I wanted to but couldn't!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Harriet M. Welsch (Michelle Trachtenberg) is a spy. But when Harriet's friends find her secret notebook the tables are turned on her. Can she win her friends back and still keep on going with the spy business? This film made it on to my to-see list because it was endorsed by Facets Film School. I had an additional interest because I think that Michelle Trachtenberg is an under-utilized actress. Now, as far as being a good kids movie, it certainly is, and was a good first feature for Nickelodeon. As for being a showcase for Trachtenberg, that is much harder to say. She is the star here, her biggest role at the time (and maybe since)... but the child actress is not the same person as today's actress.Kids will like this, and it is clean enough that parents have nothing to fear in showing it to them. Adults without kids may be less interested unless it has some sort of nostalgia value for them. For me, I could have used less Rosie O'Donnell, but she was an unavoidable presence in the 1990s.

A writer while describing the life and work of John Le Carré said this: "Writer and spy are two lonely professions, carried of emotions and both are developed under a certain load of tension". Nothing is more adequate than such quote when the analyzed person is the great Le Carré, author of treasures like "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", "Smiley's People" among many other espionage novels. The same can't be said to the main character of "Harriet the Spy" neither about the story, that almost reached such description (and it could have been way better).So, little Harriet (Michelle Trachtenberg) wants to be a writer and for such she pretends to be like a spy who sees everything, writing down all the things she sees, from random and somewhat pointless happenings to making truthful remarks about her friends and school mates. But when her diary is stolen by her most ferocious enemy things can turn out to be real bad for her if such descriptions be known to everyone she knows.A cute movie, nice to watch but that doesn't help us much. Fine, this a movie for kids and for them is prefect, very enjoyable, but those kind of flicks work better if they attract mature audiences as well, even if using two or three jokes for them. The cast assembled here with names like Trachtenberg, Rosie O'Donnell, Robert Joy and Gregory Smith makes of "Harriet the Spy" quite a good film, and we can excuse some of its problems.The main focus that a good writer is made with observations and notes only isn't much handy (as Harriet discovers). Above all, and I can't believe this was left out of the movie, a good writer must be a great reader of all sources and different types of readings, must have a background of readings. And if I'm making too much fuzz over a kid's movie, too much complications, is because is that I wanted to see an intelligent work, with this kind of plot but in a dramatic way, with lots of suspense, a teenager who wants to be a writer but gets involved with more and more trouble while covering a story. Instead, we have an emo tale filled with corny moments. But that's OK. 6/10

I love this movie. It is just so much fun. Michelle Trachtenberg was so adorable as Harriet M. Welsch, the little kid detective. Watch this with your kids, parents. It is so funny! I highly recommend this movie to everybody. Everyone will love it. Especially the kids. It teaches them a good lesson. It taught me one when I was little.The plot is so silly but so fun that it makes the movie so fun. I loved watching it when I was little. Me being older now, 15, makes me a little less into it but I still adore this and I watch it with my little cousin Lydia every Thanksgiving. She loves it as much as I do. Watch this movie. It's so awesome!

This little film has been roundly criticized for being disjointed and amateurish. Well, it _is_ disjointed: part of it is surreal allegory, part realistic morality play. Part of it moves with a natural rhythm while other parts seem to have been transplanted from afternoon TeeVee. Some is done with a cartoon cosmology, and the rest is straight from Marlo Thomas' heart. Distributed throughout are mottles of bad acting and unconsidered dialog.And I loved it all. Why?Because this is in the tradition of movies and books that generate themselves. Rather, the characters in the stories play double duty as the authors of the story and the creators of the world that surrounds it. So it makes sense as precisely what a preteen would imagine her older self writing about her. Indeed, the whole thing is a meditation on how someone might abstract the world (for writing) without a mature faculty for abstraction — which is to say how a kid would imagine an adult's mind imagining a kid's mind.Its all about the deep problems of writing. I imagine the author of the original book sitting down and having trouble writing, them ruminating about why on the page.Therefore, we have a youthful experimenter, a blocked writer, a "gardener" who makes environments from trash, another maker of environments (cages) who craves companionship, a woman who lives in a cage (Kitt), the Dad who is a movie comedian, together with lesser characters.And the spy who spies so she can write what we see. It is all about sight and callow abstraction, just what movies were made for. Sure, it differs from the book because film can amplify what the book cannot. The adapter (the guy that did the game as life as game "Jumanji" project) understood this.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.