I saw this back in the early 90s when I was about 16 years old. A group of friends and I got together to watch it. I'd known Martha Plimpton from Goonies, and I think the movie is called, My Name is Sam (it was about a girl who was adopted as a baby but she didn't find out until her 16th birthday). Anyway, she was just awesome in this movie. I have always loved her gruff and tough attitude in playing her characters.

I also liked Yeardly Smith in this a lot. She's good at playing annoying, and no one was more annoying in this film than her as Plimpton's little sister. Hilarious. My favorite scene with her was when she gets overly obsessed with informing Plimpton's character about how she doesn't understand why she's so sick because she herself has always been so healthy, so if she's so healthy why can't Plimpton be healthy, etc., and Plimpton gets so annoyed that she hauls off and clocks her and Smith gets knocked out.

My other favorite scene was when they're all celebrating Christmas and Plimpton comes racing out to the nurses' station for help because her roommate is vomiting and they don't know why. Turns out she swallowed the suppository which she didn't know she wasn't supposed to because she'd never had to use one before and no one explained it to her. Fast forward to the end of the movie and the nurse is giving the woman all her pills and starts explaining the suppository and the woman looks at her and says something along the lines of, "I know that. What do think I am, stupid?"

For a movie about such a serious topic, I think it was handled beautifully. So many funny scenes, some very touching scenes (like the woman with the abusive husband and then there's the scene where he just feels so lost and alone and realizes he's going to lose his wife, and falls to his knees and presses his face into her stomach and she just stands there looking down at him).

To me, this is a movie everyone should see, but especially women. I mean, we're in an era when there should be cures for all of this (I blame the pharmaceutical companies for this. There could be a cure, but it would cut into their profits for cancer medicine...), but instead, it feels like there are more cases than ever and that we're falling back into this movie's era when the majority of women died from cancer and going into remission was the rarity. It seemed like in the late 90s/early 2000s progress was being made. Maybe that was the problem. Progress was being made. Can't have progress. Need to keep people on meds so Big Pharma can rake in the dough, all at the expense of women's lives...