By SHARON MOORE

Staff Writer

The year: 1987. Big hair, blue eye-shadow. Tights and all that entails.

Jenna Rink is a pre-pubescent dreamer looking for a change. Matt Flamhaff is the all-dedicated and ever-faithful fat best friend.

Matt loves Jenna. Jenna loves the popular pretty-boy.

Now cue the clique just out of young Jenna's reach, a group of mean girls called the "Six Chicks." Things take predictable turns for the worst and everyone is unhappy.

Teenage heartbreak and drama for teenage audiences.

With a plot twist reminiscent of Tom Hanks' 1988 "Big," Jenna makes a wish and wakes up 30 years old. All her dreams have come true, or so she thinks. Though "13 Going on 30" reminds the audience of "Big," it is only a reminder and not an exact replica.

Adult Jenna, played by Jennifer Garner, is the co-head-honcho of a magazine she has read since she was 13, which was yesterday.

Through the course of the movie, Jenna and the audience learn she was a mean and nasty person to attain her goal. She made it into the Six Chicks and lost her best friend along the way.

Garner displays her versatility as an actress in her quirky role as bubbly Jenna. Like Hanks in "Big," Garner fully convinces the audience she is a child trapped in an adult body.

Mark Ruffalo plays the adult version of best friend Matty, a semi-struggling photographer challenged with the job of telling Jenna they are no longer friends.

Ruffalo brings incredible depth to a character that could easily be left flat in a teeny-bopper film. Audience empathy runs high as Matt saves Jenna again and again from perpetual doom, despite his childhood heartbreak.

Though geared for teens, moviemakers remembered the parents with a toe-tapping "Thriller," Michael Jackson-style, performed by cut-throat execs. With other such blasts from the recent past, "13" can be enjoyed by mother and daughter alike.

The movie is filled with PG-13 fun for the whole family. Its ending is slightly fantastic and less than credible, but completely forgivable. Eyes glisten as all the ropes finally meet and are neatly tied together with remarkably few questions asked.