BEFORE: Anna Paquin carries over from "A Walk on the Moon", and suddenly my romance chain is starting to look like a repeat of last year's horror chain, as Freddie Prinze Jr. settles in for a three-film chain, and also Anna Paquin was in one of the "Scream" movies, and hey, Matthew Lillard's here, too! It's like a horror film reunion or something! I have to keep the two genres very separate for my purposes, which usually makes me realize that most actors are either one or the other, horror or romance, but every once in a while you find some that can do both. Freddie Prinze Jr. is one of them, and so is his wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar.
I did say there would be some real romance "classics" in this year's line-up, and after a recent movie for a start, I went back to a film from 1996, then one from 1999 - this one was ALSO released in 1999, I'm going to hang around that turn-of-the-millennium period for a bit before I head back - er, forward. I think the oldest romance film in this year's chain hails from 1992 - I can't really go back much further than that, because it will be hard to link back to current day again. Still, anything's possible.
THE PLOT: A high-school jock makes a bet that he can turn an unattractive girl into the school's prom queen.
AFTER: This is a classic, classic high-school romance, it doesn't really get much more classic than this - as in, being the archetype for showing what type of relationships that screenwriters think take place in high schools. But come on, what writer ever got laid in high school, or even went to the prom? Very few of them - and I thought they were supposed to "write what you know". Writers break that rule every day, they're a cowardly lot - and I bet you they were all the awkward teens in high school, they weren't the "cool kids", not by a long shot.
But the story here, about turning the mousy girl into a hot stunner on a dare/bet, that's even more classic. Remember "My Fair Lady"? Same effin' story. And that itself was based on the play "Pygmalion", by George Bernard Shaw. And I think maybe that one was based on "The Ugly Duckling" fairy tale. OK, maybe not. But the original Pygmalion story was a Greek myth about a sculptor falling in love with a statue he carved. Yeah, OK so a dude liked humping a statue, that's pretty lame, but then Aphrodite turned it into a real woman, so then he was happy?
I guess you can follow that through-line all the way to "She's All That", and the many dozens of make-over knock-off films that came after, like "Maid in Manhattan" and "The Devil Wears Prada" and anything with a changing-room montage - like, you know, every rom-com. I guess maybe all this happened in the wake of "Pretty Woman" and the wave of make-overs dominated the films of the 1990's? Like, if you didn't have a character totally change her look, what was your movie even ABOUT, I'm super-serious... But all this was before the backlash, which happened when people realized that the message being sent out to all the teen girls was that the most important thing is to look good, and fit in. You'll never succeed if you just wear dumpy clothes, make paintings in your basement and never go outside and interact with other humans.
"She's All That" may be the worst offender, in that after mousy Laney Boggs falls (eventually) for the lines that Zack Siler is feeding her, in order to win his bet - she does become more social, more confident, and her art improves, she even gets a recommendation from her art teacher to go to art college! Yeah, she totally got played by Zack and Dean, but wasn't it worth it if she can become an artist! Plus, she'll have a horrible bullying experience and/or break-up to inspire her art in the future, it's a win-win!
But you know what's going to happen here, right? The guy who's been lying to her, the one who bet that he could turn the most unlikely candidate into a potential prom queen, he's going to spend so much time getting to know her during the charade that he'll become her friend, and then this leads to ACTUALLY falling in love with her. You knew that, right? It's basic rom-com 101.
The other storyline, about Zack's ex, Taylor, hooking up with one of the stars of MTV's "The Real World", the unfortunately named "Brock Hudson" (shudder...) is a lot more interesting, but it's also very sad - Taylor's life becomes a whirlwind of teen sex, partying, and then realizing that Brock enjoys being in the spotlight a lot more than he enjoys being with her. So while Laney's star is on the rise, on her way to maybe being prom queen, Taylor's reputation is in free-fall, she did it to herself, made herself unpopular just by hanging out with the wrong people and partying too hard. You can't really blame MTV for that, or can you?
Everything else is really disjointed here - like that fact that Zack is somehow a soccer star AND one of the smartest kids in his class. What? How is that possible? How can he be both those things? Or how can the audience understand him if he's more than one thing, and not just a simple movie stereotype? I kind of welcome this, a jock also having the fourth-highest GPA, but from a cinematic standpoint, it's also very confusing, after watching so many films set in high schools, where teens can be brains or jocks, but not both. Why can't he pick a lane and stay in it?
So many other things in the film are incredibly random - like, what high school has a DJ making random announcements and shout-outs all day long? None of them, I'm guessing. What kid roller-skates around the cafeteria offering fresh ground pepper? It. Just. Doesn't. Happen. Who's the rich girl who pukes at the party, what's her connection to the rest of the story? These things feel like something out of a David Lynch movie, they're just odd and they don't belong. I could MAYBE see a group dance taking place at a prom - I don't know for sure, because I didn't go to my school's prom - but it would HAVE to be choreographed in advance, it's not like all the boys suddenly mind-melded and decided on the same dance steps, right?
Now, of course, we've sort of progressed as a species - OK, not really, but work with me here - and we know that the best thing for Laney would have been to appreciate herself as the introverted, frumpy non-sociable type that she needed to be. Nobody should have to conform to other people's definition of "beauty", we should recognize that there are all types, and everyone is beautiful and important in their own way. Yes, even the screenwriters. Some of them, anyway.
Also starring Freddie Prinze Jr. (last seen in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer"), Rachael Leigh Cook (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Scream 3"), Paul Walker (last seen in "Flags of Our Fathers"), Jodi Lyn O'Keefe (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Kevin Pollak (last seen in "Middle Men"), Kieran Culkin (last seen in "Movie 43"), Elden Henson (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Usher Raymond (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Kimberly "Lil' Kim" Jones, Gabrielle Union (last seen in "Top Five"), Dulé Hill (last seen in "Locked Down"), Tamara Mello (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Clea DuVall (last seen in "Two Weeks"), Tim Matheson (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Debbi Morgan (last seen in "The Hurricane"), Alexis Arquette (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Dave Buzzotta, Chris Owen (last seen in "October Sky"), Charlie Dell (last seen in "The Sweetest Thing"), Michael Milhoan, Carlos Jacott (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Ashlee Levitch, Vanessa Lee Chester, Patricia Charbonneau, Katharine Towne (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Wendy Fowler, Flex Alexander (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), Debbie Lee Carrington, Clay Rivers, Jarrett Lennon, Brandon Mychal Smith (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), with cameos from Milo Ventimiglia (last seen in "Creed II"), Sarah Michelle Gellar (last seen in "Scream 2") and the voice of Alex Trebek.
RATING: 4 out of 10 incorrect "Jeopardy!" responses
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