PG-13, 1 hr. 31 min. Directed by: John Schultz. Release Date: October 1, 1999. DVD Release Date: January 8, 2002.
Have you ever wondered why people in different countries all seem to have the same, vaguely negative view of Americans? I don’t. This movie, along with the majority of the teen films that make the big screen, help to set the stereotype. American teens are seen as living in what appears to be a skin care ad. For us, life is carefree, there’s always plenty of money to blow on designer clothes, to go to movies, to spend time in coffee shops, and to squander on things that really don’t help us survive. Now, how true is that? I like the teen movie genre as a general rule, but this entry sort of leaves me less than inspired, and even less nostalgic for my own high school days. It could be that by this point in the 90s, that I was out of my teen years, and it’s true that I seem to identify more with what I see out of the genre in the late 80s and early 90s than what I see by 1999, but this hasn't stopped me from enjoying other teen movies released in this year or later.
From start to finish, there’s not much about this movie that reminds me of my own high school experience. There’s the romantic drama that all kids seem to have hang around them in clouds, time spent hanging around at the mall or with my friends, although most of my friends who had money to blow also had jobs, something that isn’t talked about among ANY of these kids. At 14, I got my first job, and I worked steadily through high school, which negatively impacted my ability to dork around. The characters seem more realistic personality-wise, but at the same time, they’re caricatures of the standard high school kids and their respective cliques. I have to wonder how long it had been since the person who wrote this script had been in high school, because it felt like the story was someone’s reflection on some very dimly remembered experiences.
If you don’t ask too much from this movie, it’s moderately entertaining. You can’t engage your brain and wonder about the details of the piece. You can’t get too worked up about the social dynamics that we see between the characters. You can’t get too distracted by Melissa Joan Hart’s eye, which never fails to unnerve me, and usually spins me into the direction of wondering why she never spent any of her Sabrina The Teen Witch on fixing that eyelid of hers. The cast is decent, filled with a lot of familiar faces from other teen flicks that were released at the same time. It pains me to say this, but the entire movie is saved by Ali Larter’s presence. As fake and stereotypical as her neo-hippie persona is in this movie, she was in many ways the most real character that I witnessed, and I think her performance was by far the best, although that’s not saying much here.
I probably wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to see this. Even for a teen movie, it’s silly and lacks any grounding in reality that I could determine. There were too many characters in this movie that I couldn’t relate to my own high school experience, but I guess it’s always possible that kids managed to get less jaded in the four years between my high school graduation and the year this was released.
