The intelligent blonde comedy has some unrequited gems and shouldn't be entirely dismissed as a genre. Clueless works because you can tell Cher's mind is just a little too distracted by fashion, but once she gets the gears in her head rolling she's really a bright and compassionate kid. Legally Blonde, scripted by Karen McCullah Lutz same as this one, works because Elle's ditziness does not ultimately give her a get-out-of-jail free card with the other characters and she eventually has to focus up and do something about herself. Buffy the Vampire Slayer works because because she has to give up fashion to slay vampires....though I guess now I'm stretching it a little.
This movie has all of the fish-out-of-water elements of the blonde comedy but is very much lacking in the charm. Most of it has to do with the clichéd script (the last ten minutes is line-for-line other movies), but its biggest problem is that it rests on those elements with a lot of assumptions about the characters (and the audience) that just gets on your nerves. For one thing, partially because of the Internet, geeky girls are no longer as readily considered losers; heck, even back in high school the most popular chicks in my grade level were the ones that joined speech and debate, student council, and MESA. The sort of cheerleader/jock POPULAR, everything else NOT dichotomy possibly still subsists as some endemic part of American culture, but it's harder to see now and not as believable as it once was. The character of Natalie and her gushing geekiness in some scenes seems exactly like what's popular right now, save the situations where they put her in front of boys and make her downright retarded.
Then of course there's the guys, few of which are really attractive because they don't do much but be attractive. Ah well, cannot have everything.
Anyway, the story focuses mostly on the character of Shelley, orphan turned Playboy bunny who gets ousted from the mansion due to backstabbing and has to make her way in the real world, stumbling upon a college campus (where nobody ever seems to do any homework or have any definable majors) and discovering the enchanting world of sororities, a more brutal and backstabbing place than the otherwise homey feel of the Mansion. She takes the freaks and geeks Greeks under her charge and teaches them the good values of fashion sense, self confidence, and only revealing 40% of their intelligence (actually she tells them to be downright nitwit dumb, but they decide to "compromise"). This is the script Simpsons episodes are made to make fun of--remember the one where Homer has to return to college?
The "Oh it's funny 'cause she's a dumb blonde" antics and general social awkwardness of the characters is just something you take in kind with this genre, but where this movie just completely collapses over its vacuousness is the part in all of these intelligent blonde movies where the outlier intelligent guy sees through the fashion to the real person underneath. Again, Clueless actually builds the biggest character beats of Cher's development around her step brother, Legally Blonde has the somewhat believable Emmett offering to help Elle out, Buffy the movie has Pike, but this movie has Oliver (Colin Hanks) who I could not believe for a second had any patience for Shelley's just absolute craziness. The antics go too far and Oliver is given no room to deal with them but just sit there with a strained expression on his face, looking just as miserable to get through these dates as we are. So the emotional core in which these stories reside, in the real human underneath the makeup, is gone. Making the movie pretty much a redundant exercise in all the obnoxious parts we merely sit through.
Then there's the house girls, who were actually well cast and it was nice to see some different body types and how they showed alternative ways of making them fashionable, though the three leaders of the pack (girl with the brace, girl with the piercings, and head of the house) ended up looking more like hipsters than fashionistas. I'm not buying the, "Well let's just be like 40% ourselves and 60% what Shelley thinks guys like." There can be a real sense of style behind fashion that is oftentimes discredited but it requires personality and self-expression that not revealing your intelligence is a good indication you don't have. So even the messages of empowerment here are mucked up.
The end is lazy lazy clichéd redundant boring done to death bad. Whoa. It gets worse when sycophant to villain girl switches her sides as some statement to the heinousness of villain girl, not that we ever realized that sycophant girl was THERE.
Finally, the cinematography is surprisingly bad for a mainstream movie. Shelly Johnson seems to be trying to light the Mansion and the Zeta House "naturalistically" and instead is commonly blowing out the frame on the lower half of the characters (the half we're not supposed to be looking at since its their faces that matter). I think for the wide shots and setting the space such a Spring day look is fine, but how much does it take to block the characters a bit out of the way of the windows so as to avoid being blown out? On the other hand, this is the exact type of stuff you're not supposed to be spending time pondering while watching the movie because the story should be involving your attention, so there's that.
--PolarisDiB
This movie has all of the fish-out-of-water elements of the blonde comedy but is very much lacking in the charm. Most of it has to do with the clichéd script (the last ten minutes is line-for-line other movies), but its biggest problem is that it rests on those elements with a lot of assumptions about the characters (and the audience) that just gets on your nerves. For one thing, partially because of the Internet, geeky girls are no longer as readily considered losers; heck, even back in high school the most popular chicks in my grade level were the ones that joined speech and debate, student council, and MESA. The sort of cheerleader/jock POPULAR, everything else NOT dichotomy possibly still subsists as some endemic part of American culture, but it's harder to see now and not as believable as it once was. The character of Natalie and her gushing geekiness in some scenes seems exactly like what's popular right now, save the situations where they put her in front of boys and make her downright retarded.
Then of course there's the guys, few of which are really attractive because they don't do much but be attractive. Ah well, cannot have everything.
Anyway, the story focuses mostly on the character of Shelley, orphan turned Playboy bunny who gets ousted from the mansion due to backstabbing and has to make her way in the real world, stumbling upon a college campus (where nobody ever seems to do any homework or have any definable majors) and discovering the enchanting world of sororities, a more brutal and backstabbing place than the otherwise homey feel of the Mansion. She takes the freaks and geeks Greeks under her charge and teaches them the good values of fashion sense, self confidence, and only revealing 40% of their intelligence (actually she tells them to be downright nitwit dumb, but they decide to "compromise"). This is the script Simpsons episodes are made to make fun of--remember the one where Homer has to return to college?
The "Oh it's funny 'cause she's a dumb blonde" antics and general social awkwardness of the characters is just something you take in kind with this genre, but where this movie just completely collapses over its vacuousness is the part in all of these intelligent blonde movies where the outlier intelligent guy sees through the fashion to the real person underneath. Again, Clueless actually builds the biggest character beats of Cher's development around her step brother, Legally Blonde has the somewhat believable Emmett offering to help Elle out, Buffy the movie has Pike, but this movie has Oliver (Colin Hanks) who I could not believe for a second had any patience for Shelley's just absolute craziness. The antics go too far and Oliver is given no room to deal with them but just sit there with a strained expression on his face, looking just as miserable to get through these dates as we are. So the emotional core in which these stories reside, in the real human underneath the makeup, is gone. Making the movie pretty much a redundant exercise in all the obnoxious parts we merely sit through.
Then there's the house girls, who were actually well cast and it was nice to see some different body types and how they showed alternative ways of making them fashionable, though the three leaders of the pack (girl with the brace, girl with the piercings, and head of the house) ended up looking more like hipsters than fashionistas. I'm not buying the, "Well let's just be like 40% ourselves and 60% what Shelley thinks guys like." There can be a real sense of style behind fashion that is oftentimes discredited but it requires personality and self-expression that not revealing your intelligence is a good indication you don't have. So even the messages of empowerment here are mucked up.
The end is lazy lazy clichéd redundant boring done to death bad. Whoa. It gets worse when sycophant to villain girl switches her sides as some statement to the heinousness of villain girl, not that we ever realized that sycophant girl was THERE.
Finally, the cinematography is surprisingly bad for a mainstream movie. Shelly Johnson seems to be trying to light the Mansion and the Zeta House "naturalistically" and instead is commonly blowing out the frame on the lower half of the characters (the half we're not supposed to be looking at since its their faces that matter). I think for the wide shots and setting the space such a Spring day look is fine, but how much does it take to block the characters a bit out of the way of the windows so as to avoid being blown out? On the other hand, this is the exact type of stuff you're not supposed to be spending time pondering while watching the movie because the story should be involving your attention, so there's that.
--PolarisDiB