starring freddie prinze jr, rachael leigh cook

Instead of just your average teen flick, STOP! DON'T get bored with John Hurt experiencing love, death and totally snoggable fellows on Long Island! DON'T flick your skirt like a virginal and somehow thirty year old high school student Olivia Newton John! DON'T flick your nosewads like the nerds! (Nerd empowerment is, like, so eighties! The nineties is about, like, enjoying your beauty!) DON'T flick your hair like Heather, Heather, Cher or Heather!

Instead, watch She's All That! For maximum pleasure, read in Californian accent.

She's all that, and more! No longer is the prom queen the queen bee, the one to be, the one with a pulsing red blooded heart 'n' hymen all ready for the takin', for the blonde sensitive jock boy to take with his big football holdin' hands. This is the nineties, where hairspray is the mortal enemy of truth, justice and the American teenage movie, where beauty doesn't matter because the world is, like, totally gorgeous. And because everyone is just do darned beautiful, we demand equal pay and equal rights for pre-chrysalis caterpillars with monobrows and unresolved hair and short stubby legs, for they are logically as beautiful as anybody else (except the fat). You're in my world now, populated by fabulous twenty five year old model-cum-high schoolers with Armani wardrobes and teeth to die for, lending even more weight to the probably partially true theory that really good looking people are incredibly stupid. I mean, how many years did these guys have to repeat? (It's the protein, I tell you! We rear 'em like that down here.)

But wait! Don't like watching ugly people get paraded as somehow equal to the rest of us? Surprise! For the price of one (one!) ticket, you get both the ugly duckling and the swan, the servant girl and the Cinderella. She, She is not really ugly, y'see. (I'm a poet and I don't know it.) She's actually quite a looker underneath all that studio makeup, pancaked on for yesterday's teenager concealing the new! improved! model, emphasis, of course, belonging on the last word.

But enough about, like, philosophy. Freddie Prinze Junior (who's like, totally cute), namesake of some way out west potato chip manufacturer with a little peanut man standing on their packets, gloriously twenty five, and the high school spunk. Da Man. Radiating a smarmy charm not unlike that of a young Rex Harrison on the stage and dumped by his social climber girlfriend, he tries to mold Laney into the next prom queen out of revenge and not aesthetics. What would Pygmalion have thought? Possibly that this is like, waaaay more a symptom of the zeitgeist than a dissection of it. Except for the rather surrealistic dance sequence, which deserves brownie points for the unmitigated weirdness of it all, like watching Western culture burn up and crash to the ground under the fiery weight of its own hydrogen filled rhetoric. "O, the humanity!"

huan-tzin goh
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