She's All That

*

Cast: Freddie Prinze jun, Rachael Leigh Cook, Anna Paquin

Director: Robert Iscove

Rating: M

Reviewer: Peter Calder

A disclaimer: my 12-year-old daughter thinks that, among the many things people over 40 should be banned from doing (wearing Lycra shorts, for example, or counting the towels on their kids' bedroom floors) must be included reviewing films aimed at the teen market.

She has a point of course. If I were 13 and wanted to be one of the characters in Beverly Hills 90210 when I grew up I might have liked this witless and derivative jumble of shallow cliche as much as she did.

I might not have cringed at an ugly-duckling storyline about a Beverly Hills high school jock (Prinze) who, dumped by the school beauty, is stung into proving his princess-making manhood by accepting a bet that he can transform the shy and clumsy campus dorkette (Cook) into the prom queen.

I might not have noticed that the duckling's status as a social outcast is signalled, with commedia dell'arte broadness, by her passion for painting (oh, that sexy smudge of oil on the cheek!) and the fact that she wears glasses.

I might not have predicted from about 17 seconds into the film that the hunk would fall for the plain Jane and have a change of heart (after an edge-of-the-seat moment in which she discovers that she's the subject of a bet) and that the beauty would turn out to be a bit of a beast.

I might not have been concerned at the subtext being shovelled into the gullible minds of young teenage girls that women can be people of substance as long as they scrub up into gorgeous and submissive waifs who want to be loved by the captain of the basketball team.

I might not have thought that Iscove (whose credits include Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella (?) and Romeo and Juliet on Ice (!) was directing by numbers.

I might not have worried that the film so degraded Paquin (what happened to her parents' post-Piano determination to protect her from the more egregious of Hollywood's blandishments?) or that the moral was delivered with a wheelbarrow and dumped all over the cinema floor.

But there you go. That's what happens in your 40s.