She's All That

Another high school film of 1999 that borrowed from a classic was She's All That, directed by Robert Iscove. It updates Pygmalion to a California high school, but only on the surface. The basic message is that if you wear a dress, take off your glasses, and put your hair down, you will be popular.

Freddie Prinze Jr is the Henry Higgins of the story. He's the most popular kid in school, but gets dumped by the most popular girl (Jodi Lyn Keefe). She is beautiful but completely shallow, and hooks up with a cast member of The Real World (Matthew Lillard). I always hated The Real World, and the script does a nice job of sending up those people.

Prinze's buddies give him the needle about it, but he says he can take any girl and make her prom queen. A bet is on, and buddy Paul Walker chooses Rachael Leigh Cook, an art student with a chip on her shoulder, as the project. Prinze gets to know her and transforms her, but at what cost?

The first large problem with this plot is that Cook is already beautiful. If the movie had been more daring they would have chosen a girl who was not, or was obese, or had some other problem that makes one a pariah in high school. As mentioned, all Cook has to do is take off her glasses to suddenly become popular. The second problem is that Prinze's character behaves only as the script wants him to be. Is he a paragon of virtue, as when he saves Cook's brother (Kieran Culkin) from being bullied, or is he the kind of guy who dates a girl only because she is beautiful? The traits don't mesh. A sub-plot about him not being able to choose a college because of his overbearing father is tacked on but not developed.

The third problem is a common one for high school films--they present a high school that exists only in the movies. I'm sure my time in high school was not representative--I didn't go to prom--but these high schools, where there is a parking spot reserved for the class president and they have their own DJ to serve as Greek chorus (in this film it's Usher) surely can't have really existed. There is absolutely nothing authentic about this film.

A few things are interesting in retrospect. The music for these films are like a time capsule, as we get now forgotten group's Sixpence None the Richer supplying a theme, and there's a dance sequence set to Fatboy Slim's "The Rockafelle Skank." It's also amusing to see how telephone technology had developed--there are no cell phones and no Internet. The rich kids might have a car phone.

As for the cast, most of them here did not become stars. Prinze Jr is the closest, but he's hasn't had a hit in years. Watching this film again did rekindle my crush on Cook, who was kind of like a baby Winona Ryder. Aside from a turn as Josie of the Pussycats, she never duplicated this success, which is a shame, because I think she had something. She was all that.