Wolff rating: FAIR
Plot summary: Mousy copyeditor is sent back to high school to investigate the lives of teenagers, and she must go from loser/geek to popular kid.
Biased, pithy comments: The movie poster tells it all---it's a shot of Drew Barrymore smiling demurely into the camera, ripe with girl-next-door sexuality. Barrymore is indeed the entire selling point of this film and your reaction to it depends on how much you end up liking Barrymore. The script, which manages to get both journalism and high school wrong, is a limply assembled set of scenes from other teen and romance movies with some moments that stretched my credibilty to its breaking point. The director has been responsible from some pretty mainstream films designed not to offend anyone (sometimes as a director as in ``Home Alone 3'' and sometimes as an editor as in ``Nine Months''). The supporting characters tend to be one-note (though Reilly's womanly hobby was pretty funny) with the exception of Sobieski's nerd and Vartan's teacher. Depending on your tolerance for watching Barrymore humiliate herself and the exaggerated unreality of the setting, you might like this. I kept getting poked by the obvious exposition and the fact that, by the end, I found I didn't much care for Barrymore's character, leaving me with nothing to care about at all. However, I could have seen an entire movie about Sobieski's powerful, husky-voiced high school geek and her buddies called ``The Denominators.'' (Then again, I probably saw most of their story in ``Rushmore.'') As a romance, it's passable, as a teen movie it's weak.
Other Notes: Does this deserve the same rating as ``Star Trek V?'' No; it's better than that, but I've given much better movies NOT BAD, and thus I'm left giving this one FAIR, but it's a borderline case. For a Barrymore girl-next-door romance, try either ``The Wedding Singer'' or ``Ever After.''
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Drew Barrymore, Michael Vartan, Molly Shannon, David Arquette, Leelee Sobieski.
Directed by: Raja Gosnell