Movie Review: Legally Blonde (2001)

A comedy about looking past superficialities, Legally Blonde celebrates do-anything empowerment with gloss, humour, and old-fashioned kindness.

Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) is a fashion merchandising major at a California college, living the sorority lifestyle centred on shopping, make-up, and manicures. She is crushed when boyfriend Warner (Matthew Davis) dumps her because she is unsuitable for his senator-in-the-making lifestyle as he heads out to Harvard Law School. 

Stung into action, Elle applies herself and remarkably gets accepted into Harvard Law School, but upon arrival finds Warner already has a new girlfriend in Vivian Kensington (Selma Blair). Elle persists and makes a good impression in the class of Professor Callahan (Victor Garber). She earns an internship opportunity while catching the eye of Callahan's assistant Emmett (Luke Wilson), and still finds time to teach dowdy manicurist Paulette (Jennifer Coolidge) some sassy skills.

An adaptation of Amanda Brown's book based on her real-life experiences, Legally Blonde is fun, frivolous and wears its silliness with pride. The story of a smart woman deciding to ditch the ditzy lifestyle and focus on academics embraces concepts of self-belief and re-defined focus, but all themes are treated with feather touches. Director Robert Luketic keeps the mood bouncy, and pokes away with equal measures of playfulness at the vacuous sorority lifestyle and law school arrogance.

However, the air of dismissiveness sometimes borders on grating. Elle and her sorority sisters are treated as total airheads. The effort required to enter law school is reduced to Elle cramming for one exam and flaunting her bikini body in the application video. At Harvard the students are a combination of snarky and instinctively rude, and Elle's pathway to influencing a high-profile murder case is ridiculously short.

But this is a comedy, and Reese Witherspoon makes the most out of the role, ensuring Elle emits flashes of wit and a continuous stream of kindness, whether in her sorority or serious modes. Selma Blair is a suitable brunette nemesis, but Matthew Davis is an unfortunate non-entity, although his lack of presence underlines the futility of sorority women obsessing over useless men.

Within the final act of the brisk 96 minutes, Legally Blonde crams in courtroom antics featuring a murdered patriarch, his snooty daughter (Linda Cardellini), an accused step-mother (Ali Larter) and her alleged Latin lover, with no less than Raquel Welch making an appearance. It's a story-within-a-story, all to prove that understanding the latest shoe fashion trends and the fundamentals of a perm are essential legal skills.



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Movie Review: The Sweetest Thing (2002)

A raunchy romantic comedy, The Sweetest Thing follows the misadventures of three party girls as they start to consider growing up.

Christina, Courtney and Jane (Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair) are best friends in their late twenties, sharing an apartment in San Francisco and still enjoying a chaotic life of partying and casual relationships. At a dance club Christina makes a connection with the dishy Peter (Thomas Jane) and also meets his more obnoxious brother Roger (Jason Bateman).

For a few days Christina is unsure whether she should pursue a relationship, but then Courtney insists they drive for three hours to a small town where the brothers are attending a wedding. They meet the uncertain bride Judy (Parker Posey), then a shock awaits.

Offering just the skimpiest of plots, The Sweetest Thing follows in the footsteps of 1998's There's Something About Mary as a lusty sex comedy searching for big laughs wherever bodily fluids and toilets are found. The humour, when it works, is often cringey and hilarious at the same time. Here the three protagonists are all women relishing the girls-just-wanna-have-fun stage, but at 28 years old, BFFs Christina and Courtney are starting to wonder if maybe it's time to settle down.

With all the sexual and romantic fantasies and mishaps presented from the women's perspective, South Park writer Nancy Pimental's script unapologetically celebrates the wild single life. From performing The Penis Song musical number in a Chinese restaurant to cleaning the stain on a dress and venturing to an encounter with a glory hole at a dingy gas station restroom, the three women are enjoying the sexual ups and down of their twenties, owning their experiences, creating memories, and dealing with all the good and bad consequences.

Unfortunately the humour's success rate is less than average, and for every excellent comic scene at least a couple fall flat. With a sparse, essentially plot-free structure, director Roger Kumble has to stretch out several sequences well past the funny point just to arrive at the 90 minute mark (the original theatrical release version is even shorter, but excludes The Penis Song, so it's all about trade-offs). The romantic elements centred on Christina's possible pursuit of Peter are a secondary, almost slapped-on, part of the film.

The three actresses ham it up, Cameron Diaz maybe too aware she is the star attraction and frequently creeping into frantic territory. Christina Applegate and Selma Blair are more understated and mischievously memorable. The three actresses do succeed in creating a sense of genuine close camaraderie and appear to be having a blast on the screen.

The Sweetest Thing is sometimes sweet, but more often sticky and yucky.



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Movie Review: Cruel Intentions (1999)

A loose adaptation and modernization of  Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Cruel Intentions enjoys a quite dazzling first half, but subsequently fades away into an overwrought mess.

In New York, Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Geller) and her step brother Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) are very rich teenagers, unsupervised by their parents, and carrying a mean streak of cruelty to others. Sebastian enjoys collecting sexual conquests, and after humiliating his psychologist (Swoosie Kurtz) by seducing her daughter (Tara Reid), he sets his sights on Annette (Reese Witherspoon), the virginal daughter of his new schoolmaster. Kathryn, who pretends to be an exemplary young woman and a mentor to others, contrives a revenge on a former boyfriend that involves humiliating his new girlfriend Cecile (Selma Blair).

Kathryn does not believe that Sebastian can seduce Annette, and the step-siblings make a bet: she will sleep with him if he succeeds, and he will give her his prized car if he fails. Sebastian does get close to Annette, but his plan is knocked off-course when he starts to develop genuine affection for her. Meanwhile, Katherine finds it easier to control the naive Cecile, who embarks on a wild journey of sexual discovery much to the horror of her mother Bunny (Christine Baranski).

Directed and written by Roger Kumble, the opening 45 minutes of Cruel Intentions is a guilty pleasure masterpiece. The screen positively crackles with an edgy depraved cruelty, driven by the psychotic Katheryn and sexually insatiable Sebastian. As they gleefully plot to destroy the lives of others with barely a hint of remorse, Kumble demonstrates what it means for the devil to make work for idle hands. Katherine and Sebastian live to satisfy their uncontrolled urges at the expense of unsuspecting victims, and absolutely love doing so.

The second half of the film is not nearly as good. Once Sebastian gets in touch with his emotions and discovers that he can actually care about the feelings of another human being, the superficial talent at the core of the movie is exposed, the edge is rubbed off and momentum is lost. Ryan Phillippe cannot carry the role of conflicted lover, and the competitive dynamic between Kathryn and Sebastian is thrown out of balance. She is still on the path of cruelty while he wants out, and the disparity punches a hole in the narrative structure.

Geller and Blair emerge with the two best performances. Geller thrives as the dark protagonist, revelling in the euphoria of manipulation. Blair allows Cecile to bounce along the path laid for her by others, her mix of determined stupidity creating the perfect target for Kathryn's contemptuous darts. Witherspoon is steady, but the role of Annette does not offer much latitude for inventiveness. The supporting cast also includes Louise Fletcher and Sean Patrick Thomas.

Cruel Intentions is half of a very good movie, a case of mistimed moral awakening ruining a wicked romp.

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