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SLAP HER, SHE'S FRENCH By Rachel Deahl Review Film Critic Click for the Official Site The one thing director Melanie Mayron's slack-jawed Clueless knock-off provides in abundance is unpleasant smacks, to both its characters and viewers alike. Best known for her role as Melissa Steadman on the angst-ridden yuppie '80s dramedy Thirtysomething, Mayron has spent much of her post-acting career directing episodic television. With this painfully reductive stab at wry teen satire, Mayron proves that she might be best suited to stick with small-screen affairs. Set in a small Texas town, Slap Her She's French concerns the humbling of an Alicia Silverstone-like heroine whose perfect world falls apart when she hosts a conniving French foreign exchange student. Jane McGregor stars as Starla Grady: head cheerleader, homecoming queen and aspiring morning anchorwoman. Like Silverstone's Cher Horowitz, who lived out a seemingly empty and self-absorbed existence in the affluent suburbs of Beverly Hills, Starla maintains her picture-perfect life amidst the moneyed set of a good ol' Texas homestead. Starla, whose world is occupied by the same cast of characters that surrounded Cher (two bitchy best friends, a helpless charity case who becomes a treacherous competitor, a dorky teacher and an intelligent loner who initially sparks frustration which blossoms into love), is also a victim of hubris. Like Cher, Starla must lose everything in order to realize there's a value in being nice instead of just seeming nice.
But try as it might, Slap Her is not Clueless. Where Amy Heckerling's acerbic 1995 film produced a whimsy, intelligent commentary on the idiosyncrasies of adolescence and California culture, with their respective bends toward narcissism and endearing stupidity, Slap Her provides no insight or laughs on the oddities of the Lone Star state and teenagers. The woefully inept script offers instead flat jokes about beef-eating conservatives and air-headed blondes who engage in an endless parade of catfights. Through the mess of failed humor and recycled plot lines, stars Piper Perabo and Jane McGregor try painfully hard to suffuse the meager proceedings with a spark of life. From McGregor's dopey facial expressions to Perabo's eerily wide toothy smile, these efforts finally seem like gasoline on the fire. But if blame is to be placed on anyone's shoulders for this debacle, it should fall on the idiot who greenlighted Clueless 2 without hiring any of the talent from the original outing. SIMONE Click for the Official Site Taking another sleek stab at the simulacra of Hollywood, Andrew Niccol (best known for penning the script to "The Truman Show" and helming the darkly satisfying scf-fi thriller, "Gattaca") here turns in a mindful, but minor satire about an ambitious director who's digital star rises further and faster than his own. Equal parts "Pygmalion" and "Frankenstein," "Simone" stars Al Pacino as a waning art-minded director, Viktor Taransky, who's just been set adrift in the studio climate. A once-successful filmmaker, Viktor is in dire need of a hit and has just been sent a devastating blow by the difficult star of his latest picture. When Nicola Anders (Winona Ryder) pulls out of the director's latest picture, Viktor is left with no star and a studio suddenly unwilling to back him. When he's canned by the head of production, who just happens to be his strangely benevolent ex-wife (Catherine Keener), Viktor is assured that his latest baby will never see the dark inside of a multiplex. So what's a director to do? Well, conveniently, a dying scientist approaches Viktor with the answer to those cinematic prayers. The answer comes in the form Simone (written S1M0NE, as in simulation one), a beautiful digital starlet complete with the downloadable range of every actor who's come and gone through the Hollywood mill. With this new star, Viktor is able to re-cut his film and place the pixelated performer in the lead. When his picture opens, audiences are captivated with the CG beauty who becomes an overnight sensation. But, having to do double duty as the gatekeeper and creator of Simone proves bittersweet, as the seemingly perfect actress goes from overshadowing the director to overtaking him.
Niccol, who demonstrated his ability to intelligently satirize the media with his snarky, but slight, script for "The Truman Show," once again delivers an amusing, if vacuous, tale here. Refusing to explore the most interesting questions posed by his premise, namely the postmodern implications of adding another layer of artificiality to an already artificial art form, Niccol instead opts to examine the business of Hollywood rather than its cinema. And, while it's amusing to ruminate on the pleasures of working with an actor who never gives any lip and always thanks her director first, it's certainly not an enduring theme. But, perhaps, the most irksome thing about Niccol's film is its inability to maintain a solid stance on anything. Setting out to undercut the bottom line nature of the business of Hollywood, which continually undercuts the "art" Pacino's director is struggling to make, "Simone" ultimately champions the quick buck. Niccol's biggest problem may be that he is too similar to his hero: he's too set on making studio pictures to see that he's lost sight of what it is he was trying to say in the first place.
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