Never Been Kissed Review
by James Brundage (brundage AT alltel DOT net)April 16th, 1999
Never Been Kissed
Directed by Raja Gosnell
Written by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein
Starring Drew Barrymore, David Arquette, John C. Reilly, Michael Vartan, Molly Shannon, and Octavia Spencer
As Reviewed by James Brundage
Theory on Film: As the year goes on, the number of bad films progressively gets smaller. The chances that a bad sounding will be good increase, and the chances that a good sounding film will be bad decrease. This only applies during the non-summer months. During the summer months, anything that will make money is put onto the table, and thus my thesis is null and void during that time period.
Now it is April. The movies that I have groaned at the previews of (i.e. The Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix) end up being ten to twenty times better than I expect. Scratch that. Remembering my algebra, a negative number times a positive number is still negative. Hence the movies are better than I expected by being good at all.
Never Been Kissed is a classic example. After watching the terrible duo of Ever After and The Wedding Singer, the last two films with her in them that I have seen, I have been tempted to find the girl from ET and do to her what was done to her in Scream. So, when Never Been Kissed came around, I expected to see a terrible film that I would have more fun perfecting my crackpot aim with the light weight missile weapon known as the popcorn kernel - a much harder object to hurl than is displayed in the movies.
What I found instead was a popcorn film plot with two very gifted writers and an excellent performance by someone who hasn't given an excellent performance in three years. Basically, Never Been Kissed follows Josie Gellar (Drew Barrymore), a 25-year-old copy editor for the Chicago Sun Times. For those not familiar with the newspaper world, that roughly translates as 30 Grand a year and no respect.
Josie is fairly unattractive, loves correct grammar and women's business suits (her constant correcting of incorrect grammar is the perfect touch put in by writer Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein). Oh, yeah, she's a virgin who has never been kissed. Well, she's been kissed, but not with the kind of magic that we find more in movies than in life. Another nod to the writers: she describes the first kiss in such terms as would put Juliet on the balcony to shame.
By some miracle of her psychotic editor-in-chief, Josie is sent as an undercover reported into the midst of the den of lions known as High School. Her goal: to find out about kids today. Of course, since she was nicknamed Josie Grosie when she really went to high school, things don't go too well for her. Her only friends are Cynthia (Octavia Spencer), a member of a Calculus team known as "The Denominators", and her English teacher Sam Coulson (Michael Vartan). Formula to the core, we all know that she falls in love with the teacher.
The funny thing about the movie is that it has humor on both levels. For the teeny-boppers who go see it thinking that it will be a "cool" film, they won't be disappointed: a great soundtrack, Drew Barrymore, David Arquette (as Drew's younger brother) and a bunch of immature humor will tide them over. For the rest of us, the geeks, the twentysomethings who have finally realized what a charade High School was, people with an IQ over 120, you are treated with wonderful tidbits of humor such as the Calc team getting pi slightly wrong and the Shakespeare class quote from Henry VI instead of As You Like It, the subject of the class.
The performance by Barrymore actually shows that talent may be genetic (her father was a terrific actor), because she actually makes me care about a character, something that I normally do the exact opposite of.
Her basically pitiful High School experiences contrasted with her current (and eventually very successful) experiences are shown through a well done series of flashbacks (the director takes care to overlight and use grainy films in the flashback scenes, to give it the 80s look it deserves), and we actually get to see Drew Barrymore, a girl stalked since 5 by some person or another, successfully act very unpopular. She has braces, she has greasy hair, and she wears nothing but sweaters.
It's not a film that lives in the box. Instead, it lives in two boxes simultaneously. One box is the "oh-that's-so-sweet" High School audience, it's target, and the other is the twentysomethings who may truly enjoy it. So, if you fall into either category a or b, see the film.
More on 'Never Been Kissed'...
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