Not Another Teen Movie (original) (raw)

Published on December 14, 2001 05:00AM EST

Photo: Not Another Teen Movie

The funniest character in Not Another Teen Movie is the outcast ”rebel” girl (Chyler Leigh), a drop-dead gorgeous brunette who could just as easily be the cheerleader bitch (Jaime Pressly) or the busty exchange student (Cerina Vincent) who traipses around nude. The rebel’s got a problem, though: She wears glasses and a ponytail. Who would date a loser like that? Finally, she gets a makeover and enjoys her first official ”slow-motion entrance” to the tune of Sixpence None the Richer’s ”Kiss Me.”

”Not Another Teen Movie” is a big, fat, juicy spitball lobbed, with mostly dead-on aim, at the teen-smarm clichés that have accumulated like so much earwax over the last three years. The film’s targets are obvious enough, but there’s a shimmer of wit to the way it satirizes movies as disparate as ”She’s All That,” ”Varsity Blues,” ”Bring It On,” even the Wes Bentley art-freak section of ”American Beauty” as, in essence, John Hughes redos. In post-Hughes Hollywood, the bad joke is that a ”romance” consists of nothing more than one entirely prescribed fashion-catalog role — jock, princess, rebel — falling for another.