May 1997
s m u g
feed hollywood
by Mike Stiles

The Way They Were/Are

Pic of Romy
and Michelle

Checked out Romy & Michele's High School Reunion last night. Make no mistake about it, I think Lisa Kudrow is a one-trick pony. Unless she blows me away in some dramatic remake of Kramer vs. Kramer, I think the character she plays is Phoebe from Friends, which was the character she played in Mad about You, which was the character she played on Bob. But if she's a one-trick pony, I can't seem to get enough of that trick, and I want her to be my little pony.

*

I literally haven't heard an audience laugh as much as they laughed in this movie. And that includes the time some kid got a giant grease stain on his crotch from the popcorn bag he was holding. Kudrow and Mira Sorvino have a chemistry I haven't enjoyed since they threw corn syrup in with carbonated water and got coke. Sure they're ditzes, sure they're stupid, and sure it furthers America's battle cry of "duhhhhh." But this time I don't care. I like these girls, I want to party with them. I want to hang out in their apartment and watch Pretty Woman with them. I want to play Scrabble against them for money.

The movie is based around the notion that there was and is a hierarchy in every high school. There's the "A-list", the girls who ironically got mega-popular by skewering everyone around them. There were the "weird" people (including our heroines) that made the horrid mistake of just being themselves and having fun. Next came the "nerds," those who made the horrid mistake of thinking school was for learning something. Then there were the "dark" people... the people who were addicted to black, all things Gothic and smoking in whatever crevice they could find. Each group pecking the next one down on the pecking order.

I didn't attend my high school reunion. Why open old peck wounds? But Romy and Michele have plans to go back and devise a fraudulent story about how they invented Post-Its and got rich. If your reunion is coming up soon and you want to be a liar, say you invented Beanie Babies. Kudrow might have been doing a little method acting here, having been able to go to her own reunion and say, "I got cast on Friends and got rich." What they find, of course, is that over time, the pecking order somehow gets reversed and what's old is not necessarily new again, it's just old.

If you see this movie for no other reason, see it for Janeane Garofalo. Absolutely brilliant. In a movie where the script could not possibly have held many more great lines, her delivery scored with every word (many of them profane). I don't care what anybody says, she is MUCH funnier than Minnie Pearl ever was. You should also go see it to pick up such great turndown lines as Romy's "I'm sorry, I cut my foot earlier and my shoe is filling up with blood."

Like I said, I want to hang around these girls. I'm just sorry I'm not psychotic enough to blur movies and reality so I'd believe I could.

*

mike@smug.com

*

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