journal features

movie review - Never Been Kissed

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 1999.10.05

Good by comparison with Big Daddy, a movie utterly unrelated other than I saw it on the same night, this one was nothing special. It's about a lowly editor who wants to be a reporter. She works for a Chicago newspaper that's foundering due to bad management, and is sent to high school to get the scoop on what kids are up to these days.

It's a pointless assignment, and the movie offers little more. It relies on the lead's excruciating embarrassment in school, a repeat of her real high school performance. It's full of unsurprising, cliched stunts, and seems to abandon its plot part way through as if the last third were re-written after shooting began.

Skip it, given a choice. Not recommended.

rand()m quote

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.