Showing in: Circuit Empire
Date: September 29, 2000



Synopsis:

From the Gospel of Romantic Comedy, Chapter One, Verse One: And lo, it was written, even from earliest times -- the 1930's at least, back when people like Ernst Lubitsch and Frank Capra used to make all those "screwball" comedies that actually worked -- that whichever pair of characters in any given film find each other most offensive to be around shall naturally turn out to be each other's perfect soul-mates, thus making annoyance evermore the primary indicator of imminent cinematic romance...

And so, from this original trope, has evolved a whole subgenre of infinitely similar movies: When Harry Met Sally and all its myriad wannabe cousins, on and on, world without end--with She's All That director Robert Iscove's Boys and Girls being just the latest (but, please, the last?) in an apparently endless line of snipe/flirt-fests that posit any given interaction between the sexes as merry combat destined to end in hot sex and eternal commitment.

This time 'round, our ready-to-rumble principal players are uptight Ryan (Freddie Prinze Jr., slumming) and free-spirited Jennifer (Claire Forlani, slumming too). They first meet as kids (played by fine juvenile actors Brendon Ryan Barret and Raquel Beaudine), on an airplane; a cursory conversation reveals that while she chatters blithely on about stuff like menstruation, orgasms and divorce, he's a priggish budding control-freak who answers the flight attendant's pleasant "Can I get you anything?" with a snobby "I don't know -- can you?"

He thinks love takes work and planning, while Jennifer thinks it's a big gamble that's "all about choices"...yes, folks, I see a happy home and a stable family atmosphere comin' out of this one sometime soon.

Cut to a few years later, and they're meeting again in high school, where they still don't like each other; cut to a few years after that, and they're meeting again at college, where Jennifer is called upon to break up with Ryan on behalf of her neurotic best friend Amy (Amanda Detmer). Ryan is consoled by his nutty roommate Hunter (Jason Biggs from American Pie, here not even getting much from pastry), a sex-crazed pathological liar who changes his name and background more often than he does his hair color. Slowly, however, Ryan and Jennifer develop an unexpectedly intimate and honest friendship, one supposedly NOT based on the unvoiced sexual tension between them that everybody else can spot inside of a minute. And then, with equally excruciating slowness, they --

-- yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.

Halfway through this truly appalling, repetitive, utterly predictable film, I had a sudden vision of Boys and Girls turning out like some lunatic teen-pic version of The War of the Roses: Ryan and Jennifer marrying, having kids, divorcing, suing the crap out of each other, marrying other people, divorcing again, marrying each other again, divorcing again, beating each other up, serving restraining orders on each other...eventually, the movie would end with them both pushing a hundred, getting accidentally wheeled into each other's rooms at the nursing home and sniping each other into mutual heart attacks.