Clueless

It's going to be a hard day. Not only must Cher (Silverstone) design a lighting concept for her date in the evening, she must also deal with surfing the crimson wave and helping newly-arrived and totally clueless girly student. Problems galore!

If none of this makes sense - where have you been? Clueless, showing as part of our female directors season, was the comic movie event of last year, spawning a shopping frenzy and a new language to boot. Cher's shopping adventures, her majorly awesome turn of phrase, and her romantic entanglements are not only great fun to watch - they're inspiring! Caught between a fascination with her (obviously gay) but totally Baldwin soul-mate and a strange attraction to her half (well, not even half) brother (Dan Hedaya), Cher has some tough times ahead of her. And that's a tall order for a girl who quotes poetry and thinks the author is a guy called Cliff Notes.

Mark Chambers & Caroline Smith

Amy Heckerling's latest cinematic postcard from the sunny lands of adolescence, borrows the skeletons of plot and character from Jane Austen's classic novel "Emma". While the sympathetic irony of the story remains the same, however, Heckerling utilizes movies' kinetic energy, rather than novels' layered detail, in her portrayal of the rituals of society's upper crust. Heckerling made a savvy choice. Clueless is her best movie since FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, though she also directed the three LOOK WHO'S TALKING movies.

When we first meet Cher, she's high school royalty, a wealthy, beautiful young woman with social advantages by the fistful. She and her friend Dionne manage to romantically pair off two of their teachers, thereby improving their own grades by improving the teachers' moods. Inspired by these good deeds, Cher decides to use her popularity to help a new girl become one of the school's elite, attempting to arrange an advantageous match with one of the available popular males. This quest, and her own quest to find a suitable boyfriend, prove more difficult, and Cher slowly learns to empathize with others--both locally and globally, as the motto goes.

The best part of CLUELESS, however, is the dialogue. Heckerling wisely avoids attempting to document cutting-edge teen slang, which would have been unavoidably out of date by the time the movie was released. Instead, she concocts a convincing argot containing elements of hip-hop, advertising jargon, colorful turns of phrase, gleanings from the dictionary and thesaurus, and other fragments of pop vernacular.

CLUELESS is smarter by half than most "teen comedies," lighter on its feet and much less self-important than, say, the teen oeuvre of John Hughes. Heckerling found the right ingredients to throw in a blender, frappe, and serve as a refreshing summer confection. It's gaudy and pink, but there are real strawberries and cranberry juice in there to add a little nutritional value.

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