Slap Her... She's French (2002)

Why so much hype?

Simply A Masterpiece

Admirable film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Reading through these reviews, I must agree with a lot of points I hate agreeing with. It's a comedy and not supposed to be taken seriously. That much is true, but if not taking something seriously is what makes a good comedy, then Epic Movie is a comedy masterpiece.But no, Epic Movie is painfully terrible, and so is this film. This does not imply I don't have a sense of humor like many will probably accuse me of. I actually find some parts that I COULD find funny in some circumstances, but here I don't.The film clearly implies that it's meant to be a comedy with a slight serious edge to it. Okay, the comedy in itself is slightly amusing at best and gave me a bit of a chuckle in one part or another. So it shouldn't deserve a score so low as 1/10, right? Well, maybe not, but it's the highest I can give when the rest of the movie is so hateful. I found only the little brother likable, and he was like from another world compared to the rest of the characters. The main protagonist in particular, is stupid, shallow, narrow-minded, homophobic c**t who always gets what she wants despite being a bimbo of a repulsive personality. And when things get ruined for her I'm probably supposed to feel sorry for her, but I start feeling good.When a movie clearly wants me to root for one character, but ends up making me hate him/her from the deepest reaches of my soul, something is done terribly wrong. Even the environment where Starla lives in seems to feed her success with its culture and that is just unsettling. It makes me wonder in fear, if this culture actually exists in America or is this a plain parody of it. Even if it's just a parody, the rest of the film just ruins it for me. Especially when in the end Starla could have just learned, that being such a terrible person isn't the best way to live, she ultimately wins and learns that it is okay to be terrible, because if you're popular, you'll survive everything. That and no clear mark of any lesson learned in the process make me want to write an alternate ending where Starla and her new boyfriend (forgot his name) have their car explode on their face as they drive in the horizon at the end of the film.And still it would be letting her go easy...

'No French people were hurt during the making of this film,' we are reassured in a title at the end. Don't be put off by the rather alarming name of the film, for it is a hilarious comedy, but it has a disturbing side because its satire cuts right to the T-bone. Yes, I said T-bone, because Texas is based not just on oil but also on beef, as we see in this film with its Beef Pageant and its signs in the school hallways praising the high school team known as the Longhorns. (The cheerleaders are known as the Hornettes.) Yes, this is another uproarious teen comedy in the tradition of CLUELESS (1995). But instead of Beverly Hills, this time Texas gets a roasting on the barbecue of satire, and the sauce drips with a certain amount of good-humoured venom. The lovely Piper Perabo (who could lead any man astray, and here does) plays a French exchange student named Genevieve who is welcomed to a suburb of Dallas in Texas by a rich and spoilt 'teen queen' named Starla, played at full throttle by a hilariously over the top Jane McGregor, who has great talents as a comedienne. The film was made entirely on location in Dallas, from which we may conclude that Starla's mind-boggling Texan mansion must really exist somewhere. By coincidence, Perabo was actually born in Dallas, but that information is only made available on a strictly need to know basis, and is not to be repeated to anyone outside of Texas, and is especially to be kept from the French, whose secret service is notorious for blowing up yachts and might react drastically to this imputation against la Gloire. The high comedic approach used in this film works very well indeed. Sublety is not attempted, nor would it be appropriate. (After all, when was a Texan ever subtle? Cowboys and cowgirls shoot straight from the lip, and their hats and boots let you know when they are coming.) Watching this film is like sitting and listening to Jerry Hall talk about her childhood, one just gets dreamy with the sound and tumbleweeds drift by in a kind of imaginative haze. The laughter is so much to the fore that this comedy is like the kind of undiluted whiskey which Americans call 'straight up'. Just keep throwing it down your throat and sooner or later the fun really gets to you, as you lose your orientation in normal reality. The film is directed by a woman, Melanie Mayron, so that all the catty scenes between the competing beauties, the way they put each other down while pretending to be intimate friends and supporters of one another, the vanity, the hypocrisy and the rival eye shadows are shown to acute perfection. No man could comprehend, much less portray, all of this. Nor do men know about what groups of girls really do in their underwear in their bedrooms in the way that Mayron does, having once been a girl herself. It is a pity that Mayron has spent most of her life as a television director and has not used her talents for more feature films, but at least she is now making a feature entitled MEAN GIRLS for release in 2011, and we can all look forward to that. All the best comedy films about young girls are directed by women, who understand them and their foibles. Men simply cannot direct these films. CLUELESS was directed by Amy Heckering, DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985) was the forerunner and was directed by Susan Seidelman, and only LEGALLY BLONDE (2001) was directed by a man, Robert Luketic, who did very well for a man but never fully penetrated the female psyche. (Indeed, has anyone ever fully penetrated the female psyche?) Perhaps the most interesting recent film about girls is CRACKS (2009), directed by Jordan Scott, who despite the name is female (see my review). Let's face it, girls are weird and nobody understands them, least of all they themselves, but attempts to explain and portray them are always of interest, if only as anthropological exercises and controlled experiments done in studios and on location. I would go so far as to say that there is nothing stranger than a girl unless perhaps a woman. We men are pure simpletons, transparently obvious, compared to gals. Figuring out the female psyche is like trying to become a chess grandmaster when you have only just learned to play: failure is inevitable. Films like this offer a great service to humanity, for while laughing ourselves to death, we derive some precious insights into the unfathomable mysteries of who and what girls might be, and which strange planets in other universes might produce them and send them forth to mystify, bewilder, and bedazzle those of us who are so stupid that we do not even understand the different shades of lipstick, and other such high philosophical distinctions in this sublunary sphere. Long may the denizens of the hyper-cosmic realms, with their deceptively angelic looks, continue to visit us and drive us crazy! Who would want to be without them? Life with girls is the most frustrating challenge imaginable, but life without girls would be wrist-slashingly intolerable.

Yes it might not be the best movie ever made, but for mindless entertainment, this is a good movie. It made me laugh to see a high school princess's world throw into a frenzy (no, I am not a cynic and don't hate all high school princesses). I kinda liked it, and it kept me awake at work. I am not suggesting going out and buying it; far from it. But if you get a chance to catch it on TV, and are in the mood for mindless entertainment, watch it. It tries to capitalize on the genre of movies like "Mean Girls", "Man of the House", and "Bring It On". I know that I might be clashing with some of your beliefs about this movie, but your comments made this out a lot worse than it was, which is just a funny teenage movie.

I must admit, I only turned on this movie because of how hot Jane McGregor and Piper Perabo are, and that's the only reason I watched it all the way through. I thought the entire plot was rather implausible; plausibility isn't a requirement for a movie, but this movie is implausible for no good reason. It has some funny moments, such as Starla's (McGregor) French exam, which got a few chuckles out of me, but a lot of things which I suppose were meant to be funny fell flat.I say it's implausible for no reason, because it wasn't very entertaining. The whole idea of Genevieve (Perabo) taking over Starla's life isn't even one of those ideas that sounds like it could be made interesting, but maybe that's just me. Why an exchange student would come to America from France and even risk a stunt like ruining the life of one of the members of her host family is beyond me, and the movie isn't enjoyable enough to make me forget that. It's predictable, and it's not terribly smart or funny.