Crossroads
**
Cinema Releases - March 29, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate PG. 94
minutes. Directed by Tamra Davis. Written by Shonda Rhimes. Starring Britney
Spears, Anson Mount, Zoe Saldana, Taryn Manning, Kim Cattrall, Dan Aykroyd,
Justin Long.
"Crossroads" is the first feature
film starring kiddie-pop superstar Britney Spears, and seeing as it shares
its title with a classic Eric Clapton album, a wonderful 1984 movie by Walter
Hill and a popular ITV soap opera, hopefully it will drown in a sea of confusion
and be lost in the winds of obscurity. Incidentally, I don't see why Britney
gets her own film when Tiffany had to settle for a voice-over performance
in "Jetsons: The Movie", but hey, that's a rant for another
time.
"Crossroads" is a bizarre piece of work, with
premise and dialogue at the level of kids' television and plot threads as
morose as teen pregnancy, child abandonment, miscarriage, rape and suspected
murder. I've seen plenty of movies where teenage girls take road trips across
America while promising to be friends forever, but this is the first one
in which the girls pole-dance for money at a motorway strip club and then
have to brawl their way out.
Britney stars as a Louisiana high school graduate
who decides she wants to find her long-lost mother in Arizona. One of her
former friends, a popular rich girl played by Zoe Saldana, decides she wants
to cadge a ride to California to see her boyfriend. Taryn Manning is a pregnant
girl from the wrong side of town who also wants to see California -- she
too jumps in the back of the car, and away they go.
I've already hinted at some of the darker aspects
of the screenplay; it's also worth mentioning that apart from the bizarre
climax, in which Britney dresses up in some kind of bird costume and clumsily
mimes to one of her hits, "Crossroads" has a rock 'n' roll soundtrack. The
opening scene sees our leading lady miming to Madonna, that good old strip
club scene features the girls doing a karaoke version of Joan Jett's "I Love
Rock and Roll", and whenever commercial pop comes onto the car radio it is
swiftly turned off.
What the hell is going on here? If "Crossroads"
had been a high-polish ditzfest for six year-olds, I would probably have
disliked it more, but at least I would have been able to comprehend it. Instead
it's a ditzfest masquerading as S.E. Hinton -- a stupid little movie that
attempts to cater to mature audiences by thoughtlessly including risqué
splashes. Kids will be baffled, teenagers won't be interested and adults
will dismiss the whole thing as thin.
Considering the amount of money behind the Britney
machine, the movie is curiously muted, with haphazard camera angles creating
a feeling of cheap flatness. And there are things that just don't make sense,
such as the school geek being perfectly toned and the girls describing one
motel room as "Great!" despite the fact that they'd slammed an identical
one as "Awful!" a few minutes previously.
I liked a few little touches, such as the scene
in which the girls' male companion stuffs his face while everyone else sits
nursing mere cups of coffee, and a moment in which the characters mime to
Shania Twain, right down to her most infinitesimal pouts. Britney shows a
tad more personality here than she does through her plastic PR, plus we get
to see her in underwear. Which is nice.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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