Crossroads
It's hard not to love a movie that posits Britney Spears as a
nerd, a high-school valedictorian, an aspiring med-school student, an amateur
mechanic and the spawn of Dan Aykroyd. When she
finally reveals that she's also a poet, sincerely reading Dido's lyrics for
"I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" as though they were Wordsworth to
her aptly named love interest Anson Mount, it's one of the funniest moments to
ever grace the big screen -- save, perhaps, for a subsequent scene in which the
big lug "surprises" her with the revelation that "I, uh, came up
with some music for your poem." The "plot" involves a road trip
designed to take Britney to her long-lost mother (Kim Cattrall,
punching the clock) and pregnant-by-date-rape friend Mimi (Taryn
Manning, looking and acting totally drunk throughout) to a singing audition. By
film's end, both goals have been written off as completely irrelevant, subsumed
by Britney's need to get laid and surpass her friend in the singing department.
Along the way, there are plenty of opportunities for car stereo sing-alongs, so we get Britney's renditions of hits by *N Sync,
Sheryl Crow, Shania Twain and so on. Mandy