For ages, I had only seen the scene of Paul Rudd dancing to Will Smith’s “Switch” and placed my own mental context around it that made it seem very charming. Truth is, in the actual film it’s kind of dreadful. Just another moment in a long run of moments that make a man as endearing as Paul Rudd feel so completely grating and immature that you only get increasingly annoyed and put off by his actions (which is why I guess it was never released theatrically in the US.) Also doesn’t help that the grand message of this movie about the societal insecurities placed on older women is that “young adult women are the enemy.”
Made all the more worse by the revelation that this was based on Amy Heckerling’s experiences working on the Clueless TV show, which she was simultaneously doing at the time she would’ve been working on A Night At The Roxbury, when Chris Kattan was allegedly pressured to sleep with her. (Heckerling and Kattan, by the way, have the same 16-year age difference as Pfeiffer and Rudd’s characters in this movie and would’ve been around those ages during Roxbury. So.) The boss/employee dynamic here feels real bad, but to realize it might be based on an even worse reality? Yikes. And how do you make a movie where Tracey Ullman feels like an afterthought that should be cut?? Just rancid rancid vibes all the way down this thing.
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