The Flickcharters made their choice rather definitively, but in the comments section a write-in candidate started gaining traction. It was seconded and thirded and before long, the evidence was overwhelming that the best candidate wasn't in the poll offerings, but was, rather, Christian Mingle, a Christian-themed dating movie starring Lacey Chabert.
So I watched Christian Mingle. And I sort of liked it.
I wasn't going to let that happen again.
So the winner of the 2020 poll, the 2003 film From Justin to Kelly, was my choice for 2024 ... and I couldn't have been happier with that decision.
I'm not even sure where to start on how bad this movie is, but maybe I should start on how much different a movie like this would be if it had been made today.
A 2024 movie featuring two American Idol stars would be a cross-promotional dream with all the various social media platforms, and it would get high-profile talent behind the camera -- an up-and-comer with possible music video experience, but either way, someone fresh and full of ideas. The resulting movie, even if ultimately unsuccessful, would have been bouncy and buoyant and probably have the look and feel of something like this year's Mean Girls remake. (Which I haven't seen, but I can make assumptions based on the trailers.)
The person they did get to direct the movie, Robert Iscove, is not a name I know off the top of my head, but neither is he some hack who stumbled into the job through nepotism. In fact, Iscove had more than 50 of his 65 directing credits (mostly in TV) prior to From Justin to Kelly, and was already 56 years old at the time of its release. Perhaps the clearest example of why he was chosen was that he had directed She's All That, which was a pretty big hit in 1997, even if it does have the dubious legacy of popularizing the instantly dated notion that a woman would turn from ugly to pretty if only she removed her glasses.
Given the sheer volume of professional experience Iscove brought with him, it's hard to overstate how shabby this movie looks, how inert are its performances, and how flat the whole experience feels.
Surely, the fact that neither Kelly Clarkson nor Justin Guarini were trained actors had something to do with their lack of charisma (independently) or lack of chemistry (jointly). (During the movie I found my mind wandering and thinking how "chemistry" can be defined as "charisma between two people.") But they are not as bad as they could have been, and might have been propped up a bit by any sort of passable filmmaking technique, or decent choreography or song choices.
Nope.
One of the first things you notice about From Justin to Kelly is just how bad the lighting is. That's not something you see anymore on any movie with any modicum of a budget. These actors are not lit to bring out their physical attractiveness -- not just these two, but the physical attractiveness of any of the cast, who are all attractive as this movie takes place in a Hollywood version of spring break. Even the daytime scenes are full of shadow and glare.
To delve fully into all the things that don't work, I need to set up the plot.
So Kelly plays Kelly, a waitress in a country (Texas, is it?) bar who also sings to a nightly crowd of two to three drunks sleeping it off. Her two friends, backstabber Alexa (Katherine Bailess) and the sweet Kaya (Anika Noni Rose), convince her to come to Florida for spring break. That's also where Justin (as Justin) has come with his two friends, horndog stud Brandon (Greg Siff) and nerdy Eddie (Brian Dietzen), who is trying to meet up with a girl he met on the internet. Their paths are going to cross way more times than should be possible in an area suffused with probably 15 to 20,000 college-aged kids.
So here we get into one narrative problem with From Justin to Kelly. The two leads are supposed to be separated after their initial meeting by bad luck (she writes her phone number in lipstick on a paper towel, but it lands in a puddle and becomes unreadable) and the conniving of the bitchy Alexa (who gives Justin her own phone number, pretending it is Kelly's phone number, so she can send him misleading texts and send him on wild goose chases that will allow her to swoop in on Justin instead of her friend).
When characters are kept apart in a movie for these reasons, it's supposed to increase our investment in their eventual pairing and make us yearn for that to happen. However, after every latest roadblock is introduced, it takes less than two minutes of screen time for them to randomly cross paths again, meaning that whatever narrative value is gained from these roadblocks is immediately frittered away. They don't seem to discuss the reasons they didn't call or arrive at the designated meeting spot the previous time, so it's like they are reset to their default interaction standards without any of what happened before meaning anything. Also, they never manage to learn -- until the very end, of course -- that Alexa has been manipulating and misdirecting them. (A simple reference to any one of several dozen texts would have done the trick.)
You'd think the relationship would be off to a less-than-magical start given this film's version of a meet cute. Although they have rubbed elbows in big dance numbers before now, Justin and Kelly first speak after meeting in a women's bathroom. He's been chased there because women want the tickets he's handing out to some party, and she's already in there. Under some staging this might have worked, but this is the most drab and boring bathroom the location scouts could have possibly found, and nothing of the short exchange that occurs between them seems like it lays the foundation for an infatuation that will occupy both of them for the rest of the movie. The actors can't sell it, but it's not there in the script, and it lets us know that this sort of lack of a pulse is going to inform the entire film.
And boy does it ever.
My wife walked in on what was probably the funniest scene in terms of the cluelessness of the staging.
In one of their many attempts to overcome the obstacles that have been thrown their way, Justin and Kelly go out on a boat ride. I can't remember how or why he has access to this boat or how he knows how to pilot it, but you need to understand how this is staged in order to understand why it's so funny. So here is a picture:
They sing a duet on this boat, but they never leave the configuration you see above, and in fact, she never even turns around to look at him. It's supposed to be a point of optimism in their relationship but the song feels dour, which is exacerbated by the fact that they are not looking at each other and in fact are both as stiff as a board. Making matters worse is that Iscove shoots it from about ten different angles, but because they never move it just draws further attention to their twin senses of rigidity and lifelessness.
Given the sort of career Clarkson has gone on to have, you might think that the songs she and Justin sing are some real bangers, maybe not "Since You've Been Gone," but at least something befitting a recently anointed diva. Nope. I wouldn't say the songs are horrible in that they violate basic principles of song structure or anything like that, but they are just so mediocre and forgettable, which is also the best description for the scenes that do have some sort of choreography that does not involve two people sitting on a boat staring straight ahead. A final fart in the wind is the closing number, which is quite involved in its choreography, but is a curiously chosen staging of KC and the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way (I Like It)." A good song, to be sure, but not really the vibe you are going for in a big happy ending number where everyone has been paired off successfully and everything's going to turn out alright. (Oops, spoiler alert.) Plus it seems to last for about two full play-throughs of the song, an interminable ending to a movie that is only 81 minutes long.
Is there anything good in From Justin to Kelly? Maybe "good" is too strong of a word, but I can tell you about something I found in the neighborhood of charming. The only real actor in the cast -- there isn't even some guest star from the older set, a Danny DeVito or someone like that -- is Anika Noni Rose, though she would not become described as such until later on. It's kind of hard to believe Rose went on to appear in films like Dreamgirls, considering that this was her first feature and it might have ended the acting careers of anyone involved (and did for most of the others). But Rose does indeed have ability, and she shows it in a romantic sub plot with a young man named Carlos she meets who works in one of the spring break resorts. (He's played by Jason Yribar, who is also pretty good.) The things that happen in their sub plot are mostly sweet and are the sorts of things you would hope would happen in the A plot, if the script knew what to do with either Justin or Kelly.
Take away points, though, in another romantic sub plot involving Brandon and a female police officer who keeps issuing him tickets for holding events without permits and gambling on things like a grudge being settled in the form of a duel between two hovercrafts. (Don't get me started on that one.) Since we're naming names, the officer is played by Theresa San-Nicholas. Brandon is a real douchebag, and Siff's performance is probably the third most professional in the movie after the two mentioned in the previous paragraph. You'd expect he'd be a douchebag with a heart of gold but he's just sort of a regular douchebag, always boasting about his female conquests and trying to see a little more female flesh (they hold a whipped cream bikini contest). He tries to seduce the female police officer as well every time they meet -- which is about five times -- so it's no surprise at all that when she finally shows up in the final scene, and he's not doing anything illegal, it's in a bikini and she's finally succumbed to his "charms," such as they are. Yes, retrograde morality on the powers of seduction of a creep were still alive and well in 2003.
It's hard to understand how Clarkson and Guarini would allow this sort of travesty to be made, except that they weren't famous at all a year before this, and of course she couldn't yet know she was really going places. (Guarini, not so much.) Today's recently minted American Idol winner and American Idol finalist would be much more conscious of burnishing their brand, as they would already have millions of followers on Instagram and would expect the world to be at their feet. Here, Justin and Kelly look like novices pushed into a disaster on terrible advice, powerless to do anything about it.
One final note on the universally agreed-upon awfulness that is this movie. From Justin to Kelly has a user rating of 1.9 out of 10 on IMDB. Usually when you see that sort of rating, it's because a bunch of trolls have gotten on IMDB to give 0/10 on a movie whose subject matter they find politically objectionable or that challenges their sense of the primacy of the patriarchy. That could not possibly be the case with this movie, so it just means that everyone thinks it's bad.
I could go on, but February 29th is over, and now it's time to get back to our regularly scheduled viewing.
But I'd be lying if I didn't admit I'm already thinking about potential candidates for 2028, now that I've gotten this tradition back on track.
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