But that is where I came across it, I already have my final two movies for that series picked out, and September is the wrong month to be watching a movie from the series anyway.
I had consumed most of a bottle of very bad red wine when I sat down to it on Thursday night. We were eating on the balcony that night, a rare night on this trip when we weren't eating out. (But you can't eat out every night, or you will go even broker than you're already going by being on a trip like this.)
It wasn't really the magical experience we were hoping. We weren't able to find any actually fresh pasta, because the place we were staying was about three blocks from the Colosseum. That area is not set up for tourists to make their own dinners in their Air BnB's. It's set up for them to eat out.
There is oodles of not-fresh pasta, much of it intended to be bought and brought back with you from whence you came, to give as a gift to somebody. They don't care what you do with it, as long as you give them as much of your money as possible. (Am I getting a little cynical after a month on the road?)
Even though we have two kids who would never be charmed by an experience of eating on our balcony at sunset -- one because he is very ambivalent about the concept of eating food, the other because he is very ambivalent about the concept of showing enthsusiasm for anything, even the great wonders of the world we are seeing -- we nonetheless thought we could make this a sort of special experience. But then we also couldn't find any garlic bread that we could prep in the oven, my wife couldn't find a drink she liked (she's not into red wine anymore), and when we first boiled the water in our kitchen, there was some sort of weird scum bubbling on the surface of the water, so we had to throw out the boiled water, clean it thoroughly and boil some more, which still looked a little weird. (The apartment was otherwise beautiful and quite clean, so this was a bit of a mystery.) Anyway, the sun had long since set before we had the pasta dinner with the pesto my younger son likes -- the kind we'd been lugging around a month from Austrlaia -- ready to eat.
The good news is, the not-fresh pasta actually tasted great. Though by this point I'd already committed myself to getting the most out of the experience by drinking myself as close to the bottom of this bottle of shitty wine as I could.
Because we had all this wrapped up by 9 o'clock, I knew that just watching an episode or two of Santa Clarita Diet -- which I have belatedly chosen as a trip TV show -- would not really get me through to my proper bedtime. I needed to find something that would go down easily while I was this drunk, and She's All That is such a part of our cultural conversation that I chose that when I saw it on Netflix on the living room TV.
The premise is, of course, the occasion for great ridicule. In our comparatively unenlightened era of 26 years ago, we bought the idea that Rachael Leigh Cook was "ugly" but that if you only removed her glasses and put her in a dress, she would not be. The movie has since become a conversational touchstone any time we need to evoke the narrow thinking of an earlier time.
Strangely, though, I thought that being a movie people regularly referenced meant that it was thought of as a classic, even with the dubious thinking that underpinned it. Like, this movie could only be as prominent as it is in the cultural conversation if it was actually, you know, good.
Nope.
It has a lot of stars. Like, many more recognizable stars than you would think. Paul Walker is even in it. So is recent Oscar winner Kieran Culkin.
But good? It is not good. In fact, I found it pretty terrible as a movie. In fact, I'm not even sure it is better than He's All That, the remake from a few years ago that I also thought was pretty terrible.
Since I am, still, on this long holiday -- Cairo currently, which I'm sure I will tell you about at a later date -- I'm not going to give you a deep analysis of why She's All That is bad. But it goes way beyond whether it has a solid theory about beauty and popularity at its core. Really, this is just a movie with very wobbly construction, a terrible "hero" in Freddie Prinze Jr., and few if any moments that struck me as iconic or enduring or quotable.
Then again, I only "sort of" saw it.
That first night -- yes, I watched it over two nights, remember how much of that wine I'd consumed -- was particularly shaky in terms of being sure I'd seen the parts of it I thought I saw. I know I closed my eyes for a minute or two here and there, but every part of the setup struck me as lacking, and even more indicative of the era of its creation than I would have thought it would be, given that we still talk about it today.
On the second night, when I'd had only one glass of wine (beyond what I had for our dinner out, which was a wine and a margarita), I was fully engaged but apparently it was too loud for my older son, who asked me to turn it down. I turned it down enough that I even turned on the subtitles, which I suppose added to a slight disengagement from it.
So yeah, I've seen She's All That, mostly, and I gave it 1.5 stars. It's shallow, it celebrates people who are lame (and demonizes people who are even lamer, at least), and I'm not going to entertain the possibility that I might have liked it more if I'd seen it in 1999, or when not drunk.
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