One of the repeats was a movie I never in a million years imagined I would watch again, except for the crush I've developed on its star.
I don't usually like talking on this blog about crushes I have on actresses -- that can be skeevy if done incorrectly, and sometimes even if done correctly. But we're all human beings and I am a heterosexual male human being. I think to entirely deny that this is part of my DNA is to be dishonest. So let's just hope I do it correctly.
Said crush is on Addison Rae, an influencer who became an actress and a pop musician, and is the star of Mark Waters' 2021 film He's All That -- the gender-flipped remake of Robert Iscove's 1999 film She's All That, which has become a dubious cultural touchpoint over the years.
Why Rae? Well she's certainly an attractive enough person with a fair bit of charisma, and enough acting chops to get by. But these were things I could observe five years ago when I first saw and reviewed the movie, and they didn't hold particular sway over me then.
But then, while gathering songs for my annual mix via Shazam after hearing them out there in the wild, I came across Rae's song "Diet Pepsi." My process here is that when I first hear it and Shazam it, I merely add it to my spreadsheet of mix candidates, and then only in January, when I'm actually making my mix, do I revisit these songs and become more familiar with them, deciding whether they ultimately make the cut. (And speaking of mixes and He's All That, I actually got a song from this movie for a mix back when I first watched it, Mackelmore's "Dance Off.")
So this past January was when I became obsessed with "Diet Pepsi," specifically its video:
Now, you could argue that what Rae gives us in this video is specifically sexual and that this is the source of my interest in her. But I don't really think that's it. I think it's an amalgam of everything this video is offering that has made me watch it enough times (probably a dozen) that YouTube presents it to me as a likely option every time I go to the site. (A source of a little bit of embarrassment, because this account is logged into our TV, so my younger son uses it as well.)
Let me break down what I perceive as the appeal of the "Diet Pepsi" video, that doesn't just make me a dirty old man:
1) The song itself. I would never have even watched this video if I didn't dig the surprisingly mature song -- mature if not in subject matter or lyrics, then in production and the sophistication of its construction. What do I mean about "sophistication" in this context? Well I think my absolute favorite part of the song is the key change in its final 30 seconds, which works so well precisely because it is so unexpected. Most pop songs don't dare to do a thing like this, wouldn't even consider it. And then actually vocally, I think this is quite a good song, as the whole vibe reminds me of one of my favorite new discoveries of the past ten to 15 years, Lana del Rey, who I think is just brilliant and a staggeringly accomplished vocalist. There's an ethereal quality to the whole thing that really immerses me in it, and the lyrics themselves add a small bit of titillation to the experience. Even naming the song "Diet Pepsi," when those two words are only mentioned once in the lyrics, is a highly sophisticated impulse.
2) The video is incredibly shot. It's kind of a masterpiece of both cinematography and editing. It's kind of in the tradition of old perfume ads, where it exists only to make the people look as beautiful as possible, but I don't think it's fair to suggest this means it's utterly vapid and devoid of value. Making people and things look beautiful speaks to some core part of us that wants to see pretty things, and they absolutely hired the finest craftspeople to accomplish this.
3) And then finally we get to Rae. She's beautiful at times, cute at times and sexy at times. It's a winning mix. There's something about this quest for her to get to the convenience store to get a can of soda -- though the video doesn't have even that much narrative rigor -- that I find kind of adorable, especially that bit where she flits through the store to the refrigerated case, wearing her perfectly appointed brand name party clothes. She may be on another planet than we are in terms of glamor and enviable life events, but for a moment, she's bringing us into it.
That was a lot more than I expected to write about "Diet Pepsi."
In any case, this is all background for why I decided I would rewatch He's All That. I wanted to see just how much of Rae's charms I hadn't fully appreciated back when I first watched it.
And you know what I discovered? I actually like He's All That better than She's All That.
The presumption would be that this could never be true. But here's the thing. I had not actually seen She's All That yet when I watched He's All That. I only rectified that last year in Europe, when I watched She's All That as a way to wind down one of our nights in Rome, a viewing that I wrote about here.
And I really didn't like it. Not only has this movie dated worse (I assume) than many other films from the 1990s -- though it's not every day that I'm seeing films like this for the first time, making comparisons tricky -- but I have a hard time even putting myself back in the place I would have been as a 25-year-old in 1999, imagining myself liking it then. There is nothing in this movie that delivers well on even what would have been important to me then, at that age. I don't find the performers charming (Rachael Leigh Cook probably comes off best) and I don't find anything funny, even by the standards of late 1990s romcom humor. I found the whole thing pretty cringe.
And I found He's All That a lot cuter and more darling this time.
Surprisingly, it was not specifically Rae I was responding to on this viewing. In fact, I specifically noted that my toes did not curl while watching her, as I thought they might. However, I did appreciate what she was capable of providing to this project, and half-wondering why she hasn't tried for any more similarly prominent star vehicles in the past five years, because she's certainly got the minimum necessary charisma and ability to support such a project. I'm guessing she's just more interested in the music side now, and that'll be even more the case after the album containing "Diet Pepsi" was received well by critics. (And I've actually watched a couple other videos from that album. They are shot equally well, and objectively, Rae looks nice in them. But neither the songs nor the specific video entrance me the way "Diet Pepsi" does.)
Jeez I'm talking about "Diet Pepsi" again. But here's one more thing before I leave that topic: Is Diet Pepsi, the drink, actually more popular than Pepsi Max? I shifted from Coke Zero to Pepsi Max about five years ago and haven't looked back.
So while I did appreciate Rae, it was about the same amount that I appreciated her when I first saw the movie. I just liked everything else a bit better. I just thought it was a pretty sweet movie that accomplishes its modest goals and is full of the kind of sunny cheer you would want in a romcom aimed at young people. It has its mean characters who do mean things, including Rae's character herself, though she doesn't mean to (sorry to mix the meanings of the two uses of "mean"). The difference in tone between a movie like this and the movie I wrote about yesterday, Rebel Wilson's The Deb, is that this is a movie that doesn't feel fundamentally mean even with characters who do mean things, while Wilson's film does feel a bit more fundamentally mean -- perhaps an extension of its director's persona.
When I considered the premise of this post, I thought I would lead with the fact that I had given She's All That a higher star rating on Letterboxd but had actually liked it less. I assumed that would be the case.
But looking at it now, I see that I gave them both 1.5 stars. That's correct for She's All That, but it is not correct for its gender-flipped remake. While I don't know if I can go so far as to give this a fully positive assessment, because it still has the shortcomings I noticed the first time (including an absurd amount of product placement -- I wonder if, considering "Diet Pepsi," that is just Rae's thing), I'd go up at least a full star to 2.5 stars.
Maybe I was just grumpy at the end of 2021. When this came out in September of that year, it was nearly the end of another lockdown, and Netflix movies continued to be one of the few sources of new movies, a reality I wrote about the only other time I've written about He's All That on my blog. Maybe nearing the end of two long years in COVID, you're inclined to be more cynical about this sort of movie than in other contexts.
But it was, I'm glad to say, nearing the end. It was only a month later that we saw our current house for the first time, and we were only able to see it because they widened the distance you were allowed to travel from where you lived under lessening COVID restrictions. I guess you could say it's all been pointing upward since then, except that we reelected Trump and started a number of violent conflicts on foreign soil that have lost us huge amounts of credibility on the world stage, plus in my family we've lost two grandparents in those intervening years.
Even so, the arrow is pointing upward, and my general mental composition is a lot better now than then, making me able to embrace He's All That after shunning it then.
I never expected this post to run the gamut from "Diet Pepsi" to COVID to the war in Iran, but you never know where a blog post will take you.
