This and That

Here is one of the leftover observations from my long Easter weekend of viewings on the projector in my garage, which totalled 12 viewings over five days (I got started after work on Thursday), five of them new viewings and seven of them repeats.

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. 

I finally saw: She's All That (sort of)

And wouldn't it have made a good movie for my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist if I'd thought of it rather than randomly coming across it on Netflix in our Air BnB in Rome?

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.