I’ve been on a ‘90’s movie kick lately. I watched Never Been Kissed with Drew Barrymore and was more interested than the wacky fashion and Leelee Sobieski—where did she go?—than the plot. I rented She’s All That, the 1999 Pygmalion remake starring Rachel Leigh Cook and Freddie Prinze, Jr., on Saturday so that I could relive the cultural phenomenon that was my fifth grade year.

Freddie Prinze, Jr. was the hottie of my fifth grade classroom. We still had our own desks that year and nearly every girl had a picture of Prinze on it. The photographs were printed on cheap white paper and usually had streaks of darker and lighter ink from the shoddy library printer. His face smiled out from layers of tape, our youthful version of lamination. We quoted the movie (which tries desperately hard to coin new words like “major wiggage”...?). Every girl cited Rachel Leigh Cook as her favorite actress, even though, on my recent viewing, she does very little but stare, occasionally smile and look pretty with or without glasses to stand in for acting.  

If you don’t have a mind for 1990’s teen romantic-comedies, first, who are you? And second, good for you. As a refresher, She’s All That tells the story of Zach Siler (Prinze), who is popular, smart and has been secretly admitted to all the Ivy League schools (yes, all of them), but refuses to tell his dad. Zach’s girlfriend Taylor dumps him for Matthew Lillard, who plays himself but under the guise of a Real World cast member named Brock Hudson.

After Taylor dumps him, per high school teenage boys in movies, he doesn’t care, but instead makes a bet with his best friend that he can make an unpopular girl prom queen. He picks weirdo Laney Boggs who marks her weirdness with big glasses, messy hair and paint on her weirdo clothes. She does weird things like performance art in white make-up and a cute little dress. Zach forces her to go out with him, saying he loves art, etc…and they gradually fall in love, but the truth comes out that she was just A BET. In the end, she says she feels like Pretty Woman without the hooker stuff because she has taken off her glasses, cut her hair and is dating a rich boy.

Seriously, the movie is way, way worse than I remember because all the popular girls in my school saw it and loved it, meaning I loved it too. As stated in every gender study course I took in college, yikes, he doesn’t like her until she takes off her glasses! She doesn’t really have any identity, either, except for the vaguely-developed characteristics of “artistic” and “isolated.” Plus, the acting is really, really bad and the dialogue and character development is even worse.

Bottom line: go see this movie!