What is it with American junior chick-lit and chick-flicks? While little girls in these parts are following the god-slaying adventures of His Dark Materials’ Lyra, or Jacqueline Wilson’s spunky heroines, in the US, they get stuck with frothy confectionary like The Princess Diaries, wherein the simpering protagonists get carried off by some prince or footballer or other.
Is it that their culture is more prescriptive than ours? Or that our relative proximity to royalty leads us to suspect that bagging the heir apparent will inevitably end in taped conversations with some horsey, less-than-coy mistress? Either way, this tired Cinderella-in-high-school riff will do little to inspire cheerleaders-in-waiting to burn their bras and pom-poms.
The crushingly predictable proceedings cast wannabe-pop-princess Hilary Duff as a frumpy (oh, please…) put-upon teen, living under the cruel thumb of her wicked and remarkably gauche stepmother (the wonderfully clownish Coolidge), and desperately fantasising about a boy she’s met on the net, who, conveniently enough, happens to be the most popular footballer in school. After a masked prom, we discover that our Hilary flew the entire Bin Laden clan back to the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11. No wait, maybe I just got bored and started contemplating other movies.
Anyways, even if I’d sooner my daughters learnt their sexual politics from Seven Beauties, this is far from the worst teen-flick this year (The Prince And Me, anyone?) largely thanks to Coolidge’s harpy-ish comedic flair (“That salmon came all the way from Norwegia”). And although Lindsay Lohan would never have needed all that padding to fill out a strapless ball-gown (miaow), Hilary Duff is very lovely and amiable, even if she did start the Gulf War for oil. Or perhaps I drifted off again…