Never been kissed (Drew Barrymore)

(Amazon UK link)

Once again we were tired. So we wanted to watch something light and not too long. We looked through some DVDs which we had not seen in a decade or so, and opted for the 1999 movie ‘Never been kissed’, which we last saw in February 2014.

Drew Barrymore - rather a young Drew Barrymore - stars in this light-hearted romantic comedy. I had entirely forgotten the storyline. Drew plays 25-year-old Josie Geller who has a good job with a newspaper, working as a copy editor. She’s quite pedantic, and evidently very good at what she does. She has her own office, and even an assistant, though he doesn’t seem to be much use. 

But Josie longs to write some stories for the paper. She’s proposed several ideas, most of which have been accepted - and then given to another writer. She’s almost in despair when the paper’s CEO, the rather authoritarian Rigfort (Garry Marshall) announces that their next big scoop is going to be an undercover expose of a high school. And he selects Josie to research and write the story. To do so, she has to pretend to be 17, and enrol in the local school…

Josie is very nervous about this; as we learn, in flashbacks through the film, she had some terrible experiences when she was at high school. She was quite geeky, and had terrible clothes sense, and was quite badly bullied. This was mostly verbal, but she suffered a lot of humiliation. And it seems that very little has changed when she starts out again in her undercover role.  Her brother Rob (David Arquette) was very popular when he was at the school, but did not do well academically. 

The film itself, rather like the film ‘Mean girls’, serves as something of an expose of American high school culture. Perhaps it’s now similar in the UK and elsewhere, but it bears almost no relation to my own experience in the 1970s. In these American films there are a lot of cliques. For instance, the ‘popular’ girls (usually in ultra short skirts and tight tops) who rather rule the roost, and the sporty types - particularly boys - who are treated like sex symbols.

 ‘Mean girls’ has a lot of other groups, but the only other one featured in this film is the one with the geeky people who like math(s), known as ‘denominators’. One of them befriends Josie, and she likes being part of this group who share a lot of her values. She’s rather keen on one of the teachers, too, Sam Coulson (Michael Vartan), and he admires her extensive knowledge and enjoyment of Shakespeare. I did feel a bit uncomfortable at times with the extra attention he gives her; as his student, he should have been more careful. 

However, Josie isn’t at school just to attend classes and make friends, and when she visits her workplace she’s forcibly reminded by her immediate boss Gus (John C Reilly) that she needs to come up with a good storyline, or both their jobs will be forfeit…

While the style is quite light-hearted, I didn’t find any of it particularly funny. I hope some of the flashback scenes were caricatured rather than realistic, but they give a very poor impression of a US high school. Drew Barrymore is excellent as a somewhat klutzy geeky girl who often gets things wrong; she manages to play herself at 25, at 25 pretending to be 17, and in flashbacks as if she really were 17. 

There are some nice interactions in the film, and a few thought-provoking lines, too. It’s sad when people are judged by what they wear and their manner of behaving; but probably people who are judgemental in that way are unlikely to watch this film. 

The ‘romance’ part is also somewhat underplayed, although it was obvious from early on where this was eventually going. The ending is a bit bizarre, something I could not imagine anyone doing, but it makes a dramatic conclusion and a happy ending. So while this seems to me more a teen movie than a romantic comedy as such, the main characters are adults rather than teens even if a lot of the action is set in a high school.

On the whole I liked watching this, but it’s not one of my favourites.  The rating of 12 is about right, in my view; there's nothing explicit but a lot of innuendoes and sexual discussion. There's no real violence and bad language is mostly fairly tame. But it's not the kind of film that would be of any interest to younger children; it's more likely to appeal to older teens or young adults. 

There are no extras on our DVD.

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