Awesomely Horrible Netflix Instant Films: “Clueless”

I'm not a fan of rom-coms. They are trite, silly, and completely predictable. Of all the movie genres they are the most easily reduced to a formula: boy meets girl - boy loses girl + boy gets girl back = happy ending. Clueless is no different in this respect. The boy she can't stand turns out to be the love of her life and they get together at the end. What makes Clueless fun is it's complete lack of pretension and seriousness. It's a piece of crap and it knows it. But Clueless is a cinematic time capsule to the time it was made: 1995. Maybe it's because that was the year I graduated high school but this movie makes me happy whenever I watch it.

The movie takes place in the magical year 1995 in Beverly Hills, CA. It stars Alicia Silverstone back when she was super duper hot. Like, Aerosmith videos hot. She plays Cher, a vapid high school student only interested in fashion and like, stufff. Her best friend Dionne (Stacy Dash) and her decide to adopt a clueless, (get it?), newcomer played by the late great Brittany Murphy. They try and hook her up with a popular boy who isn't interested. Cher tries to date a gay dude before finally realizing that her stepbrother (Paul Rudd) is the one she really loves even though the majority of the movie is spent with her making fun of his listening to Radiohead. They get together in the end even though, like I said, they are friggin' step-siblings.

According to the Netflix description, the film is a loose adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. But then again, aren't 90% of rom-coms? For all of its inherent silliness there are some great performances in the movie. Wallace Shawn is great as an exasperated teacher and Dan Hedeya is hilarious as Cher's lawyer father. Amy Heckerling's direction is over the top and, along with the costumers and art director, created a love poem to the times they lived in. It was a simpler, happier time. Pre-9/11, during the Clinton boom years, at the tail end of the grunge era. Young White people were all angsty for absolutely no reason. They didn't realize that in 10 years things were going to really start sucking. Or maybe it's just me? To paraphrase Socrates, "True wisdom comes from, like, being totally clueless".