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Forgotten Film Friday: Never Been Kissed

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman So this is a weird week. As a writer on this film blog I started this series because of a day where I was super depressed I re-watched a film I forgot about. There is often a sense of nostalgia in this series. I am so precious with these moments in film that deeply affected me but very rarely resonated with the world at large. This weekend I didn’t have a film to write from this perspective. I was devoid of something to say because I was saving my mental energy for something coming down the pike here which may or may not have already been dropped. So on a Tuesday night my lovely fiancé says “We are watching Never Been Kissed!” I hope I am known on this film blog as the rom-com guy but that night I wasn’t feeling it. What I was treated to was a charming movie but not a masterpiece. So now you may be asking “what is the point of this then!” The point is Never Been Kissed is an example of a movie you can never make again. Never Been Kissed’s plot lives in an America that is oddly blissful, where crimes are ignored, where true love is all that matters and where the grand romantic gesture still has a place. It is a movie you can see someone in their formative years feeling the same way I did about the earlier films in this series. Now it is a bizarre culture artifact featuring actors we have never seen again (Michael Vartan, Jeremy Jordan) eventual super stars (Jessica Alba, John C Reily) and a straight-up Hollywood royalty (Gary Marshall). It is a movie where the main love interest is a teacher who believes he is falling in love with a child. Where two-twenty something just enroll themselves in high school! That is wildly creepy and if wasn’t for Drew Berrymore this movie wouldn’t have done as well as it did in 1999! But this all of the creepy things that stood out to me became the most interesting part of this movie and it got me thinking! Forgotten Film Friday doesn’t always have to be about shouting out films. I want to shout out how far we have come. Representation has gotten so much better. Film has gotten so much better. Story has gotten so much better and directing has gotten so much better. Films don’t need one charming actor to keep a film afloat anymore. That is something we should be so thankful for. Drew Berrymore is a gem and always will be. She has proven that she can make zombies charming! We now use that as a weapon instead of the crutch of a whole film. For all of our issues with Hollywood has film fans we have to be thankful for that! So before I go I have one more thought about this film that I want to put into the universe. As I stated this movie is creepy. Lowkey creepy but creepy none the less. That made me think what if you remade Never Been Kissed as a slasher film. Not a fan? Well you know what now you don’t get to hear my ideas then! Seriously think about it!!

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