This movie is on WB right now. I like romantic comedies and this one was all right, but the premise was really unbelievable. Like Drew Barrymore made it into her twenties without ever being kissed. It reminded me of Emma Watson in Harry Potter or Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets. Watson is not goofy looking and Helen couldn’t be frumpy if she tried.
Have you ever watched a movie and thought to yourself yeah, right. He/she is soooo unattractive—not!
I’m really sorry for using that —not! construction. I’m too slow right now to think of a better way of expressing myself. Please forgive me.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think Drew Barrymore’s that good-looking. True, she’s not bad looking enough to prevent her from getting kissed all through her teenage years, but she’s definitely not my cup of tea.
Don’t you know, Biggirl, that all you have to do to make a hottie look a total dog is to de-makeup and put a pair of glasses on her? For an extra slice of homeliness, put her hair into a loose ponytail at the base of her neck and dress her in shapeless unisex clothes.
What’s that film with Rachael Leigh Cook in, where she’s supposed to look like an ugly geek, but actually looks like a frickin gorgeous stunning super babe with perfect everything?]
I’m not really talking about whether or not any individual finds any particular actor or actress especially “hot” or not. What bugs me about the examples I gave was my inability to suspend my disbelief long enough to buy into the movie. I was wondering if anyone had experienced the same thing.
In Never Been Kissed they didn’t even give Drew the prerequisite glasses and ill-fitting clothes like skeptic pointed out. They just made her fall down once or twice. What a clutz. No one could ever be attracted to someone who trips!
Hermione’s ‘ugliness’ (the books neves say she’s ugly, just that she’s goofy and has bushy hair) is not central to the books (except a little bit in GoF where ironically she surprises people with how good she looks), so I was able to watch the Harry Potter films without being put off by that and the other big difference (the fact that Ron is supposed to be gangly, but in the film he’s smaller than Harry!)
In one scene in the movie, Drew Barrymore’s character says that it’s not that she’s never been kissed, just that she’s never had, quote:
“That thing, that moment, when you kiss someone and everything around becomes hazy and the only thing in focus is you and this person and you realize that that person is the only person that you’re supposed to kiss for the rest of your life, and for one moment you get this amazing gift and you want to laugh and you want to cry because you feel so lucky that you found it and so scared that that it will go away all at the same time.”
So, in other words, she’s smooched guys before, she’d just never yet had an orgasm when she did.
In his classic essay, *Such, Such Were the Joys...,"* George Orwell wrote that "until after I had left school for good I continued to believe that I was preternaturally ugly. It was what my schoolfellows had told me, and I had no other authority to refer to."
So it is certainly possible for one’s views of one’s self to conflict with reality.
I know a fair amount of people who have made it past their teenage years and haven’t been kissed yet. It’s not totally improbable.
And I thought that Drew Barrymore made a convincing nerd, and it wasn’t just the braces or the gross hair; there was something that I can’t put my finger on that just made her more real. Now, Leelee Sobieski’s nerdiness was a little too over-the-top to be believable, but whatever…
I can accept that somebody good-looking could fail to realize it, AND tend to drive away anyone who IS attracted.
People can be very screwed-up, especially if they have twisted parents, hateful schoolmates, etc., who WORK at screwing them up!
An obvious example: look at all the women running around right now who are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that they are hideously obese, and become irritated when their husbands and boyfriends tell them otherwise.
I once dated a woman whose ex-husband had quite thoroughly convinced her that she was stupid, boring, ugly, and unable to function on her own. In actual fact, she was quite bright, fun, cute, and functioned just fine once she got away from him.
It’s what they’ve got to do. If they had an authentically geeky chick, the vast majority of the audience (and that’s no slight on them - that’s just the way it is) wouldn’t understand the guy’s eventual attraction to her. When we see a “hot-ugly girl,” we’re seeing what the lead eventually sees.
People’s tastes are uniques. I don’t fall in love with the same girl you do. At least when we have a standard “attractive woman,” we get (at some level) why the guy likes her.
I agree. With some kids, if you are marked as a nerd or a smelly loser, you’ll be known as that until you graduate regardless if you are attractive or not. With some kids, their self-esteem goes down and that probably makes them less attractive to others. Plus, maybe the boys wouldn’t be caught dead with Drew’s character because then it would show they were losers themselves (to the other classmates).
My favorite example of this is Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie and Johnnie. They play two lonely hearts who get together in large part because no one else would have them. (Kathy Bates did Pfeiffer’s role on stage.)
But to try to pass Rachael Leigh Cook off as anything but a goddess is insulting to viewers. It’s not like she was a newcomer either. She did that anti-drug commercial where she was wearing that pasted on white t-shirt and smashed up a kitchen with a frying pan. Every guy I know could instantly recognize her after that regardless of what she was wearing.