When Nicole is with Carlos, who dreams of being a Navy pilot, an occasional sweetness emerges from the damaged girl, notably when she has the generosity to hire a small plane to take Carlos up in the air for the first time, resulting in one of the film’s better scenes. Relations between Nicole and Dad are severely strained, and worse between Nicole and stepmom Courtney (Lucinda Jenney), who’s preoccupied with her baby daughter and can’t stand Nicole’s desultory attitude. While familiar, the dynamic thus far is plausible enough, and both young thesps invest their characters with absolute credibility and solid detailing although it’s not explained why, Nicole really is floundering, and Carlos, while human enough not to be able resist the fruit dangling in front of him, still seems sufficiently strong to be seduced only up to a point.īut what’s a big drag for Nicole turns out to represent a big break for Carlos: Her father Tom (Bruce Davison) is a longtime congressman who offers to help Carlos in his ambition to get into Annapolis. With a sense of modesty and decorum, Carlos won’t play along with such a scenario, so the inevitable is merely delayed a bit while Nicole tarnishes the good boy by inducing him to slack off on some of his family and school responsibilities. Before long, Nicole takes him home and, in broad daylight and with her father right outside her bedroom window, starts stripping herself and Carlos in the expectation of immediate gratification. Still, it’s impossible for Carlos to ignore the ripe charms that Nicole practically pushes in his face, on top of the lure of the different and the unknown, so the young man allows himself to be driven around and flirted with by Nicole and Maddy. Still obedient to his strict old country mother, Carlos is earnest, cognizant of the value of hard work and a good education, and lives by the sort of strong values that Nicole scoffs at. Nicole surprises even herself when she sets her sights on Carlos (Hernandez), a fine-looking straight-A student and football star who gets up before dawn every day to bus all the way to Pacific from East L.A. Looking not quite as trashy as her best friend Maddy (Taryn Manning), she still cuts the figure of a dissolute tramp, the definition of a spoiled rich kid spiraling in the wrong direction. A bad girl who lives in a glass house overlooking the sea, Nicole (Dunst) wears cut-off T-shirts with no bra to Pacific High in affluent Pacific Palisades and cuts class to drink.
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It’s hard to believe that a more honest telling of this story, one that dealt more openly and directly with what kids think and feel, and therefore spoke to its audience more meaningfully, wouldn’t perform even better than this cosmeticized version.Īs it is, pic consists of a series of touchstone relationship scenes papered together by a relentless stream of 30 insistently banal and thematically on-the-nose pop tunes. Still, this is one of those cases where, faced with certain narrative choices, the filmmakers have consistently compromised their work in what feel like marketing-dictated directions, which steadily undercuts its scattered authentic elements and consequently weakens its genuine connection with the viewer.