Imagine, if you will, just how exciting Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon would have been in the woodcutter, priest, and samurai's ghost all showed up out of the rain, sat down in the shelter, and agreed totally on who the murder/rapist was. No different perspectives. No multiple sides to every story. Just pretty much general agreement. But what if each then told the story of the murder/rape, in the exact same way. Instead of watching the same story told from different points of view, we watch the same story, repeated exactly, four times.

That would be pretty boring, wouldn't it? Then why on earth did director Zoe Clark-Williams and writer Victoria Strouse think that that was a good structure to aim for in their film New Best Friend, which sat on the shelf at MGM for several years, made a one week detour at select theatres, and then moved straight to video/DVD.

In New Best Friend the opening credits give one version of who Alicia Glazer (Exotica bad-girl Mia Kirshner) was. She was frumpled and meek and bookish. As soon as the credits end, we discover that Alicia is in a drug induced coma and that local sheriff Artie Bonner (the man who helped Stella get Her Groove Back,Taye Diggs) suspect foul play and that he suspects Alicia's three best friends — Hadley (Dawson's Creek's manic depressive Meredith Monroe), Sydney (my muse Dominique Swain), and Julianne (Rachel True, the girl from The Craft who wasn't Robin Tunney, Neve Campbell, or Fairuza Balk) — of somehow being involved. While Sheriff Bonner plays Jessica Fletcher and goes all amateur-detective-on-the-scene, the three girls basically each tell him that Alicia wasn't the goody-goody we saw in the first scene. Nobody offers complications. Nobody offers explanations. All we know is that everybody thought Alicia was a good girl, but she wasn't. It's not particularly interesting, and heaven knows Alicia doesn't get a voice, because she's in her drug coma for the entire movie. Sure, we get a ton of flashbacks, but ever time you start thinking just how hot Mia Kirshner is, director Williams cuts back to a shot of her in a hospital bed tubes in her nose, all ugly-like. The film seems to be suggesting a causal logic that if you violate your true nature to try to be popular, you're gonna end up with tubes in your nose, all ugly-like. That's a pretty free-flowing morality for a film that takes as much pleasure as possible out of the nubile flesh of its hot young leads.

New Best Friend is yet another variation on the Pygmallion/All About Eve formula. Quiet unassuming ostensibly unattractive girl gets remade to fit in with the popular crowd. And *gasp* wouldn't you know it? It turns out that the mousy girl cleans up all nice and once she starts wearing make-up, starts washing her hair, and starts wearing clothes that show off her breasts, the mousy girl becomes the belle of the ball and jealousy follows. And just as always happens in stories of this kind, you never for a second think that Mia Kirshner's Alicia is anything other than hot. And, perhaps the the film's credit, New Best Friend spends barely any time charting Alicia's transformation, not insulting our collective intelligences by implying that it took for that an application of lipstick to change her.

New Best Friend is set in North Carolina at fictional Colby University (chosen, perhaps, so that costumers could save money and just have students wear sweatshirts from Colby College, in Maine). Colby is a haven of rich elitists. Alicia, we find out, is actually quite poor. But she's smart. Very smart. Sure, she doesn't have very good hygiene and knows little of modern beauty products, but she does have good enough grades to have gotten into Colby Law School. Or some other law school. The film doesn't really have any sense of geography. Alicia sits in front of Hadley, Sydney, and Julianne in sociology class and when the professor requires the students to work on a class project in pairs, Alicia and Hadley get "stuck" together. But almost immediately they become close friends. The three girls live in a massive on-campus mansion (that they don't appear to share with anybody else) and they're throwing a party when Alicia shows up, all wanting to do homework. They put the aforementioned lipstick on her and suddenly guys start noticing her, she starts becoming more confident and the other hotties start becoming threatened. Sure, Alicia's doing also sorts of wicked fun things with them, like tripping on acid, snorting coke, and dancing drunk, but she's also doing totally uncool things, like sleeping with their boyfriends and potentially using them in countless other ways. Why was the transition so easy for Alicia? Because, silly, she wasn't the girl we thought she was in the opening credits. OK. Sure. Why not. And apparently her free-spirited ways led to her coke OD. Or else, she was set up to OD by... the most likely suspect imaginable (See, I'm not giving anything away, but when you get down to it, it becomes clear early on that only one person has any kind of motivation to get Alicia out of the picture. We're offered other suspects, but they aren't really plausible).

As you may already have guessed, I watched New Best Friend largely because I'm a completist and as long as there are straight-to-video features with Dominique Swain still learning out there, I won't be able to sleep right. The number of unseen (and also unreviewed) Swain films are dwindling. And I must say that with each film of hers that I see, I respect the erstwhile Lolita's acting talent less and yet I love her more. Go figure.

If you've been keeping up with Swain's career (or even with my reviews of her most recent features), you'll know that basically they're the same movie over and over again. I started off my Swain odyssey feeling really sorry for her because of how hard she was working to avoid typical teen movies, but is it possible that once you choose not to star as a love interest for Freddy Prinze Jr., there's only one other script floating around Hollywood for young women and that that script essentially gets remade over and over and over? In my review of Swain's career nadir of The Smokers, I made reference to several tropes that keep recurring in Swain's movies and it should be no surprise that they return again here. Instead of a ritzy boarding school where people have to deal with class issues, we're at a ritzy college where people are dealing with class issues. So Ms. Swain has grown up a little. Additionally, while she's been losing her virginity in film after film, here she plays the school slut. So I guess, again, that Ms. Swain has grown up a little. Once again, she gets to make out with a girl, which is nice. And once again, she gets to dabble in booze and drugs. Swain had done voice-overs in four previous films, but here, the voice-over is done by Taye Diggs. But that seems fair, since in New Best Friend Swain is, at best, the third lead. However — and this is a massive however if you're a big fan of Dominique Swain's — New Best Friend does feature Swain's first real nude scene, as part of a raunchy, but too-brief tryst with Mia Kirshner. It's not a long scene, but it's certainly gratuitous as is the flash of Swain's breasts in a later scene where the exposure it totally unmotivated by the narrative. But it's during the lesbian love scene that you realize just how much better New Best Friend would have been had it had more of this, had it taken its apparent interest in exploitation cinema several steps further to be more like John McNaughton's Wild Things or Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions (a film whose major sin was that it went far, but not far enough). If you're going to go overboard, don't go slightly overboard, go crazy. That's my motto.

Instead, all too frequently, Zoe Clark-Williams seems content to stop just short of the level of smut that she clearly aspired to (listen to the director's commentary on the DVD to hear Williams's giggling lamentations about all of the hot bits that got cut). Williams doesn't care about exploring any of the major female characters as anything other than substance abusing sex pots. But if you're just going to punt on character, motivation, and compelling plot, you've gotta throw the audience a bone (so to speak) and give them what they want, which, in the case of this viewer, is less copping out and more raunch. Or else a better movie. This viewer isn't picky, but he wants *something* for his hard-earned money and he'll either take quality or trash, but you can't deny him both.

Williams's abandonment of quality is pretty much consistant. This is a character study without any real characters. This is especially true on the masculine side of the equation. There are at least three main male college students amongst the cast and none of the three have even the slightest bit of character. Scott Bairstow's Trevor is the closest to a young male lead. We know he plays lacrosse and that's going about to go to law school in Minnesota. We know that Alicia has a crush on him, but we don't know anything about his feelings for her, friendly or otherwise. He's not a character, but he's got more to do than Eric Michale Cole's Warren, who apparently edits video for the girls' sociology project and also is Julianne's boyfriend. He's not a character either, but he's still got more to do than Oliver Hudson's Josh, who doesn't have even a stitch of dimension. He doesn't have a single character trait or trace of personality and yet he's in the background of many scenes and he's sometimes even more prominent than that. Why? I don't know. He doesn't factor in the actual plot of the film at all.

Even though Taye Diggs's sheriff is a major part of the plot, even Diggs doesn't have the chance to actually act. He does a Southern accent that's laughable and frequently absent. And then he wanders around. Diggs is an actor who has been cast largely because of an impressive physical presence and great abs. So did he think that it was a good idea to prove that he could actually subvert that physical presence to play a character who doesn't stand out in any way at all? The part requires no action, no intimidation, and no acting. Although he's playing a sortta investigator, he also gets to show no intelligence. None of the facts he uncovers leads to anything else. He basically solves the "mystery" when it's time for the movie to end, because otherwise, there won't be any closure.

The absence of mystery or thrillers is another point at which Zoe Clarke-Williams decided that quality just didn't matter. Wild Things, in addition to the exploitation, had the good sense to create a mood, through the Florida settings, and to provide several twists as the film goes along. Nothing in New Best Friend is suspenseful and there aren't really any twists. And no tension can possibly evolve because the film spends its final thirty minutes doing a clip show.

You know how at certain trendy coffee houses, your paper cup will declare that it's made from 100% Recycled Material? Well, so's the last thirty minutes of New Best Friend. In the first hour Diggs interviews the three girls and we get a number of flashbacks to show that, in case you don't remember, Alicia wasn't the Virgin Mary or anything. Then, the film's last act is made up almost entirely of reairing the footage from that first hour, only with Digg's voice-over explaining to us how everything fit together. There are one or two things pieces of information that we didn't get in the first two hours, but that's mostly Diggs filling in blanks for us that we either could have figured out ourselves, or that we didn't care about anyway. The mystery is made even less mysterious by the use of certain "hero props," or convenient pieces of evidence that pretty much explain everything. Alicia, for example, had a date book in which she made sure to articulate all of the film's themes, plot points, and character relationships and Williams happily shows us pages from this datebook as if she's found a way to visually convey information, rather than just providing the viewer with yet another intellectual crutch. But I guess the datebook actually helps because otherwise there's no way of knowing how much time has passed. The absence of linear character growth and developing mystery as well as shoddy editing make it unclear how the plot of the movie took place in what was, apparently, only three months.

In the place of interesting plot, Williams relies on camera tricks to spice things up. The jiggling frames of the acid trip sequence is neat for all of three seconds and the film's random shifts to handheld camera aren't suggested by anything in the plot, merely, I'd guess, by a director trying to prevent things from getting boring. Thanks to Tom Priestly's photography, at least New Best Friend generally looks nice.

Not that you need a great cameraman to produce attractive images of the film's four main actresses. Much of the pleasure of the movie comes from watching these young ladies and hoping they can find better material. Of the four leads, Rachel True is the least interesting mostly since her character's interactions with Alicia are entirely secondary. To the best of my memory, they have no scenes together, so True is left out of the loop [I just remembered one scene, but I don't really remember what it had to do with anything... sorry]. That's bad writing and directing and shouldn't be blamed on the actress. For whatever reason, the character was written into the script and then forgotten at crucial points. Oh well.

When she was on Dawson's Creek Meredith Monroe was the best part of the show, the only actor there seemingly capable of unguarded, unaffected emotion. New Best Friend continues the suggestion that in the right kinds of roles, Monroe may actually be a good actress. Her character, Hadley, isn't inherently interesting. She's just a poor little rich girl who yearns for the affection of her father. She's just 90210's Kelly Taylor, transplanted to North Carolina. But with an icey glare, and a profile suggesting Gwyneth Paltrow, Monroe gives a mature performance providing layers not even suggested by the script. Of course, Williams encourages her by giving Hadley at least three scenes were the camera tracks across a big room to find Hadley looking full of guilt, or regret, or sadness. None of those scenes fit with the movie-proper, but they give Monroe good moments to put on her clip reel in hopes that she may get to show her stuff in better movies in the future.

For Dominique Swain, this is a step forward, since she gets to play a character who has made it past all of those awkward moments that have been the bedrock of past Swain performances. Here, she gets to play poised, sexual, and aware, the first time she's had that much assertiveness since Lolita, a film which, not coincidentally was her best work. I'm not sure if the random nudity here will improve her career prospects, but as long as she keeps making movies, I'll keep waiting for them to come straight to video.

And finally there's Mia Kirshner. I only want better for Mia Kirshner. For her, I want a version of New Best Friend in which her character has a true arc, in which the actress could actually show how Alicia went from bookworm to cokehead and have us believe the transformation. For Mia Kirshner, I want a version of this movie where she doesn't go from nebbishy one scene to dancing drunk and sexy with Meredith Monroe in the next. Oh well. Mia Kirshner is a good actress. She does what she can here. But she's betrayed, really, by everybody. Neither the writer, director, nor editor could find a way to have her character make sense. So one again, who can blame the actress?

New Best Friend is simplicity itself. Four hot women. One story without any mystery. Lots of drugs and booze. A little steamy sex. No interest in exploring anything beyond the surface. There's a hint at some point that New Best Friend is actually about how fathers and daughters interact and how most daughters base their personalities on the abuses at their father's hands. Fathers molest their daughters. Fathers stand their daughters up on their birthdays. Fathers tell their daughters that they're fat. And as a result young women are insecure, sexually troubled, and slightly insane. If this was something that the move wanted to get into, I wish it had actually taken the time to give it some discussion, instead of just touching on this dark idea and moving on. But basically, New Best Friend is a bad movie, with good actresses, that is never smart enough, funny enough, or risqué enough to be worth the effort.

[The DVD of New Best Friend contains the option to watch the film in fullscreen or widescreen. It also features a commentary by director Zoe Clarke-Williams. Williams's commentary is fitting because she seems to have no idea what she wanted to do with this movie and seems to have no awareness of any of the film's failings. She says something about enjoying the chance to do a genre piece and then something about making a movie showing the way college students really are, but it should be clear to anybody who's just watched the movie that she fails on both of these counts. Mostly, Williams talks about the haunted sets and giggles like a schoolgirl about a scene in a men's locker room full of naked lacrosse players. Not very enlightening.]

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD