Get Over It

Get Over It

With its commercially savvy mixture of Dawson's Creek-style drama, Farrelly Brothers-derived gross-out comedy, and montage-heavy teen romance, 1999's She's All That helped create the template for scores of witless teen-sex comedies. But while Get Over It, the second film from She's All That scribe R. Lee Fleming Jr., may sound like little more than a limp rewrite of his previous smash, there are crucial differences. In She's All That, for example, the hero loses his girlfriend to an obnoxious cast member of MTV's The Real World, while in Get Over It, the hero loses his girlfriend to an obnoxious member of a boy band in heavy rotation on MTV. That alone speaks volumes about the level of creativity behind Get Over It, a terrible teen comedy only partially redeemed by the direction of Tommy O'Haver (Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss), whose comic-strip-informed sensibility and penchant for comic exaggeration favorably recall the work of Frank Tashlin. Fleming's screenplay, however, less favorably recalls the regrettable likes of recent teen-themed atrocities Whatever It Takes and Down To You in chronicling the love life of Ben Foster, a gloomy high-schooler who can't get over losing his sweetheart to a teen idol. Desperate to get closer to his former love, Foster snags a role in the school play, but ends up falling for castmate Kirsten Dunst, the perky, songwriting sister of his best friend. Get Over It boasts a terrific opening-credits sequence, in which the recently dumped Foster marches homeward followed by pop star Vitamin C (singing "Love Will Keep Us Together"), her band, a marching band, and a host of singing and dancing lovers who gleefully mock his pain. But the film speeds steadily downhill from there, hampered by a lack of chemistry between its leads and a protagonist who's sullen, bitter, and entirely undeserving of Dunst's attention. Dunst emerges unscathed, which is more than can be said of Foster, who seems lost trying to make a character who derides his rival as "Backstreet Bitch" seem likable. Get Over It is probably the best movie that could have been made from Fleming's script, but everyone involved would have been better off had O'Haver simply thrown it out and started from scratch.

 
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