It's a Boy/Girl Thing
By Helen Cuthbertson, Blockbuster.co.uk
"What do you do about that...thing you have every morning?"
It's an age old story: boy meets girl, boy hates girl, boy and girl end up in each other's bodies wondering what the hell happened and begin to destroy one another from the inside out, before reaching an understanding and eventually finding love.
Ok, so perhaps the middle part isn't quite that common, but it's essentially
Pride and Prejudice meets
Freaky Friday.
The story concerns graduating high-school students Nell (
Samaire Armstrong,
Just My Luck) and Woody (
Kevin Zegers,
Transamerica), who are next door neighbours but couldn't be more different. She's an intellectual, prissy (but unrealistically pretty) "pencil-neck virgin" geek with high hopes for a future at Yale, while he is the school's tanned sports hero, not in the slightest bit academic and relying on a football scholarship to get into a half-way decent university. After being forced to pair up during a field trip to a museum, their argument appears to be overheard by the Mayan statue they are studying and the next day they wake up in each other's bodies.
At that point, they hate one another so intensely that they begin to systematically ruin the other's image, reputation and relationships in a hilarious attempt to sabotage their lives. However, they can only go a certain distance in one another's shoes before empathy sets in, they see what life is like "on the other side," discovering things about the other person that they didn't expect. Cue the moral of the story: their identities might be different, but neither is any less valid than the other.
Directed by
Nick Hurran (
Little Black Book) and written by Geoff Deane (
Kinky Boots ) the film was also financially supported by Elton John and David Furnish.
It epitomises the American high school romantic comedy genre (
Clueless,
Never Been Kissed) with the division between nerds and jocks, the homecoming prom and the cutting bitchiness that can be explored so well in the high-school environment (with
Mean Girls of course being the superior model). It also carries off the central morality theme without being too cheesy about it (although a certain amount of cheese is par for the course with any rom-com).
There are plenty of funny moments in this film and, even if you don't normally rate romantic comedies you will probably still laugh out loud at the main characters' various anatomical discoveries. If you're a fan of high-school comedies or romantic comedies in general this is definitely one to watch and it is exclusive to BLOCKBUSTER®.