MuteMae

Kat, the furiously flip take no prisoners heroine of "10 things I hate about you" might be described as a ball buster, although that would hardly do her justice. Brainy, beautiful and haughty as hell, with dancing feline eyes she narrows in contempt at any guy unlucky enough to make a play for her, Kat has a lot in common with the babelicious teases who saunter through high school movies, like leonine queens of the adolescent jungle. The difference is that Kat isn't going to win any popularity contests. She's a willowy high strung misfit who armors herself with gender war rhetoric, pretending she's better than everyone around her. She uses her bitchery and wit to put down guys for the unforgivable crime of being guys. This may be the cheekiest "literary" update yet - a post riot grrrl gloss on "The taming of the shrew" with Shakespeare's plot twirled around devices that have become cliches, virtually overnight in the new teen comedies - the guy who struggles to land a girl in order to win a bet - the ingenue - in this case Kat's younger sister - the button nosed Bianca - who's a virgin to everything but consumerism. The film casts an amusingly jaundiced eye on the unholy status games of contemporary teen culture. When the big keg blowout arrives, it's a quesy tequila soaked suburban sprawl, with make out session glimpses in all their squirmy desperation and a nerd bragging to two girls about his play to buy... a Toyota Tercel. At the center of this nasty spitfire is, Kat. The young actress Julia Stiles in her first major roles, casually plays against her luminescent Pre-Raphaelite glow. At times her hot blooded earthiness recalls Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth" and she makes Kat cruelly ambivalent about the effect of her sexuality on others. Along the way Kat is wooed and then "tamed" by a suitor of surprising Charm - Patrick a gentle Aussie heart-throb who's like Val Kilmer before he went falky - he knows just how to kill Kat with kindess. The film's snappish crank case doesn't break any molds, but it certainly gives you a lift.

We're supposed to be leaping into our neighbors' laps in fear - but once glance at the big ugly fisherman's hate and slicker and I'm guessing Ronald McDonald would have been a lot scarier. Even the killer's name is bland - Ben Willis - and more often than not he has a peculiar way of terrorizing his victims. Take for instance that lissome tulip Julie James. After helping her college chum Karla win a radio contest, the two arrive along with a couple of boys for a weekend getaway at a deserted Bahamas resort. In the middle of a monsoon, Julie decided to use the tannin bed, and as she's lying there with her headphone on, Ben Willis sneaks in turns the dial up to extra crispy, and binds the door with what looks like a cheap little newspaper bundler. Julie's friends burst into the room, there's a lot of screaming and commotion, but really! - a pair of scissors would have done the trick. Even when Ben Willis plants his hook into flesh it's all staged rather politely - a hand spiked here, a dribble of blood, with none of the outrageously gross, limb splitting carnage that all but defined the slasher genre in the '80s heyday. The gruesome pay off shocks are by now, as generic as who will be the next to die schematic. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Brandy are actresses the way that Annette Funicello and Olivia Netwon John were, but the fact that both of these doe-eyed teen idols happen to be mini-industries means that there's not much doubt about whether they'll truimph over the killer. Hewitt especially, looks as if she could fend him off with a quick flex of her abs. It's not just her body that's sculpted and toned - her entire personality seems aerobicized. She has no visible dirty thoughts, and that makes her the perfect star for a thriller so antiseptic you could eat off one of the corpses.

Ten years out of high school in Arizona, and Romy and Michele the best friend heroines are living in Southern California. They've got a cute apartment on the beach, baubley clothes and a great capacity for unironic enjoyment: Watching "Pretty woman" on video for the millionth time, they can still be moved by the sadness. They have no jobs (well, Michele is unemployed) and no boyfriends, but that doesn't keep them from hitting the dance clubs together. The two have got irrational optimism and a blissful trust in one another's friendship. Then they hear about their 10th high school reunion - and proceed to get all bent out of shape trying to make themselves appear more succesful than they are. How they go about it - how they get psyched, humiliate themselves, fight to reconcile, prevail, woo the boys, and triumph while never making any sense on planet Earth - is the rest of this comedy fairy tale, directed with an indulgent hand by TV producer-writer-director David Mirkin (Newhart, The simpsons - a lot of good stuff.) Had 'Romy and Michele' been written by Wendy Wasserstein - at this point our bard of the contemporary American female condition - it would have been called "Uncommon High school woman and others" and it would have been a much better and tighter story. As it is, this sloppy, pleasant comedy is an amiable mess, a padded out expasnion of a play called 'Ladie's room' mounted nearly a decade ago, starring a then unknown Lisa Kudrow in a showcase role that eventually brought her to 'Mad about you' and 'Friends' doing much the same ditz-as-Zen-mistress character. There are so many good ideas packed into 'Romy and Michele' about friendship, revenge, about the kind of high school torture that never sees the light of day in "Grosse Pointe Blank" - that it may be uncharitable to yammer. There's a killer interpretive dance the two friends do with Alan Cumming. The music is dishy. So, like, I guess who cares if there's a long draggy fantasy portion in the middle? Who's carping that these girls couldn't possibly be so dumb and so savvy at the same time? They're, like, sort of like real girls from high school. And they just want to have fun.