Dude!
I know.
Dude!
I know.

When I walked into a sneak preview of The Girl Next Door I was expecting a teen romp sex comedy. That's what the advertisements led me too. But this movie is clearly something different. It's hard for me to get a handle on exactly what it is though. That's the wierd thing, while I was watching it reminded me of John Hughes, standard teen sex comedies, high school movies where the uncool kid becomes the cool kid, well done romantic comedies, and Risky Business. Seriously, this movie draws inspiration from all of those places. Now that I've thought about it some I'd say the best way to describe it is a cross between John Hughes and Risky Business, with some ridiculous sex comedy thrown in for spice (note that the movie doesn't rely on gross out humor, it tends to be smarter then that.)

The odd thing is I'm still not really sure how good it was. Honestly, I was so impressed that the movie was doing all these different things and not falling flat on its face that my mind was caught up in that, instead of just watching it. Now, a truly excellent movie wouldn't have allowed me to be distracted like that, but I think we can all safely agree that this one isn't in that category anyway. There were times when I really was drawn in, the movie captured me the way excellent high school or romantic comedies can. That's where they ran into trouble with their genre mixing. Just when I was really getting drawn in, they'd change gears to a new genre. This had a jarring effect for me and pulled me out of the movie, so now instead of thinking about the characters and how much fun I'm having watching this, I'm thinking about how clever it is that they managed to mix all the genre's together and make it mostly work.

I kind of want to go back and see it again now that I know all this, see if I can watch it for the movie it is instead of thinking about all this other stuff. It was a sneak preview though, I can't go see it again until it opens wide in a few weeks. So I guess I have to do the best I can from the one showing.

Is it good? Yeah, it's good. I got drawn in, I was suprised, characters that you think won't have depth end up having depth (namely the title character), it was sweet, and I laughed a lot. You have to get over the genre switches and just go with them, and porn plays a pretty heavy role in the story so you have to be accepting about that. But the movie is ambitious, it trys new things, it doesn't delve to the lowest common denominator and it doesn't depend on shock value for it's humor. I have to reward and applaud movies that do that. Even when they're not great, I like that they didn't take the easy or (these days) popular way out. But it was good, and I think we need to reward movies like this, because that might inspire more like it.

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