Director: Deborah Kaplan, Harry Elfont
Cast: Ethan Embry, Charlie Korsmo, Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Love Hewitt
Have I Seen It Before: Never. I was 14 when it came out, so the idea of graduating from High School seemed like a completely different planet. Which is weird, considering that 1998 was one of those summers (there have been a lot of them since) where I insisted on seeing everything I could get my eyes on. I looked up the box office figures from its opening weekend in search of a point I make later in the review, and realize without much doubt I opted to see Dirty Work that weekend, and remember enjoying it immensely.
Maybe I have seen it, and completely forgotten it.
Did I Like It: Which would explain a lot. Look at the film stacked against the great teen comedies, and it is left wanting. It reads like a shopping list of things one might want to include in a teen comedy. Throw in a soundtrack album someone might want to listen to, and you can make back your money as counter-programming to other summer fare (see above). That’s all that needs to happen, and that’s all the studio and the filmmakers are either capable of or interested in.
I’m left with questions after watching this film. No, not questions like one might have after finally seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on the big screen. There are more fundamental question that betray a film not terribly thought through.
If Denise (Ambrose)—the character I most identified with—never bothered to get her senior pictures taken, why is she showing up to the party? I once got into a verbal argument with a parent moments before my own graduation, when she wanted to stamp my hand for the official graduation party, and I insisted that I was not going, and that she really should not be grabbing my wrist*. I didn’t get my senior picture taken, and I wouldn’t have been caught dead at any party graduation night. One wonders why I didn’t watch the movie for nearly thirty years.
This one is more of a personal note. When X-File #1 (Joel Michaely) and X-File #2 (Jay Paulson) are eventually taken up in a flying saucer**, they should have offered a coda—as they did with other characters—saying that they are still missing, and that anyone with information as to their whereabouts should call the FBI. That at least would have been the right follow-through for that gag. Then again, had I graduated in 1998, I would have skipped the party and gone to see The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998) instead.
Here’s the best question: For what precisely are these unable to hardly wait? You let me know, and maybe I’ll get turned around on the film.
*I really enjoy that story. If you’re out there, random helicopter mom: Thank you for one of those sterling examples of my own personality.
**Yes, that is how the characters are credited in the end-credits. Yes, it is the fate of the characters.