Movie Maven

I have a friend who, if it's even possible, is a bigger TV and film addict than I am. So one rainy day last weekend, I meandered over to said friend's house for a day of being completely useless and sedentary. As we flipped through the cable, which is normally rather trashy of a Saturday afternoon, we landed on the ABC Family channel and Love Don't Cost a Thing, starring Nick Cannon and Christina Milian.

Can you think of a bigger waste of time? We were overjoyed and made merciless fun of the dialogue, filming (which had a weird shaky-cam effect that is really more appropriate for an intense documentary than a beach dance scene) and Steve Harvey, the poor bastard, who played Cannon's father. Basically the plot is Cannon is a geek who pays Milian $1,500 to be his friend for a few weeks so he'll become cool. There are coordinated dance numbers, which makes it worth a viewing for me, and we watched happily until this line:

Cannon: "I'm with her now."
Milian: "Her? (Snorts derisively) She's given more rides than Greyhound."
Cannon: "Yeah, but at least I didn't have to pay $1500 for a ticket."

At this point my addict friend sits up and screams "Oh my God! I know this movie! Have you ever seen Can't Buy Me Love?" I admitted shamefully that I had never even heard of it. We popped it in immediately (well, right after a hysterical viewing of Real World/Road Rules Challenge,) and I hadn't realized how incomplete my life had been before this movie. Patrick Dempsey as skinny lawn boy with floppy hair pays cheerleader Amanda Peterson to be his girlfriend for two weeks to make him popular. Cheerleader plays it tough, but she's got a sensitive side too, and in the midst falls in love with nerdy Dempsey. But Dempsey's had a taste of popularity, and (oh shame!) loses both his friends and the girl. But all will be well, for the floppy-headed Dempsey learns his lesson, gets his old friends, frightens the school bully and gets the girl.

In effect, it is the same movie.

There are montage sequences and 80's power chords and (huzzah!) coordinated dance numbers. But the whole reason for the movie's existence is Dempsey's truly fabulous performance as Ronald Miller, 80's lawn-boy geek extraordinaire. He becomes popular purely by accident, and never really stops being a geek. Cannon, by contrast, is simply a playa-in-waiting, one who exhibits two extremes of personality, and simply chooses the good one.

But let's not get technical. After all, we are talking about a movie with Nick Cannon and Christina Milian.

All the best lines in Love Don't Cost a Thing are simply stolen from Can't Buy Me Love. Besides the Greyhound lines (which are indeed identical Amanda Peterson's dialogue) there's an entire poem recited word-for-word from the original script and a couple of other exchanges that are hauntingly familiar.

It's kind of like they took the script, and added in a "dawg," "playa," or "shorty" every time there was a gap in the dialogue. Classy.

We are in an age of perpetual remakes, adaptations and general lazy screenwriting. From the painstaking rip-offs of Japanese horror to the remake of Superman, due out soon, it's hard to find a movie that hasn't been recycled from something else. Some are good and some are bad, but this example takes the cake. So here's your homework assignment: watch Can't Buy Me Love and then Love Don't Cost a Thing, and view the degeneration of filmmaking at work. Or, if you disagree, let me know.

Patrick Dempsey says don't be frontin'. Someone should have told Nick Cannon.