One not-so-magic Christmas, I gave a girl on whom I had a crush a box of Frosted Flakes. I had attached a lovey-dovey card that looked more suited to a wedding present and spent hours prettifying Tony the Tiger with tissue paper and ribbons. The girl's best friend was at the unveiling, and later she said something I'd never heard before but have many times since: "Well-wrapped garbage is still garbage." I'm about to repeat that to Get Over It director Tommy O'Haver, who added Broadway stylings to a bland teen movie script that he then shot in widescreen. This isn't failed filmmaking, it's transparent sleight-of-hand.
Get Over It stars newcomer Ben Foster, an actor with an original, vulnerable face but a surprisingly opaque humanity; I didn't find him endearing for a second. The film opens with Foster's Berke being dumped by long-time girlfriend Allison (Melissa Sagemiller), at which point Vitamin C and various village sweethearts materialize to serenade him with Captain and Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together," advancing from behind like Buñuellian love troops. The trouble is, when you get right down to it, this is just an opening credits sequence--it doesn't do anything except happen, and it ends as hoarily as it possibly can, with Berke screaming at the camera in nightmare apoplexy.
This is the pattern of Get Over It (initially called Getting Over Allison): familiar set-up, surreal interlude, anticlimax. Berke tries out for the school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to win back Allison, its Hermia, and so does her new boyfriend (Shane West), a faux-Brit member of a boy band who effortlessly scores the part of her suitor. Because Berke is no Olivier, how to get him the male lead opposite so that he may compete for Allison's affections both onstage and off? While the solution is original, it's neither clever nor especially whimsical (it involves nunchaku). Meanwhile, his best friend's sister tutors Berke in the iambic pentameter; Kirsten Dunst plays her in a role so thankless it had to be a favour. Her falling for Berke has the odd dynamic of simultaneous predictability and unlikelihood: the demands of the routine plot clash with Foster's off-putting moroseness. We feel sorry for her that she has this crush.
Get Over It is an almost complete waste of time. There is a charming moment that I wish had been saved for a better movie, wherein Berke, ill-prepared for his singing audition, performs the Big Red commercial jingle (of course, the filmmakers undermine its beautiful spontaneity by ensuring that someone in Berke's sightline is wearing a Big Red T-shirt), and Coolio, if you can believe it, gets a priceless reaction shot. I even have to hand it to O'Haver that when the play-within-the-film goes inevitably haywire, with its cast scrambling to make their improvisations sound organic, it recalls every pitiful excuse for theatre I sat through in high school. Yet for most of its 86 minutes, the first and final five of which are glorified MTV videos, Get Over It is a snooze, and all of the attempts at formula subversion (faeries and an unhinged Martin Short also contribute) amount to crap on top of crap. I'm not so sure it's well-wrapped.
Miramax has released Get Over It on a DVD that aims to please. The 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer looks healthy despite some edginess; Dunst fans will be happy to know that the fleeting bikini shots, frequently isolated when the film was being marketed to theatres, were authored with care. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is an active thing (said faeries are given to swirling about the soundstage) with music and effects carefully placed. The LFE channel really kicks up the jams in the closing number between Sisqó (in his acting debut) and Vitamin C.
The disc's extras are ample. The section of eight deleted/extended scenes features much stronger optional commentary from O'Haver and screenwriter R. Lee Fleming, Jr. than does their self-deluded screen-specific track, as they explore the dilemma of having to bring in a PG-13 with the studio shouting "racier!" in one ear and the MPAA "tone it down!" in the other. (I am disheartened that they were forced to overdub the word "masturbate," spoken by a purported sex therapist, no less, with "polish the rocket.")
Other supplements: Boy bands are parodied in the video for "Love Scud" by "The Swingtown Lads", but Josie and the Pussycats sent up the phenomenon with greater precision...Vitamin C's "The Itch" video is overproduced claptrap..."Behind the Scenes of Get Over It" has a candid vibe...Martin Short's make-up test is about two-minutes' worth of silent footage...Martin Short's outtakes is seven minutes of footage we only wish were silent...a different still for each serves as the visual backdrop during five original showtunes... Lastly, you'll find trailers--for Bounce, Boys and Girls, Down to You, She's All That (from a Fleming screenplay as well), 10 Things I Hate About You, and Get Over It's soundtrack--on the Sneak Peeks page.
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