Crossroads

Hello, I'm TheCinemaChick, joined by Kit Kat on this ride through terrible movies that people have made.

While there are many movies out there that I can’t stop watching over and over again… There are, unfortunately, a few that give me pause. Those movies that always seem to play on TV when nothing else is on so we are forced to watch it while rolling our eyes. Crossroads is one of those movies.

I have to agree with Kit Kat on this one.  Crossroads had good intentions, it just failed miserably.  The entire movie was begging to nominated for every Razzie out there.  If you don’t know, bad movies get awards too.  Razzies are like Oscars, only Razzies prove the movies sucks.  This movie did great in Japan, but bombed in the States.

So here we go.  TheCinemaChick and Kit Kat are going to review Crossroads.

This is a movie starring Britney Spears. Now, I’ll admit, when I was a kid I was a fan of Britney Spears. And I even liked the movie because I got to hear her sing. However, now I look back at that movie when it comes on TV and wonder…what  was I thinking?  Yeah, the songs are good and all. But the rest of the movie…well it sucked royally. This movie was a movie talking about the rise of Brittany Spears into fame. Really, that’s just as bad as the movie about Justin Bieber.

Another good point.

Like I said, good intentions, but that can only get you so far.  I saw this when I was in high school with a friend of mine.  It was something she wanted to see for her graduation, so I agreed to go.  Granted, it’s a good film to watch with your girlfriends, after several margaritas or perhaps out of sheer boredom.  There are just too many things that don’t make sense about it.  

We start off with three girls burying a time capsule, then flash forward to the present.  All the girls are in high school, it’s almost time for prom and graduation is on the horizon.  Here’s where I have the first problem.  The movie never explains why the trio drifted apart.  They just did.  So now, instead of a trio, we have the popular princess, little miss perfect and the statistic, I mean, the pregnant outcast.

And everyone would be thinking, hmm, this is about the rise of Britney Spears. So…our popular princess Britney would be the one working towards being the singer, right? Wrong! The pregnant outcast is the one that comes up with this little gem of an idea after they all meet back up to dig up their little time capsule. Apparently, there is some unnamed casting call out west for singers and she was going to pack up and head out west.

Yet, somehow, these girls that fell apart by some unknown stimulus are suddenly coming together easily to all make this trip together to be backup singers for their pregnant friend. I’m not sure how the pregnant one thought that anyone would sign with a person like her or that just maybe along the way that she was going to end up having the child. What a nice image for all those little girls out there. Get pregnant in high school. It’s all right. You can always pack up yourself and just head out without any resources to become a singer.

I’ll give that one to Kit Kat.  While Hollywod productions are meant to be a means of escape, this one just raises questions.  Where did all their money come from?  Why do they trust some random guy to travel with them?  What bar allowed underage girls to go in and sing?  How come nothing exciting happens for 93 minutes?

Here’s a good one.  The tagline for this film is “Dreams change.  Friends are forever.”  What does this imply?  You can give up one dream and pursue another.  I’m sorry, my parents always told me I could do anything, no matter how unrealistic the goal was.  Plus, when I graduated high school, my parents wouldn’t have let me up and run away for an audition on the other side of the country!  Also, clearly friends are not forever!  They didn’t speak for an unspecified amount of time.  So…what?  Make sense of this for me please!  This is all hypocritical gibberish.

If friends are forever then why did they stop being friends in the first place? Still bothers me. In any case, while they are traveling out west, we see that, once again, Britney has no real desire whatsoever about singing. Despite her performance at the bar that shows her otherwise. Obviously, she chose not to pay attention or she is really playing up the stupid popular princess theme to the extreme. In any case, she decides to break off from the group to go see her mother who “amazingly” now lives in a home in the direction they are heading to the contest. What with all the other roads that lead them west they somehow manage to pick the one that leads them near the city where Britney’s mother now lives…with her new husband and kids. Sorry kiddies, mommy doesn’t love you anymore now that she has another family.

Do they ever explain why her mother has left?

Not really.  It just isn’t making sense.  This movie must have been the bastard child of Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” and Britney Spears.  How else could it have so many plot holes?  So, the bar scene.  Mimi, the pregnant outcast, Lucy, little miss perfect, and Kit, the popular princess are in this bar so Mimi can do open mic night or something.  Mimi freaks out and Lucy takes over, which earns them a nice chunk of change.  No one tips that well at a bar.

Maybe this is just me, but how come the pregnant chick never looks pregnant?  You get occasional glimpses of a belly, but for the most part, nothing.  I’ll come back to that later.

Good point, why did they insist on having a pregnant character if they hide it nearly the entire movie? Anyway, they manage to make enough money to fix the car that had broken down. Once again, they have no funds. We even see scenes of them sleeping in the car or out in the open. What nice role models. Yet, somehow, they net enough to fix the car and rent hotel rooms for the rest of the trip to the coast. Of course, along the way we have that nice realization by Lucy that her mother doesn’t love her so she keeps going with the others after having her own break down. Of course, the strange male is the one to comfort her…which leads to the cliché fade to black scenes that we as children didn’t recognize as one of the first sex scenes we’d ever see. But honestly, now Lucy is having sex with a guy she barely knows?

But Kit Kat, it’s ok that Lucy is sleeping with this guy. They end up together in the end, so that makes it all morally perfect.  (thank you Hollywood for this lesson) And the relationship takes a back seat when Mimi finds the apartment of the guy who got her pregnant.  Sadly, you are reading this correct.  Mimi got pregnant buy a guy who lives on the other side of the country.  Well, she gets there and he tells her that she was a mistake.  She gets upset, runs off and falls down the stairs.  Here’s where we get another problem.  They don’t say how far along she is, but from the looks of it, I’d say Mimi is seven months or more.  She has to go to the hospital because of complications, but apparently gets out the next day.  Ok, I know for a fact that if you have something like that happen, doctors will immediately try and save the baby.  The film doesn’t explain what happened.  I could have believed she miscarried if she’d only been about two months along.  All that’s said is that she lost the baby.

Let me backtrack for a moment.  When the time capsule is dug up when they are teens, Mimi’s wish came in the form of a keychain which looks like a globe.  When she falls down the stairs, there is a close up of this keychain in her hand.  

*symbolism alert*

This is one thing I actually liked.  That baby was her world and she’s lost it, so in this case, yes dreams change.  However, she did not just give up, there were circumstances outside of her control that lead to it.  It’s sad because you want her to have this baby, in spite of the jerk, one night stand father.  Had Mimi kept the baby and raised it, showing that she was successful, that would have made this film a little more worthwhile.  Sadly, we all know this is not the case.

Okay okay, I’ll allow the pass on the sex because they end up together. But there is one lovely twist you missed out on cinemachick about the guy that got Mimi pregnant. The whole reason they were there in the first place is because this is actually the boyfriend or something of Kit. She wanted to surprise him by showing up unannounced to see him. We all know that this NEVER leads to good things. It’s that point where Kit discovers why Mimi didn’t want to wait around because it is the guy that got her pregnant. All of this knowledge passes in the moment when Kit sees the bottle of blue “liquid”, which is never specified throughout the movie that was the hallmark all the girls knew to be of the jerk that got her pregnant in the first place.  I will agree also that it’s very sad for Mimi to lose her child. It would have added something special to this otherwise horrible movie as a decent lesson to learn.

In any case, I believe we have a random appearance of Lucy’s father who managed to travel all this way to get Lucy and take her home after the loss of the baby. But wait…where’s the contest? Mimi knows she can’t sing. Kit is just the backup singer. Lucy is the one that needs to go. Of course, she changes her mind and somehow her dad who had been all for taking her home is easily persuaded to let her stay and audition.

And the moral of this story?

There is no moral.  It makes no sense and was just terrible.  I’d rather sit through Burlesque again or even Hereafter or…something awful on the SyFy channel, like Titanic II.

All right Kit Kat, time to take our bows and say happy movie watching.  I think these people get the point.

Crossroads, starring Britney Spears…avoid at all possible costs.

I’m Kit Kat. No movie is to good or, in this case, too bad for a review. And this certainly won’t be my last

And I’m TheCinemaChick, bidding you happy movie watching and hoping you never have to watch this cinematic abomination.