Where's the Porsche?

Rating: Null/10 (9 May 2004)

Imagine the following scene, if you will.
It's the early eighties and Paul Brickman drops his file. It's a windy day in Hollywood and out of his file spills out his latest script and because of the inclement weather, many of the pages blow away, never to be seen again, at least by him.
Come forward twenty years or so...
Wagner & Goldberg find the lost pieces of Brickman's script and decide to write a movie of their own, using the script they found as the plot. Obviously, they are missing bits, so they fill in said missing bits themselves. ...and this movie is what we're presented with as original.
The above scenario is so plausible because 'The Girl Next Door' borrows many ideas from Brickman's script for 'Risky Business'. Take the high achieving student with the head for business. Take the ne'er-do-well Rebecca De Mornay and transform her into Elisha Cuthbert, from high class hooker to teenage pornstar.
Take the cliched happenstance of risking everything for a recently learned philosophy and the love of a dangerous but good-hearted and misunderstood woman. Our lead in each case goes through a gamut of emotions from initial fear to cool bravado. They both get the girl and the prize by the end, though which one is more important is made abundantly clear to us, as if teaching us the same lesson, as if we needed it repeating.
I see this in a very different light, viewing it now at thirty -five, than when I first saw Risky Business at fourteen. The film is no less for my slightly altered perspective and I'm sure those people viewing it now in their teenage years will call this 'inspired' rather than 'reproduction'.
The lessons are the same, though the approach is slightly different. While Risky Business was a classic of the genre, I assume that when I'm fifty-five, people the age I am now will view this in the same light.
I enjoyed the film and laughed out loud on a couple of occasions. I think this will do more for Cuthbert than any of the main protagonists, more than RB did for De Mornay, certainly. Whether that is deserved or not appears to be unimportant.
Where De Mornay smouldered, but lacked in audience participation, as far as her characters' feelings were concerned, Cuthbert's own character demands more attention, although her ability to exude sexuality is surpassed by De Mornay's x-rated business acumen.
A very good teenage movie. I hate to categorise it as that, but it is difficult to call it anything else. Much better than I was expecting.