Word: tritely
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...directing may be poor and sloppy, but the five thousand costumes built from scratch look really, really nice. The acting may be flat and wooden, but the studio employed enough elephants and horses for a single shot of the mile long royal procession. The plot may be incoherent, trite and full of holes, but a horde of carpenters and artists were hired to build an ornate five acre replicate of a Siamese palace in Malaysia (the reason not filming in Thailand, of course, is that the Thai government resents the butchering of the story and refuses to endorse the project...
...upwards of two hours in the theater. To see Chow Yun Fat finally in a North American dramatic role is tempting, but, like special effects, fantastic costumes and elaborate art direction are not sufficient criteria to spend upwards of five dollars on a film. Anna looks to be tepid, trite and filled with it's own self importance...
...Beastie Boys and Bjork, among others. Jonze's performance is one of the highlights of the film. He portrays Vig with a sort of unstudied exuberance, post-adolescent can-do hyperactivity, and is earnestly naive without a trace of self-parody. He delivers lines that may be almost trite in their ignorance--for example, when he asks an Iraqi rebel leader, "So, you guys think all Americans are Satan, right?" without betraying anything more improprietary than curiousity. His acting carries some of the less compelling scenes out of their self-conscious didacticism, for example, the inevitable "learning about each other...
Sure it's trite, sure Melissa Joan Hart might still clearly remember both the rise and fall of break-dancing, sure high-school dances do not have fifty foot television screens in the center of the dance floor. Although Drive Me Crazy does not have the light-hearted self-mocking tone of Clueless or the moody, pretentious tone of Cruel Intentions, the general theme of the movie is wonderfully formulaic. Indeed this clichd approach to high school works; the triteness of the plot renders this movie awfully comforting; everything always come out okay in the end: candied apples and lollipops...
...Elsewhere, Lucas uses the old movies with less trite but equally lame intent. Qui-Gon needs to appear wise; thus, Lucas puts him in the back of a sea-pod cockpit, murmuring confident wisdom ("There's always a bigger fish.") just as Kenobi once presided behind Han Solo's pilot seat. Jabba's dancing girls return as masseuse-extras in a Tatooine hanger, once again serving to sprinkle Lucas' archetypal myth with just enough sexiness to be annoying...