I caught this on a movie channel after years of wondering what the hell happened to it. I was dismayed by the shelving and re-titling of this movie. I definitely would have paid to see it. The person responsible for shelving and re-titling this needs a serious beating! This movie deserved a theatrical run and certainly would have earned back the studios' investment. I remember seeing it with my mom on DirectV and saying "What the hell? That is NOT what this movie is called and why the hell did it never show up in theaters?" It is a pretty solid teen-type comedy. Totally fell in love with Piper because of this movie and I am pleased to see she has a pretty solid career.

'No French people were hurt during the making of this film,' we are reassured in a title at the end. Don't be put off by the rather alarming name of the film, for it is a hilarious comedy, but it has a disturbing side because its satire cuts right to the T-bone. Yes, I said T-bone, because Texas is based not just on oil but also on beef, as we see in this film with its Beef Pageant and its signs in the school hallways praising the high school team known as the Longhorns. (The cheerleaders are known as the Hornettes.) Yes, this is another uproarious teen comedy in the tradition of CLUELESS (1995). But instead of Beverly Hills, this time Texas gets a roasting on the barbecue of satire, and the sauce drips with a certain amount of good-humoured venom. The lovely Piper Perabo (who could lead any man astray, and here does) plays a French exchange student named Genevieve who is welcomed to a suburb of Dallas in Texas by a rich and spoilt 'teen queen' named Starla, played at full throttle by a hilariously over the top Jane McGregor, who has great talents as a comedienne. The film was made entirely on location in Dallas, from which we may conclude that Starla's mind-boggling Texan mansion must really exist somewhere. By coincidence, Perabo was actually born in Dallas, but that information is only made available on a strictly need to know basis, and is not to be repeated to anyone outside of Texas, and is especially to be kept from the French, whose secret service is notorious for blowing up yachts and might react drastically to this imputation against la Gloire. The high comedic approach used in this film works very well indeed. Sublety is not attempted, nor would it be appropriate. (After all, when was a Texan ever subtle? Cowboys and cowgirls shoot straight from the lip, and their hats and boots let you know when they are coming.) Watching this film is like sitting and listening to Jerry Hall talk about her childhood, one just gets dreamy with the sound and tumbleweeds drift by in a kind of imaginative haze. The laughter is so much to the fore that this comedy is like the kind of undiluted whiskey which Americans call 'straight up'. Just keep throwing it down your throat and sooner or later the fun really gets to you, as you lose your orientation in normal reality. The film is directed by a woman, Melanie Mayron, so that all the catty scenes between the competing beauties, the way they put each other down while pretending to be intimate friends and supporters of one another, the vanity, the hypocrisy and the rival eye shadows are shown to acute perfection. No man could comprehend, much less portray, all of this. Nor do men know about what groups of girls really do in their underwear in their bedrooms in the way that Mayron does, having once been a girl herself. It is a pity that Mayron has spent most of her life as a television director and has not used her talents for more feature films, but at least she is now making a feature entitled MEAN GIRLS for release in 2011, and we can all look forward to that. All the best comedy films about young girls are directed by women, who understand them and their foibles. Men simply cannot direct these films. CLUELESS was directed by Amy Heckering, DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985) was the forerunner and was directed by Susan Seidelman, and only LEGALLY BLONDE (2001) was directed by a man, Robert Luketic, who did very well for a man but never fully penetrated the female psyche. (Indeed, has anyone ever fully penetrated the female psyche?) Perhaps the most interesting recent film about girls is CRACKS (2009), directed by Jordan Scott, who despite the name is female (see my review). Let's face it, girls are weird and nobody understands them, least of all they themselves, but attempts to explain and portray them are always of interest, if only as anthropological exercises and controlled experiments done in studios and on location. I would go so far as to say that there is nothing stranger than a girl unless perhaps a woman. We men are pure simpletons, transparently obvious, compared to gals. Figuring out the female psyche is like trying to become a chess grandmaster when you have only just learned to play: failure is inevitable. Films like this offer a great service to humanity, for while laughing ourselves to death, we derive some precious insights into the unfathomable mysteries of who and what girls might be, and which strange planets in other universes might produce them and send them forth to mystify, bewilder, and bedazzle those of us who are so stupid that we do not even understand the different shades of lipstick, and other such high philosophical distinctions in this sublunary sphere. Long may the denizens of the hyper-cosmic realms, with their deceptively angelic looks, continue to visit us and drive us crazy! Who would want to be without them? Life with girls is the most frustrating challenge imaginable, but life without girls would be wrist-slashingly intolerable.

I first started watching the movie for Piper Perabo. I'm a huge fan and I LOVED her in Coyote Ugly and Because I said so. But the plot kind of surprised me at specific points of the movie... not in a really good way. First I really wanna say that I don't like Perabo being the bad girl, and I don't like our standard bad girl being the hero in the end. I mean, what was the use of the picture that Ed took of Genevieve and Starla?? It's just that the movie lead us in the wrong way and then shocked us. That would've been a good thing if I wasn't such a fan of Piper Perabo and I didn't like her being mean. All-in-all, I liked the first half of the movie, but I didn't really love the rest. 7.75/10

I was surprised to see the wide range of opinions in the other reviews of this movie, from "terrible" to "brilliant". I go with the former. From start to finish this movie is uninspired, unfunny and just plain silly.The plot is a weak mixture of implausible and meaningless. Apart from once or twice, I laughed _at_ the movie, not _with_ the movie. The twist at the end doesn't explain much and just makes the movie that much more random.This is a strong contender for the worst movie I've ever seen. Totally pointless.