New Best Friend (2002)

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

"New Best Friend" is another entry in the "steal another woman's life" sub-genre; the best of which are "Single White Female" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle"; the worse of which you can catch almost any afternoon on the Lifetime Channel. For some reason this type of identity theft happens exclusively to women.There are just two basic ways to play this type of story. You can make the woman evil at the beginning and let the audience watch knowingly as she hatches and implements her evil scheme. Or you use misdirection to make her appear a good person, as a seemingly unplanned series of events break in her favor until she is revealed to be evil in the climatic scene. Unfortunately the makers of "New Best Friend" could not decide how they wanted to play it and things crash and burn early. We first meet Alicia (Mia Kirshner) scamming the college's financial aid office for scholarship money. We now know that she is a bad person and will view all her subsequent activity with suspicion. But the director and editor apparently forgot that this revelation had been made and spend the next 50 minutes laying misdirection to make us think that Alicia is a good person. This introduces the only element of suspense, not about whether she is evil but about when the director and editor will wise up and stop wasting our time with transparent misdirection."New Best Friend" suffers more than most from the teen movie curse of a cast too old to be portraying undergraduate students. There are really only two big parts, Hadley (Meredith Monroe) and Alicia (Kirshner). They were 31 and 26 respectively at the time of the production. It almost works for the 26 year-old Kirshner when she plays the mousy version of Alicia but it becomes glaring when she is transformed into the glamed-up version of Alicia. Monroe's casting is simply a joke, about like having Nicholette Sheridan try to pass as a classmate on "Lizzie McGwire". She looks much closer to a mid-life crisis than to a term paper.The producers must have owed a lot of favors because this age issue extends to most of the supporting characters. Taye Diggs who plays the town sheriff is younger than most of the students.The basic setup is that Hadley and two other rich party girls (played by Dominque Swain-age 21 and Rachel True-age 35) are undergrad roommates at college. They share (as their student residence) a mansion that is nicer and better furnished than the mansion on Real World-New Orleans (a premise more believable than soccer moms playing students). Alicia moves into the mansion and begins to take over Hadley's life. At least that way Swain finally gets a roommate from her own generation so the two can have a lesbian scene. Swain's supporting performance is the only good thing about "New Best Friend" and her love scene with Kirshner is fantastic, so cool and artsy that it doesn't fit with any of the other segments, maybe it was subcontracted out to a good director and cinematographer.The unintentionally hilarious story is presented in a series of dreary flashbacks of rampant sex and nonstop parties, each proceeded by a shot of a comatose Alicia in a hospital bed. About half of Kirshner's screen time is spent lying motionless with a tube in her mouth. Not a good career move Mia.Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Interesting idea and storyline which didn't quite work.When you see the film, maybe you will feel as dissatisfied with the ending as I did. I didn't really know who to root for in the movie, Taye Diggs looked bored as the detective, the rest of the characters seem so one-dimensional and unpleasant.If the victim Alicia(Mia Kirschner) had been more of a nice girl, we might actually have enjoyed seeing the plot unfold and the perpetrator brought to justice. The problem was that she was as bitchy as the other girls, turning from sweet girl to conniving opportunistic cokehead. I can't understand the moral message of this film, and as a detective story and thriller it doesn't work.

One could certainly make the statement 'why should we care' about this film, and perhaps one should have posed that question to the director. Very little attention was paid, it seems, to anything which might endear any of this film's characters to the viewer. While the four female leads are intended to flutter between victim and villain as the story progresses, the performances ring hollow, contrived, and ultimately fall short of what I would hope started as a grand study of human sociology. Indeed this idea is suggested by their forced cooperation on a senior year project. Again, one is left with the feeling of too many tongs in the fire, and not enough hands to mind them.While great pains are taken to show the villainy of Alicia Campbell (Mia Kirschner), the final upshot of all her ill deeds struck me as not only rediculous, but totally unfeasable, unattainable, and illogical. The broad strokes used to bring conclusion to the film failed to deflty weave together the many loose threads, instead preferring to shelack them to the table in an effort to prevent their fluttering away. It was nice to see the sidekick from "The Craft" continuing to make a name for herself as an out of control socialite.Thankfully this film was not terribly long, although the music was surprisingly good. I'm still not sure why the director felt it was necessary to pepper the film with gratuitous breast shots, increasing in frequency as the film progress. My only thought is they began to suspect the film was failing as a concept piece, and chose the lowest common denominator for salvation.Whatever your take on it, this film is still moderately entertaining, even if the ideology behind it has been beaten like a narc at a biker rally.

Not very interesting teen whodunit saved from being a turkey from some decent performances. The main cast consisting of Taye Diggs, Mia Kirshner, Dominique Swain and surprisingly Meredith Monroe are all good but the story is not very original.