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BY ROLAND BARTHESIMPSONNE
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From Justin to Kelly director Robert Iscove has complained that Miramax passed him over for the job of directing Chicago; surely, M. Weinstein will look at the triomphe musical that M. Iscove achieves here and gnash his teeth in regret. Much more daring than Miramax’s Oscar vainqueur, FJ2K reinvents the musical genre, boldly rejecting such staid, hegemonic strictures as acting talent, plot coherence, and memorable songs. The film stars American Idol performers Justin Guarini and Kelly Clarkson (their characters are, in Pirandello-esque fashion, named Justin and Kelly), who subvert paradigms by being less conventionally "attractive" and "interesting" than the supporting cast. As Justin puts it, finding les mots justes, "I’m slightly less dorky than you think." The film even offers a radical new vision of the sacre du printemps that Americans call "spring break." Rather than present it as an alcohol-drenched orgie, FJ2K shows this American idyll as a wholesome, elaborate courtship ritual that primarily involves line dancing and cell-phone text messaging. The story, a corrosive hommage to the cinéma du Frankie et Annette of the 1960s, casts Justin and Kelly as two Florida vacationers whose surfside amour is frustrated by comical mésaventures and frequent outbursts of chanson. Not only does the movie provide les jeunes with a demonstration of the unreliability of language, it also offers a valuable moral for Idol phone voters: whn ur txt mssgng, b sr u dl the rght #. (85 minutes)
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