Crossroads

I used to think Britney Spears was an evil genius on par with Josef Stalin. She seemed to have perfectly calculated a career based on girls wanting to be her and boys wanting to do her. She’s so precisely bland that I generally don’t believe people who say they don’t like her music; that’s like saying that you don’t like the taste of air. Everything about her boils down to a fine-tuned manipulation of image, but her first film, Crossroads fails to deliver anything but that manipulation: Britney obsesses about her virginity, goes on a cross-country trip with three friends, and grows as a woman. Unfortunately, the kind of blandness that makes best-selling pop records only succeeds in making deadly boring films. Film calls for a completely different category of blandness, the kind that Steven Spielberg delivers. Maybe for her next film Britney will team up with some computer generated dinosaur-robots in order to fight Nazi slave owners, but in the meantime Crossroads is just going to have stand as Brit’s first lesson in failure.