Screen Teens

As for Britney, she is certainly comfortable on camera, and her Stepford radiance is easy on the eyes. But Tamra Davis' movie stinks. It's about three Louisiana teens--the geek, the freak and the princess--and Britney plays the geek. Escorted by a dude with 'tude (Anson Mount), they go West in search of stardom, performing their sassy act in bars and discovering that sisterhood is booty-full.

On the way from La. to L.A., the gals trip over plot twists that belong in a much darker film (the fiance of one girl is the rapist of another; the hero's sister was abused by her father). And there will be giggles aplenty at the scene in which our brainy heroine writes a poem with the line, "I'm not a girl, not yet a woman" (which just happens to be a recent Spears hit). But Crossroads delivers on the expected climax: Britney's first kiss with an adult male. It's a Saint Bernard slobberer of a smooch--the tsunami of wet kisses.

There's really no reason to get agitated about Britney's generic music or dreadful new film. Her primary function is not musical or cinematic but educational: to instruct girls in the complex lessons of peer envy and to get 12-year-old boys on the fast track to concupiscence. Similarly, Crossroads, whose $10 million budget was put up by Spears' label, is less a movie than a multimedia branding, an extension of the Britney franchise--a marketing tool, exactly like the singer's Pepsi spots, though without their craft, verve or production values.

So any carping, by reviewers or audiences, is beside the point. We don't have to love the product; we just have to pay for it. Pay up to the Princess of Pert.