MONDO EXTRAS

The movie starts out with the most annoying title sequence of all time. A jazzy Christmas song plays while the camera pans over a map of America. A little animated white ball wearing a Santa hat flies all over screen and supplies “o”s to everyone’s name and makes boingy sounds. Also, when a trumpet solo comes up, it takes off its hat and plays it like a trumpet. So irritating. It also does one of those things where someone’s name was put up wrong, so it fixes it. It’s the editor’s name too, so I think that’s a diss on him. We’ll see if it’s deserved. It then uses the hat as a parachute for a while until it gets run over by producer Tracey Trench’s name. That was satisfying. By the way, it stops its mischievous activities just in time for director Arlene Sanford’s name. I guess Arlene thought it was okay to distract from everyone else’s name with that stupid white ball, but when it came time for her name, she demanded that the ball respect her. The floating map comes to rest on Los Angeles and then turns into a college campus. White letters inform us that this is the “Palisades College.” Then we see kids at lockers. Right now I’m trying to figure out what kind of college has lockers. Oh, and there’s Jonathan Taylor Thomas (JTT from now on, because that’s so much cooler) himself, walking down the hall and saying “hi” to everyone. He must be cool and popular. His friend Ian is stuck in his own locker. Does that even happen in real life? My lockers in high school were so small I could barely fit my jacket in them, and I don’t have lockers at my college so I wouldn’t know. Anyway, JTT frees him, but only after Ian slides copies of upcoming tests and backstage passes to a Dave Matthews Band show out through the little slats. Oooh, so JTT is a bad boy here! What a risky character choice for the teen idol! Don’t worry, ladies, he plays it the exact same way he played Randy on Home Improvement. Anyway, it turns out that Ian got thrown into the locker because some guy named Eddie and his friends were angry about fake IDs JTT and Ian sold them. Fake IDs! Cheating on math tests! Will this reign of terror never end? Oh, JTT, you are such a lovable scamp! JTT thrusts tickets back home to New York into Ian’s hands and tells him to change them to tickets to “Cabo San Lucas.” I have never heard of such a place, because I’m not as cool or smooth as JTT.

And now JTT is walking down yet another hall, past a bunch of ladies with white patches over their noses. I smell a Clueless-style nose-job joke, but actually they are wearing those sticky things that supposedly remove blackheads. They don’t work, by the way. Not that I have blackheads. Because I don’t. Really. Really! Dammit, this movie is making me insecure already. JTT knocks on a door, and some ugly girl wearing a basketball uniform opens it. Now I’m really confused, because this “college” has a bunch of young-looking students and lockers, but also dorms. Is it a boarding school, perhaps? Then why is it called a college? JTT is said to be 18, which means he could be in high school or college. I don’t know which it is, and it won’t ever be explained in the movie either, so let’s all stop worrying about it. Because it won’t be the first thing in this movie that goes completely unexplained, and we’ll have to ignore all of those things too, so just get used to it. The ugly basketball girl won’t let JTT into the room until he gives her chocolate bars. He does so, because he is so smooth that he always carries them around to bribe chocolate-loving females. By the way, JTT is so short that this girl towers over him. And he’s wearing a really ugly shirt. Anyway, he walks over to Jessica Biel, whose character’s name is Allie, and is JTT’s girlfriend, and shall henceforth be known as Mary, in honor of her 7th Heaven character’s name. She’s sleeping in bed. JTT lies down next to her. Scandalous! Then she wakes up and freaks out because she fell asleep studying for a French final that's in three hours. Before she can kick him out, JTT gives her tickets to that Cabo San Lucas place so they can spend Christmas there together. Mary gets all huffy and leaves.