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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood), the high-school vamp and evil genius in the new satirical comedy "Pretty Persuasion," tells her protegee, Randa (Adi Schnall), an Arab emigree, that she, Kimberly, is glad she is white. Then she wonders what she would choose to be if she had to be something else. For Randa's benefit, she lists the possibilities in her order of preference: first Asian, then African-American (as long as she could have "Caucasian features," like Halle Berry), ending with Arab. Randa listens quietly, wide-eyed. The kids in "Pretty Persuasion" are perhaps the most barbaric group of bad seeds gathered together in recent movies. They turn candor into a form of aggression, they use sexual availability as a way of gaining power and demanding favors, and they boast of their friendships while working hard to annihilate any friend within reach. They're beyond hypocrisy--greed and narcissism have made them virtually senseless. The writer, Skander Halim, and the director, Marcos Siega, set the movie at a private school in Beverly Hills, and the kids are generic: they're good-looking, spoiled, manipulative, and so completely immersed in the media values of fame and celebrity that nothing else matters to them. "Pretty Persuasion" lampoons America in the era of omnivorous media coverage and reality TV, an America in which every young person wants to be a celebrity and will do whatever it takes to...
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