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Three high school graduates, Lucy (Britney Spears), Kit (Zoe Saldana), and Mimi (Taryn Manning),
unearth a box of symbols of their dreams buried during their younger years to be opened only on their graduation day. Though they have drifted apart in high school, they now
laughingly review their dreams, pledging to be friends forever. All three hitchhike with Ben (Anson Mount) on his way to California for that adventure of a lifetime. Class
valedictorian Lucy hopes to find her mother in Arizona, she who abandoned her at age three. Popular Kit is curious why her fiancé in LA keeps postponing their wedding date,
while pregnant rape-victim Mimi wants to compete in the open audition for song writers. From Georgia to California is a long cross-country trek where unexpected things can and
do happen.
Crossroads consists
of three equally pedestrian stories in parallel, very much akin to American soap and our own telenovela, where most sequences are quite contrived. With its tagline of
"experience love, sex, and music", these are curtailed because of the lengthy sob-stories of the girls. Like other singers who have invaded the movies, Britney Spears' acting
debut is far from sensational. But despite Spears' low-key acting as the pretty innocent ready to be deflowered, the two musical sequences showcasing the blond pop concert
princess singing "I Love Rock n Roll" and her current hit "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" can still send her legions of fans to a screaming frenzy.
While the movie involves three American teenagers—loud, daring, independent and very free—our
local counterparts are not too far behind. Though parents want their children to have fun, our culture somehow dictates more parental guidance for and demands some kind of
decorum from the young. During their road trip, the girls rediscover their friendship and develop strong bonding, where they are there for each other in time of need. Parents
can also take a cue from Lucy as she blames her Dad that throughout her growing up years, all she did was study, missing out on her social development. Thus, during their
adventure, she is bent to have sex and learns to drink just like everybody else. And when her Dad insists that she take up medicine, she decides to run away with the two and
follow her heart's desire to sing. While Lucy may be right in not wanting to be an anti-social brainy nerd and about following her heart's dream, Britney Spears fans might
have the mistaken notion that premarital sex and drinking sprees are just as right.
(Date reviewed: April 5, 2002)
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