(My apologies to whoever pointed me this movie, I’ve forgotten whether it was here on the blog or Twitter or elsewhere.)
Get Over It is, for the most part, your standard high school romantic comedy: nerdy guy has awesome girl, nerdy guy loses awesome girl to handsome jerk. Even more awesome girl (Kirsten Dunst) comes along who loves nerdy guy, but he doesn’t see it because he’s too busy trying to win back awesome girl #1. Blah blah, awesome girl #1 learns what a fool she’s been and wants nerdy guy back, nerdy guy decides that awesome girl #2 is the better choice, happily ever after.
Now, take that plot and drop it on top of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Interesting. Especially when you have handsome jerk playing Lysander, nerdy guy as Demetrius, original awesome girl as Hermia and new and better awesome girl as Helena.
Now, do it as a musical. Directed by Martin Short, playing one of those standard “washed-up actor who goes on to direct high school theatre” roles (very similar to the Hamlet 2 thing that just came around last year). Is it me, or does Kirsten Dunst try to sing in all her movies? It’s… cute.
With any movie like this, I typically watch it for the Shakespeare. While the jokes are pretty standard stuff, there are some funny bits. When was the last time you caught yourself humming a catchy tune from Macbeth? Shakespeare may have been a great poet, but he’s no Burt Bacharach!
The ending, truthfully, was a surprise. I mean, not in the “Nerdy guy gets the right girl” thing. That always happens. I mean, how it all goes down. Actually it came down to a single word, which I found possibly the funniest part of the whole movie, but I can’t explain it without ruining the joke. If you collect this sort of stuff you might have missed it when it first came around. I know I’d never heard of it.