"It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someone's head. ... It was just beautiful ... I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.
But I think the real problem with it is that -- it's not a terrible movie, but it's no lost cinematic gem, either. Christina Ricci (who looks astonishingly like Wurtzel) is good in it -- she's pretty much always good, even in terrible movies -- and she does take off her shirt. So that's something. Otherwise, it's sort of dull and pointless.
I've never read the book so I didn't realize that Wurtzel had essentially rewritten The Bell Jar, and it has the same problem that film versions of the earlier book have -- there's not a lot of narrative, and what little there is, comes across as shallow and whiny when you remove the intensely emotional internal dialogue. (That's why Shakespeare used monologues.)
Yes, I know Prozac Nation is based on Wurtzel's life. The Bell Jar was based on Sylvia Plath's life. Talented young women from broken families win writing contests, go to nice schools, and get spectacularly depressed for no readily apparent reason.
The big difference is that Plath is very disengaged from her surroundings. Her depression makes her a blank slate that other people project things onto. In Prozac Nation, except for one scene where "Lizzie" has a classic writer's block/drug induced meltdown, most of the time she manifests her depression by treating other people really, really badly. I mean, I suppose we're supposed to see her cruelties as a sort of protection of a vulnerable...oh, heck, I don't know. And I really don't care. Which is a problem in a movie. It leaves me thinking that fiction about depressed people really needs to be funny, or Hamlet (although Hamlet is pretty funny, actually, if you stage it right). Because, you know, nobody wants to listen to you complaining unless you're funny.
