Crossroads Turns 20: Bonus Cinematic Throwback

(Yes, I had this poster up for several years)

Heading into 2002 my movie fanatic self was consumed with feverous anticipation for two movies. One was Attack of the Clones, which we will get to in May. 

But the undercard was Crossroads, the proper movie debut of Britney Spears, who at this point was pretty much at the peak of her early career powers. This was one of the centerpiece events of that "Britney" era. I actually first saw the trailer for this movie at her Dream Within A Dream tour.

I saw this movie 3 times in theaters. I have watched it many times over the years. 

But Crossroads is not a great movie. That's okay. It arrived with all the hype and critical scrutiny (which we will get to) that would accompany a huge event film, but in reality this is a modest little film with modest goals.

I think two things worked against this movie somewhat. One is that by early 2002 the teen movie boom of that era was already waning. Nothing that I would even consider a teen movie made the top 50 at the box office that year. Crossroads was actually down around #70. 

And two, I have always felt that as a Britney Spears product, this movie came out one era too late. By the time this movie came out Britney had already released Slave, and danced with a snake, and put out an album that was more adult and provocative than is really represented by the film. Yeah there are songs on "Britney" that are there because of Crossroads (I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman, and I Love Rock and Roll specifically), but I have always felt that if this had been released during the Oops era that would have been a better fit. Although this movie wasn't even being filmed until after the Oops era. Chalk that up to the time it takes to get a movie made.

It's a classic road trip movie, with Britney and her friends (then newcomers Zoe Saldana and Taryn Manning) traveling to California, chauffeured by the requisite hunky bad boy and inevitable love interest (Anson Mount, who is not a terrible actor exactly, but often comes off as a creepy sexual predator...yeah this could have been cast better).

There is a lot of melodrama in here, with parental abandonment and teenage pregnancy and rape and this stuff is probably the weakest part of the film. Too much of it is just given surface level attention. A big part of the plot involves Britney visiting her absentee mom (Kim Cattral) but that visit winds up being just one super short scene.

The best parts of this movie are almost across the board the parts in which the 3 girls are just hanging out and having fun. There really isn't a lighthearted scene in this movie that I don't like. It doesn't surprise me at all that Saldana and Manning have always had such nice things to say about Britney over the years. You can tell how much they got along. That really comes through.

The movie of course creates some excuses to have Britney sing. We get a fictional origin story for INAGNYAW, and a nearly full performance at the end. And of course there is the iconic karaoke scene.

Like I said, Crossroads is a modest movie with modest goals, which it reaches. But man was the response to the movie vicious. The knives were firmly out for this one, and for Britney. Critics wanted this to be Glitter 2, so they just called it that despite it being immeasurably better. They mostly trashed Britney's acting, much of it in very misogynistic fashion. It was way over the line. I'm sure the response had some effect on Britney's desire to keep acting. It sucks that this remains Britney's only lead performance in anything. 

Critics also flat out lied and said the movie was a financial flop. Not even close to true. It made 4 times its budget. Any other time any movie would make 4 times its budget it gets correctly called a success, but when a Britney movie does that it gets stamped as a bomb. 🙄 

And Britney is so god damn sweet in this movie it makes her critics seem even more grinch-like. 

So in terms of what this movie did for careers, Britney probably didn't get much of a bump from this. The big break was probably for Shonda Rhimes, who wrote the movie and then went on to create a whole TV empire. Saldana and Manning basically got their careers kickstarted by this.

The movie does carry a bittersweet tinge to it though. I mean, the movie itself has that, but also the fact that this was the only big Britney movie we have ever gotten, and also that after this movie and era is when things started to turn sour for her. This should have been the start of something, not a one-off.