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reviews Mon Jan 12 04, 11:29PM

Chasing Liberty (review)

So Totally

[spoilers. yes, I'm spoiling a Mandy Moore movie. like you care.]

Oh. Mygod. This is so totally like this trip that my best friend Tiffany and I are planning? For when we so totally turn 18? We're gonna, like, so totally go to Europe for like six months and bum around and go to all those cute cities that have cobblestone streets and colorful money and meet totally hot Europe-ish guys with amazing accents and get into totally hot clubs and hear awesome bands and not even have to use fake IDs cuz you can drink when you're 18 there, god that's so, like, civilized, and shop and shop and shop (with Daddy's credit cards, of course).


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I guess our trip won't be so totally as cool as Mandy's -- that's Mandy Moore I love her she's fabulous!!!! -- because her dad is, like, the president so she gets all kinds of cool stuff like a parade with the mayor of some way amazing city with a funny name and she gets to wear great clothes like you can only get at the fancy mall, you know, the one with the Nordstrom's not the boring one with the Sears, and she also gets her very own Special Service agent who's so totally hot and even takes his shirt off and has a way dreamy English accent and a moped.

I think it's kind of like what my English teacher called "irony" that the rad hot guy Mandy so totally falls for is also her Special Service agent, but I'm so totally getting ahead of myself cuz this movie is sooooooooo great!!! Tiffany thinks so too!!!

Okay, so, like, what's so totally amazing about Chasing Liberty is that it's, like, real. It's almost like the guys who made it -- isn't it amazing that it's guys? It's like they're totally in my head or reading my diary or something! It's like those guys are really talking to me and Tiffany and real girls who know how important it is to have the right boyfriend and the right clothes if you want to be popular. And they also know that real girls never have any privacy or freedom, like when Mom picks me and Tiffany up at the mall she always wants to know about everyone we hung out with and about everything that we bought! It's like she thinks that just because she let us use her credit cards and dropped us off and picked us up she has the right to get all personal!! It's like in the Pledge of Allegiance or something about privacy and Mom never respects that.

But it's so totally worse for Mandy, and you'd totally think that her dad the president would know better about the Pledge of Allegiance or whatever. But she can so not even totally go on a date with just a boring guy from school, not even a totally awesome one with an accent and a moped, without her Special Service agents, like, listening in on what they're talking about! She's like officially The Most Popular Girl in the Country cuz her dad is the president and she's still like a real girl like me and Tiffany, which we can so totally relate to. I love when movies are real like that.

That's all the beginning of the movie, which is why Mandy is so totally p---ed off when she gets to go to Europe on Air Force One and still she can't get the chance to be alone with her totally awesome friend who's like the Princess of Europe or something. So she runs off with this guy named Ben who she thinks is really really cute (he is!!!!!) only she doesn't know that he's secretly her Special Service agent who's watching her! But he's so totally English and rides a moped and is creative (he's a photographer!!) so who cares!!! Though I think maybe there might be something illegal about a Special Service agent doing, you know, it with the person he's supposed to be protecting. But who cares!!! He's totally cute!!!

That's like the irony thing I mentioned. Mandy wants to be all alone and free and she's actually with someone who's protecting her and watching her all the time. So this movie is, like, literary. And it's also, like, political, too. I think it's kind of like how because of all the terrorists in America and how they want to kill us all, the police and the government and everybody is watching us all the time and doing things like putting suspicious people with funny foreign names in jail. It's like Mandy is America, and Ben is the government, and maybe she's mad at first when she finds out who he is really is, but in the end she loves him. And also look what happens the first time she tries to get away from him after she finds out he's been spying on her: those nasty French (!!!!) guys attack her! It's like Ben spying on her is so totally for her own good, and wouldn't it have been even better if she never found out who he really was and she could just think she was free and private?

I think that's like maybe really deep. I'll have to ask Tiffany.

[reader comments on this review]

viewed at a public multiplex screening
rated PG-13 for sexual content and brief nudity
official site | IMDB


who I am


I'm MaryAnn Johanson: writer and ponderer in New York City who drinks too much wine and thinks way too much about such inconsequences as movies, TV, books, and the meaning of life.
[email me]

• contributor, Film.com
• member, Online Film Critics Society
• member, Alliance of Women Film Journalists
• member, International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences
• visit my scratchpad blog, MaryAnnJohanson.com
• read my Doctor Who fan fiction

photo by David Speranza

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