As is normal for my Saturday nights, I decided to watch a Netflix movie by myself. I was exploring the different sections when I stumbled across this film, Sassy Pants. The title caught my attention, and then I saw that Ashley Rickards was in it. I immediately pressed play.
You may know Ashley from her MTV series, Awkward, where she is the title character. The show isn’t amazing, but Ashley definitely is. She carries the entire show with precise and charming acting ability, and she does the exact same for this movie. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say she is one of the most underrated teen actresses of the past few years.
I’m really not.
She also had a supporting role in Chris Colfer’s Struck By Lightning. She played an emo girl who didn’t care about anything Chris had to say.
You might also recognize her as the dead cheerleader from season 1 of American Horror Story. On Halloween she came back to exact revenge on Evan Peters for killing her in a horrific school shooting.
I had seen her in Awkward, American Horror Story, AND Struck By Lightning before seeing this film. So I knew this was going to be good.
The story follows Bethany Pruitt, a recent home-school graduate who wants to get out from under her overprotective mother to explore her dream of going to fashion school. It’s Struck By Lightning meets Juno, with a little bit of Awkward thrown in.
Bethany spends the first scene of the film getting ready for her graduation, until ultimately it is revealed that she is the only one in her graduating class. In fact, she is only one of two kids in her entire school, the other one being her younger brother. Bethany’s mom, June, is about what you’d expect for a home school mom. She uses costumes to teach history lessons, and takes her children’s education way too seriously. When Bethany graduates, her mom expects her to start right away on her online college education.
Bethany eventually wises up to the fact that her mom wants to keep her away from any kind of social interaction for the rest of her life, and she runs away to visit her dad. He’s a car salesman in a different town, and he is dating none other than Haley Joel Osment. Here is what he looks like:
Well then you shouldn’t have gotten fat.
I had to pause the movie at this point because I was like this:
Even Emily wasn’t happy about her older brother:
Okay I eventually got over the fact that the main character’s dad is dating a gay Haley Joel Osment who is half his age. The character was a typical gay cliché, getting overly excited about shopping and immediately wanting to be Bethany’s best friend, which surprised me for an indie film like this.
The film didn’t handle the fact that the dad left the mom because he realized he was gay that well, but it wasn’t that big enough of a deal for me to care. Anyway, so Bethany gets a series of jobs at clothing stores, and her life goes to hell because she is tricked into moving back in with her mom, and then finally she gets into her dream fashion school and the ending is corny and endearing.
Speaking of Hannah Montana, they randomly cast Shanica Knowles as a nameless cashier at one of the stores where Bethany works. Here’s an idea if you don’t remember who that is.
In four words I can tell you how boring my night was… I made that gif.
Aside from the clichés, aside from the random cast of characters (did I mention the old lady from M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil plays Bethany’s grandma?), the film was entertaining. I wasn’t constantly checking how much time was left, and I didn’t even stop to research each actor when they were introduced. The film has a 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, but only because it has a pitiful six reviews. Has anyone ever heard of this movie? Because it’s the first movie I’ve EVER encountered that doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. It came out in October 2012, and I’m assuming no one saw it. But I did and it was great.
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