In MTV voting specials, Aguilera shows power, Barrymore is a pouter
If there's one hip cause on the youth-culture circuit this year, it's voting. Russell Simmons has a voter-registration drive, as does the lead singer of the punk band NOFX. P. Diddy has signed up with MTV's venerable "Choose or Lose" campaign. And Drew Barrymore and Christina Aguilera headline their own MTV voting specials this month.
But just because a celebrity tells them to vote doesn't mean kids actually will, and Barrymore and Aguilera prove that there's a right way and a wrong way to go about this business. Barrymore's self-directed film, "The Best Place to Start," which debuted on MTV Sept. 21 and is repeating periodically, is a vehicle for Barrymore in pouty mode; she mugs for the camera while whining about low youth voting rates. But Aguilera, playing against type as a quasi-objective journalist in "Sex, Votes, and Higher Power," premiering tonight at 10:30, actually gives 18-year-olds a good reason to hit the ballot box.
Indeed, there's something oddly admirable about Aguilera's special. First and foremost, it has a point: Yes, kids, the government affects something you find fairly important. In her hometown of Pittsburgh, Aguilera interviews teens and 20-somethings about sex and its consequences. There are young women who had accidental pregnancies; a victim of domestic violence; recruits of the "Silver Ring Thing" who have pledged to stay virgins until marriage.
Because this is serious stuff, Aguilera has dialed the tart-o-meter down to roughly "6." The sweaters are high-necked but oh-so-tight, and the skirts cut off at the top of the thigh. Her hair is curled and primped into a bun, professionally tousled. She's adopted an intent "tell me more" look and an NPR accent.
But to her credit -- and MTV's -- she treats both sides of the sex education and abortion debates with roughly equal time and weight, without shedding her Christina-ness: When she sits with a Silver Ring couple, she can't help but ask, more bluntly than can be printed here, exactly what they do with each other. And she can't help but speak up when Virgin Boy tells her he expects to like sex, since "if you see a doughnut and it looks good, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be good."
"I've had some rotten ones, you know," Aguilera blurts out. "You never know."
If only Barrymore were half as entertaining, or a quarter as articulate. If only she had a real purpose; she wants to "experience voting firsthand," she declares before heading off to New Hampshire to see the primary, and you think, why not just go and vote, then?
Instead, she asks the same question -- Why don't young people vote? -- over and over again, while setting new records for unnecessary use of the word "like." ("What do you say to them, to, like, let them not be discouraged?" she asks US Representative Henry Waxman, in one of the film's more discouraging moments.) She lands interviews with A-list political types, from Hillary Clinton to James Carville to Jon Stewart, and then complains that they're telling her "crap."
And she can't seem to figure out whether her film is about the youth of America, or just about Drew: In one scene, she sobs as she tells her producer that the project is depressing her. Poor dear. The world is apparently conspired against her, as when she interviews erstwhile Democratic candidate Wesley Clark on his press bus, delaying a press conference. The next morning, she awakens to find in the
Well, this reviewer happened to be a member of the Clark press corps on that fateful day, and here was the problem. It was one day before the New Hampshire primary, and the reporters were on deadline, dead tired, and carsick. So when the Hollywood crew traipsed in and tried to take our seats -- and the starlet proceeded to flirt with the candidate -- we were less starstruck than annoyed.
At least Barrymore sees through politicians' half-baked statements as much as the press corps and the electorate does. "That was, like, such a stock answer," she complains to her crew shortly after a rambling response from Clark about young voters. And at least she's not as wardrobe-obsessed as Aguilera -- we see her in pajamas and baggy pants, and she wisely wears a warm, shapeless coat in New Hampshire -- though she might well have been the only person to traipse through Selma, Ala., this winter in Uggs.
That's where Barrymore's documentary reaches its climax, in a long and surprisingly dull sequence in which she discovers that black people once didn't have the right to vote, and now do. Fully enlightened, Barrymore returns to Los Angeles and triumphantly mails in an absentee ballot. Good for you, Drew. Now, get off the bus.
