Britney Spears, the young queen of pop, has hit a fork in her career. With several hit albums under her arm and millions of dollars in her pockets, I guess she figures the time is right to rediscover the acting talent she had as a child as a member of The All New Mickey Mouse Club. She is one of many recent female pop divas that have also tried, unsuccessfully, to cross the boundary from music to film. And if Britney is looking to reveal that hidden talent with her work in Crossroads, her feature film debut, she better look elsewhere.
Spears plays Lucy, the beautiful but brainy valedictorian of her graduating high school class in a small Georgia town. She can carry a tune, but her divorced dad (Dan Aykroyd, in a role we've seen from him too many times before) has decided she will not study music in college but will instead study to become a doctor. Because of her focus on studying, she has missed out on the high school experience and has lost touch with two close childhood friends. After graduation, the three girls put their differences aside and reinvent their friendship by digging up a time capsule they planted as kids. Ah, they have something in common after all: The desire to get out of their small down. Lucy, the all-American girl, wants to meet the mother who left her at age three; Kit (Zoe Saldana), the fashion queen, wants to see her fiancé at UCLA; Mimi (Taryn Manning), the expecting mother, wants to pursue a singing career. And Mimi's mysterious guitar-playing friend Ben (Anson Mount) agrees to take the girls on a road trip to California in his '73 Buick convertible.
Continue reading: Crossroads Review