Review of "It’s a Boy Girl Thing," DVD version

Review of

It’s a Boy Girl Thing, DVD version

Four out of five stars

 The plot device of having two people that are adversaries and of opposite gender have their personalities swapped has been used several times. It was the driving force in the last episode of the original Star Trek series called “Turnabout Intruder.” To make it work, each of the actors must exhibit explicit characteristics of the other gender while keeping it a bit uncertain and awkward. When the two people being swapped are adults they have decades of experience interacting with the other gender, but young people have yet to get comfortable in interacting with the other sex.

 Woody Deane is a top-notch high school quarterback and exhibits many macho traits of the star athlete. His parents are very working class and he is hoping to get a football scholarship as that is the only way he will be able to go to college. Nell Bedworth is heavily into literature and is hoping to get accepted into Yale. Their houses and bedroom windows are facing each other so they can almost give each other handshakes without leaving their rooms. They also have a great deal of hostility towards each other and are seniors.

 When fate intervenes to pair them up during a museum visit, they face a statue of an ancient Mexican god. That god lives up to its reputation for dirty tricks when it swaps their personalities. With little experience in how the other gender views life and does the basic gender specific things, both must learn to comfortably use the rest and locker rooms of their adopted genders and try to function as a person of the other gender.

 Since they are young , inexperienced in life and have to function in a high school social setting, there are many opportunities for them to face awkward situations. The actors and the director take advantage of them to create scenes that are amusing and sometimes cringeworthy. Both players also do what they can to humiliate the other in the eyes of their classmates, some of it gross and rather nasty. However, even through their hostility, they begin to learn that they need each other if they are to function in the world.

 The predictable happens and this becomes an unconventional love story with an ending that the reader could predict early in the gender-swapping predicament. Yet, the journey there keeps your interest as you wonder how they will deal with having to function on the other side of the gender divide.