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No, Please, Please, No CLUELESS Sequel

Clueless is one of my favourite movies, and I can get very boring and strident explaining why it is the best Jane Austen adaptation ever (even the Zombies thing hasn’t surpassed it), and I even liked the first season of the TV adaptation, but this is going too far. Alicia Silverstone and Amy Heckerling have apparently been spotted discussing a script for a Clueless sequel. Okay, it’s just a tabloid rumour at this point, but I need to post something so I’m going to treat it as if it’s happening.

Now, I don’t say that they could never get this made. If Heckerling could get some of the original cast members, particularly Paul Rudd — who was in Heckerling’s last movie, I Could Never Be Your Woman — then sure, they could get it made. But apart from the obvious points about how this could wind up being Cher Horowitz and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there are two immense problems:

1) The success of the movie was to some degree a fluke based on one good, late-breaking idea: looking for a way to expand her TV-show idea into a feature film, Heckerling hit on the idea of taking this character she’d created and writing her into the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma. There is no sequel to Emma, so a sequel would have to have a semi-original plot — not a good sign.

2) There’s already been a sequel to Clueless in all but name, and it was called Miss Match. What was Silverstone playing in that show except Cher, grown up, working at her dad’s business (Clueless was full of hints that she’d wind up as a lawyer like her dad) and still playing around with people’s lives?

Oh, well, I still like Heckerling. But I think she and fellow washed-up filmmaker Cameron Crowe would be better off getting together for a Fast Times At Ridgemont High sequel.

Because this is “TV Guidance” and not “Movie Mirroring” or whatever a movie blog should be called, here is the title sequence of the first and only season of the Clueless show on ABC’s TGIF (it moved to UPN after that, with a lower budget, much re-casting, and less involvement from Heckerling). Paul Rudd and Brittany Murphy both appeared on this show in guest spots as different characters than the ones they played in the movie, meaning that Silverstone was the only original cast member who never appeared on the TV series in any form. (Well, her and Dan Hedaya.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JooY0rvYm_w

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