The Girl Next Door
Matthew Kidman (Emile Hirsch) is a man filled with dreams. He has his sights set at Georgetown and an important speaking event coming up with a scholarship on the line. Then his life gets flipped upside down with the arrival of the aforementioned girl next door, Danielle, played by 24's damsel in distress Elisha Cuthbert. A few awkward looks later, the two hit it off relationship-wise, but gets complicated when Matthew's friend Eli (Chris Marquette, Joan of Arcadia) finds Danielle in a porn movie. Soon, the distractions get the better of Matthew, who up to this point had been coasting through life, but now the combination of a girlfriend, missing money, the scholarship offer, and school burden him, forcing Matthew to deal with things one at a time.

At first glance, this is just another typical teen movie. Yet, looking closer, this movie is smart and charms with its high-quality performances. Newcomer Hirsch (thus far, his biggest film was The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) is very talented and Cuthbert shines as someone to see, both in looks and performance, things lacking in her role in 24, where she has no idea what's going on, gets into one ridiculous situation after another, and now is stuck behind a desk at CTU. By far, the funniest scenes comes from its look at sex education films and the radical makeover Matthew and his group do to it when they produce their own, complete with real porn stars. For a film that sells itself off as a sex-crazed teen comedy, it sends the serious message that doing the right thing will get you far ahead in life. In fact, it may be too smart for its own good, heaping on conflict after conflict for Matthew to solve and lengthening the film even further. At some point, I was getting a bit bored by it. But in the end, you'll laugh without being grossed out and you'll appreciate the characters of Matt and Danielle as two people who weren't dumbed down for the sake of a cheap laugh. 3 stars