She was Natalie Portman before Natalie Portman was Natalie Portman, Isla Fisher before Isla Fisher was Jewish and definitely before she married Borat. She was the Jewish “it” girl of the mid-to-late ’90s, the time of my pubescence. She was the Semitic goddess, Alicia Silverstone.
You know how a lot of guys secretly love “Mean Girls” (I was watching it on a flight to Israel once and when I looked around I realized every male in the six rows around me was watching it too)? That’s how we felt about “Clueless” when it came out. I was only nine and I could still see the appeal. When “Batman and Robin” hit theaters two years later I was in fifth grade and I could tell that the only good part of the movie was watching Alicia play Catwoman.
But then, of course, I hit middle and high school and Natalie, Isla and Rachel Weisz took Alicia’s place in the part of my heart dedicated to movie stars who probably attended synagogue on Yom Kippur. The truth is that I’d tried to forget about her after “Blast from the Past,” which was her last legitimate “big” movie but which was actually Brendan Fraser’s 173rd “terrible” movie.
So I don’t know what reminded me of Alicia thirteen years later. Maybe it was Brittany Murphy’s unfortunate, too-soon death that brought “Clueless” to mind a while ago. Maybe I was reminiscing back to the days when I could still enjoy Chuck E. Cheese without looking really sketchy. Maybe (probably) it was that I saw her on the “Party Lines” page in New York Magazine this week and recalled when she was relevant. So I looked on her IMDb page just now.
What I saw confirmed my depressing thoughts. “Blast from the Past” was indeed her last movie that people paid any attention to, which is a sad end to fame for an actress who starred in one of the best chick flicks of the 90s. Since then she’s been in 13 episodes of the TV show “Bareface,” “Scooby Doo 2” (but apparently not 1) and most recently, a made-for-TV-movie called “Bad Mother’s Handbook” in 2008, along with several other middling films.
Why has this befallen her? She was a decent actress a couple decades ago and even teen heartthrobs mature and continue their movie careers as they enter their thirties. Julia Roberts was 23 when “Pretty Woman” came out 20 years ago, and look at her.
So come back, Alicia. Get up on the silver screen and show the haters that the Jewesses can still pull at your emotions, even if they’re, like, totally existential.
