Look who's talking

>> Gossip doesn't quite walk the walk

by MATTHEW HAYS

There's only one thing worse than a mind-numbingly mindless teen movie: a mind-numbingly mindless teen movie which purports to actually pack a message.

Which brings us to Gossip, a sort of hep-looking, full-of-gorgeous-young-babes teen movie starring Goldie Hawn's offspring (Kate Hudson) and the obligatory Dawson's Creek star (Joshua Jackson). The film opens with a didactic little hook: did you know gossip is a bad thing, which can potentially do harm to others? (God, you'd think these screenwriters have actually read the Bible!) Hottie James Marsden plays a college student with his own funky pad. Lena Headey and Norman Reedus are his roommates and for a time the three are inseparable. After Marsden spies Jackson mounting a drunken Hudson at a wild party, he decides to start telling tales about what he saw. The three roomies choose to spin a yarn about Hudson's being date raped--something they know didn't happen--in order to see what trouble they can whip up.

It's not an entirely uninteresting premise and in its first act, Gossip actually threatens to make for a good movie. The young actors are sharp, the sex scenes are sexy (though certain cinematographers should be kept away from MTV for a while) and there are some plot twists and revelations that make the film more surprising than the poster makes it look.

But then Gossip becomes hell bent on being the Muppet Baby version of The Last Seduction--there are copious plot twists, double crossings and fuckings-over, all of which become decreasingly believable as the film progresses (not to mention a rather obvious explanatory device featuring Eric Bogosian as a journalism prof whose combative lecture style teaches us all something about--you guessed it--gossip).

The film's final turn is operatic in its idiocy, a bit of over-the-top closure that's supposed to yell "Surprise!" but instead shrieks "Sucker! You just shelled out 10 bucks for this!" Conventional wisdom has it that teen movies are critic-proof. Those wacky kids'll

go and see anything, goes the theory. Still, it's my job to report on this. Most older types will be put off by Gossip, I suspect, while the only teens who will come out liking it are the ones whose vision has been severely clouded by hormones. :

Gossip opens Friday, April 21