Clueless

Pip is now Finn (Ethan Hawke), a brooding painter. Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a creamy jet-setting dream girl. Miss Havisham has become Miss Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft), mamboing around her ruined Gulf Coast mansion to the scratchy strains of “Besame Mucho.” At times, the latest version of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations seems specifically designed to spark mass coronaries among the nation’s English-literature professors.

For someone who remains best known for one song, recorded nearly 20 years ago, Jimmy Buffett is swimming pretty these days. He has a clothing line, two best-selling novels, two restaurants, and a custom record label, which has just released Margaritaville Cafe New Orleans — Late Night Gumbo, a collection of Cajun musicians that celebrates one of those eateries. He has 26 albums under his belt, the latest being Barometer Soup.

The Southern California teenagers of Clueless were in diapers the year Ronald Reagan was elected President. Cher (Alicia Silverstone), the beautiful and vacuous young heroine, is a preternaturally spoiled Beverly Hills princess who lives in a thick haze of charge accounts and pop-culture references, most of which date back no further than the late ’80s.

To get the 411 on the Beverly Hills High School scene, we collared some real students for their take on the lives of their Clueless counterparts. Is it totally true, or, like, only partially?

Stork Club: This season, not only will NBC’s Mad About You get a new night (Tuesdays) and a new guest star (Carol Burnett, as Jamie’s mom), costar Helen Hunt will get a new look: mommy chic. Now that her Jamie is expecting, Hunt will be padding up for the long nine months ahead. ”We’re doing prosthetic stomachs for Helen in stages with a first, second, and third trimester,” says the show’s exec producer, Larry Charles.

It sounds like Hollywood has started speaking in tongues. First, there was the trendy-teen argot of last summer’s hit Clueless; now moviegoers practically need an intensive Berlitz course to comprehend the heroin-addled-speak of Trainspotting. Can’t habla de lingo, you say? Herewith, a guide to not getting lost in the translation.

Nouns

Jerks: Clueless: Tards Trainspotting: Bams

Female Babes: C: Betty T: Mantovani

As Jane Austen might have memoed in a fax: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a movie producer in possession of a good book must be in want of tweaking the story. If John Grisham, very much alive and volubly protective of his first novel, A Time to Kill, was willing to let screenwriter Akiva Goldsman change prose-speaking characters into rhetoric-spouting ones, then what hope is there for such long-dead creative consultants as Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter with a happy ending?

The Twelfth Night-inspired She’s the Man is the latest teen DVD based on classic lit. Below, five way-better pics.

CLUELESS (1995) Amy Heckerling’s clever update of Jane Austen’s Emma effortlessly shifts the tale to the dating (and shopping) rituals of ’90s teens. What really puts the zing in this comedy of MTV manners is Alicia Silverstone’s beguiling, lightning-bolt performance as dizzy Beverly Hills princess Cher.

Pip is now Finn (Ethan Hawke), a brooding painter. Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a creamy jet-setting dream girl. Miss Havisham has become Miss Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft), mamboing around her ruined Gulf Coast mansion to the scratchy strains of ”Besame Mucho.” At times, the latest version of Charles Dickens’ ”Great Expectations” seems specifically designed to spark mass coronaries among the nation?s English-literature professors.

Its star was the ”Aerosmith girl,” it had been stalled in development hell, and it opened on July 19, 1995 – the tail end of the antipop grunge era. Despite those drawbacks, Clueless – a candy-coated, slang-dropping look at Beverly Hills brats – raced to the head of the box office class and became a definitive relic of the prosperous Clinton era.