It's also all about Reese Witherspoon—a very blonde, beautiful and hilariously emotive Reese Witherspoon. She brings a humanness to a character that, in the hands of a less-talented actress, could have been obscured behind a pancaked wall of camp. I credit her performance with keeping this film from becoming overly-cloying and wretchedly sweet. We laugh with her, not at her, and I found myself laughing quite a lot.

Dumped by her politically-minded, social-climbing boyfriend to further his career, Elle Woods (Witherspoon) decides to enter Harvard Law School in an attempt to win him back. Her manicured optimism takes a beating from the cynical, sweater-vested ivy-leaguers until she proves that some blondes have brains too.

In a lot of ways, the plot of Legally Blonde is by the numbers, but Witherspoon's performance is so charming and good-hearted it's easy to forgive the predictability.

While it doesn't offer any solutions to world hunger, this film does offer some suggestions for World Peace—believe in yourself, work hard, do the right thing and the rest will take care of itself.

Although I may regret admitting this in a public forum, for the first time in my life I understood the deeper value of cheerleaders.

Seattleites, in general, seem to have perfected the apathetic stare. A lot of people here can scope you up and down, look you in the eye and glaze over as though they were staring into the painted face of a mannequin. To my mind, there's a "been-there-done-that" jadedness that permeates everything from downtown shopping to midnight raves—and I'm sorry to say that I'm as guilty of it as the next drone. This movie identifies and skewers this kind of self-indulgence and glorifies the remedies—intelligence, sympathy and self-confidence. 

When I walked out of the theatre, I found myself smiling at strangers, and I'll be damned if some of them didn't smile back! Of course, by the time I'd ridden down four flights of escalators in an overpriced, downtown mall I'd been sufficiently derided by enough indifferent stares to return to a more "appropriate" Northwestern picture of dubiousness. But for at least five minutes, the unrelenting positivism of Legally Blonde infected more than a few hopeless, sun-starved Seattle cases. Perhaps the FDA should study the potential side-effects of this film....

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