Could a movie like "Clueless" work today?

Or is it simply too much a product of its time:

http://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/502-1990s-pop-cultur e-and-teen-slang-as-seen-through-c/

Noel: Nathan, you’re right that I’m drawn to Clueless as a document of that brief sliver of time when having a character who’s really into neo-swing wouldn’t seem weird. But I remember being drawn to Clueless almost as much as a throwback to 1980s high-school comedies, like John Hughes’ films, or Heckerling’s own Fast Times At Ridgemont High. By which I mean: There’s a timelessness to films about youth culture, stretching back to the rocksploitation and beach-party movies of the early 1960s, and all the way back to the college-campus musicals of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. (Both versions of Good News are kind of the Clueless of their days.) No matter the era, kids are worried about grades, on the prowl for mates, and far more concerned with social values than their judgmental elders seem to believe.

That said, I can’t deny that Clueless gets better with age in large part because of its dated qualities, which add a layer of poignancy. Remember when everybody having a cell phone in a movie was a sign that they were insanely privileged? Ah, the 1990s.

Genevieve: I think another, somewhat paradoxical reason for Clueless’ strange timelessness is how heightened its 1990s-ness is. We recognize the way these characters dress, talk, and act as reflective of mid-’90s trends, but they’re not exactly realistic depictions of the average teenager in 1995. (I think? I was barely a teenager when this movie came out, and nowhere near the privileged sphere of these characters, but Cher and her cohorts never scanned as “peers” to me.) Consequently, Clueless—like many other teen/youth movies, as Noel notes—exists in its own world, one that looks sort of like ours, but never really ages or changes. It’s sort of like Cher’s house, with its columns out of the 1970s: classic, even if certain elements only date back a couple of decades.

Nathan: Totally. Clueless embraces the frothy frivolity of its time. Looking back, it’s kind of the perfect teen movie for the Clinton decade, when the economy was booming, we inexplicably weren’t constantly at war, and the world seemed safe and secure enough to embrace the silliness and shameless materialism at Clueless’ core. But it also understands its place in the teen-movie pantheon as the spiritual successor to teen beach-party movies, Valley Girl, and other largely angst-free explorations of what it’s like to be young and full of pep.

Scott: While we were watching Clueless in the screening room, Tasha quipped, in the middle of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones performance, that we could narrow down when the movie was shot to a six-month period. The 1995 aspects allow us to engage in a little cultural anthropology—cell phones as a sign of privilege then are an absolute necessity now, and we’re dozens of fads removed from neo-swing, which hasn’t had its revivalist revival yet—but the film is old enough to assess from enough of a distance to guess safely that it will continue to work well into the future. Time has been kind.

Tasha: It helps that Heckerling seems to have been entirely conscious that she was making a time capsule for the future. That Mighty Mighty Bosstones performance (Essentially, “Now we will loudly perform the choruses of both our big hits for you, in between plot-significant scenes”) makes me laugh every time I watch the movie, because it’s so era-specific, but it also feels more like artificial product placement than like organic recognition or incorporation of something that was cool at the time. Some of the references do feel more organic because they aren’t heavily underlined, like Cher knowing Hamlet better than the pretentious college girl quoting it, because Cher watched the 1990 Mel Gibson movie. But most of the drop-ins feel so conscious and removed from the narrative—like Cher watching Ren & Stimpy and informing Josh that it’s “way existential,” or catching Tai singing along to a Mentos “Freshmaker” ad—that they feel to me like Heckerling storing up nuts for the future, to remind us what pop culture was like way back in the olden days.

The "John Hughes-style" teen movie itself suffered a backlash in The Nineties, as Heathers' deconstruction of many of the tropes associated with those films made it harder to take their messages and characters seriously as representative of actual teenagers. Like the teen sex comedy, "lighter" teen comedies made a comeback in the mid '90s, starting with Clueless (a reconstruction of the genre) and continuing with films like She's All That, Can't Hardly Wait, Bring It On, Never Been Kissed, Drive Me Crazy, Get Over It, Whatever It Takes, and 10 Things I Hate About You.

Not Another Teen Movie in 2001 and Mean Girls in 2004 were arguably the Genre Killers, with the former viciously parodying the tropes of the genre (as well as those of teen sex comedies) and the latter raising the bar by tackling a slew of real-life youth issues in a way that made a lot of earlier films look uncomfortable in hindsight. While the better films from both periods are still remembered as classics, many of the other efforts, while successful in their day, are now looked back on as saccharine and unrealistic, remembered solely for '80s/'90s nostalgia.