You can't turn a plot corner in "A Cinderella Story" without hitting a predigested self-affirmation along the lines of "You're special!" or "Go for it!" At one point, a character even says, "Fairy tales aren't just about finding handsome princes; they're about fulfilling your dreams."

There's that important new tune being thrummed again: You don't need a man to be happy. Yet "A Cinderella Story" wants to have it both ways. Duff's father, before he goes off to that great, Cinderella-dad beyond, tells his young daughter that to meet her handsome prince she should go to a place where handsome princes are likely to hang out.

The answer? "Princeton!"

On the one hand, it's an admirable notion: Go to school, get an education, be open to love as you find it. On the other hand, in the '50s, many women were encouraged to go to college not chiefly to educate themselves, but to find a husband. In some ways, isn't this dad saying essentially the same thing? Worse yet, Duff shows up at the ball (a school dance) in a speechlessly bad strapless white dress, her blond hair pinned up in a tousle of stiff curls, her lips slicked with bubble-gum-pink gloss: She looks like the Jenna Jameson of the Disney Channel. If "A Cinderella Story" is looking to sell a brainier brand of sexiness, couldn't they have come up with a better look for Princess Duff? One that's actually sexy, or at least a little less obvious than this backroom-magazine blend of undefiled youth and come-get-me-big-boy audacity?

One of the problems of modernizing the Cinderella story is that the importance of the prince has to be downplayed. And while even without a prince the Cinderella myth would still be steeped in issues of class and self-actualization, the presence of a prince is essential to the story. Face it: He represents the promise of sex. Coolidge's "The Prince and Me" -- the most entertaining and most thoughtful of the recent "Princess" movies -- at least has the candor and smarts not to lose sight of that. The movie works largely because of its star. Stiles is one of the most redoubtable actresses working today, of any age: No prince, no matter how powerful or seductive, is going to slow her down.

So in "The Prince and Me," Stiles, instead of yearning to find the perfect man, has to be wooed by him. And in an unusual twist, he waits for her: He'd like her to be his queen someday, but he recognizes that going to, and finishing, medical school is her first priority. "The Prince and Me" allows its viewers the pleasure of seeing romantic dreams fulfilled without compromising more practical ones.

What's frustrating about the other recent princess pictures is that they operate on the assumption that girls are insecure to begin with. Naturally, everyone is insecure, and men and women have different insecurities as well as many shared ones. But these princess movies have an anxious, helpy-helperton quality that's off-putting: They're busy alerting us that there's something within us that needs to be "fixed" even, possibly, before anything has gone wrong.

Recent Stories