Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  My Brilliant Career

  The Solo Flights of the Brats

  Molly Ringwald wasn’t coming off any bloated Brat Pack project. Pretty in Pink had cemented her star status. She’d been on the cover of Time. She’d been sought out for projects as diverse as a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Blue Velvet (her mother read the script and rejected it before her daughter saw it). Then Warren Beatty stepped in, courting her for a project penned by his longtime collaborator James Toback. The Pick-Up Artist (1987) was the story of a sidewalk sweet-talker who finally meets the right woman. Of course, after one night, she wants nothing more to do with him. Robert Downey, Jr. at his most pantingly eager to please is the eponymous pick-up dude, Jack Jericho. Ringwald is ice-cool museum guide, Randy Jensen. Her reluctance to get involved with Downey stems not from the fact that he sweats, shakes and gesticulates enough to make Chris Farley look like James Spader, but that she’s the daughter of a gambler (Dennis Hopper) in trouble with the Mob. The film has a heavyweight cast on board (Hopper, Harvey Keitel, Danny Aiello), but Ringwald seems divorced from the proceedings. She cuts back on the flushing and lip chewing without substituting anything in their place. Warren Beatty had his name removed from the finished product, which is dominated by the manic Downey of whom Ringwald would later comment, “Drinking didn’t seem to be his drug of choice.”

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  Downshifting from his comic tour de force in Sixteen Candles to his weepy search for self-esteem in The Breakfast Club established Anthony Michael Hall as a guy with more than one string to his bow. Moodswinging from the supposed zaniness of Weird Science to the supposed suspense of Out of Bounds (1986) proved to be the tyke’s undoing. In this film by Richard Tuggle (director of Clint Eastwood’s pervo Tightrope), Hall benches all his natural attributes, his teen wise-ass persona, his shy-guy sensitivity and his Swiss-watch timing.

  In their place is the blank stare of a taciturn Iowa farmboy, atrophying in the boredom of his loveless family home. Upping sticks to spend some time in L.A. with his adored brother and sis-in-law, Hall’s almost-mute Daryl picks up the wrong dufflebag at L.A.X., leaving the airport with a sackful of heroin. A hilarious comedy of confusion fails to ensue. Instead, bad hombres slaughter his West Coast relatives. The LAPD characteristically want to set him up for the crime. Daryl goes on the lam, hooking up with New Wave bubblehead Dizz (Jenny Wright), who gels his do, fits him out in checkerboard shirts, flip-up shades and baggy pants, all the better to blend in with the decaying glamour of L.A. street culture.

  Thus disguised, he can swim in the sleazy stream that runs from Melrose to Silverlake to Venice Beach, evading the cops and chasing the narcotic nogoodniks. As delineated, Out Of Bounds contained the ingredients for a sizzling fish-out-of-water culture-clash smash. Instead, it’s a big fizzle. Hall switches like that from a heartland naif to a punked-up street-fighter, showing little enthusiasm for either role.

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  Ally Sheedy is a self-centered, coked-out, credit-card immolating Hollywood kid. In this movie, I mean. She may have lost that youthful foxiness but she had enough savvy to take a poke at her public perception in the cute Maid to Order (1987). Winding up in jail for speeding and cocaine possession, Sheedy’s Jessie Montgomery is bailed out by her long-suffering widowed father (Tom Skerritt) who wishes on a star that he had no daughter. Enter braying fairy godmother Beverly D’Angelo who makes the wish a reality. Rejected by Skerritt who treats her like an unfamiliar interloper, Jessie has no one to turn to. Fairy godmother D’Angelo finds her alone and dejected on a park bench, waves her wand and gets her a job as a maid in the house of screeching Malibu arrivistes Valerie Perrine and Dick Shawn. Jessie gets a fresh perspective on the values and behavior of the wealthy and thoughtless. She also has an opportunity to revel in the simplicity and sass of the folks below stairs. After a few scrapes involving her unfamiliarity with washing machines, irons and stoves, she worms her way into the hearts of the staff, especially the taciturn secret songwriter barely played by Michael Ontkean. I know it’s faint praise but Maid to Order is easily the equal of any of the more successful Touchstone comedies of the time. Best scene: a skinny-dipping Sheedy is gallantly offered a towel by Ontkean. He turns away as she gets out of the pool, then sneaks a look to see her walking away with the towel wrapped around her head. She still had it.

  * * *

  Andrew McCarthy also took the cutie-pie route with Mannequin (1987), a broad and sappy fantasy that successfully exploited his sole asset: that look of bewilderment. He gets plenty of opportunities to gawk and drop his jaw, playing a department store stock clerk befriended by a mannequin (Kim Cattrall) who comes to life only when they’re together. For audiences, the astonishment was generated not by the bland coupling of warm flesh and cold plastic but the over-the-top-and-into-orbit hamming of Meshach Taylor as McCarthy’s flaming window-dresser colleague and, of all people, James Spader, simpering and hissing as the store’s evil, effete manager. Starship’s Abba-esque theme tune made this a big international hit but now it’s not so much dated as violently unwatchable.

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  Speaking of violently unwatchable, what of Judd Nelson’s first solo steps? Glad you asked. The movie was Blue City (1986), and what a movie it was. Ally Sheedy is on hand as love interest, but here, finally, after taking the strain in two seminal group movies, you get your pure, primo 100% uncut Judd. His prodigal-son character, Billy Turner, doesn’t let the dust settle for a second after his unexpected return to Florida’s Blue City. He stomps into a bar bouncing a basketball, flicking his hair and flaring his nostrils. Naturally, his presence ignites a fight. He’s thrown in jail and bawls for the cops to call his old man, the Mayor. It turns out he is, in fact the Mayor’s son, but Hizzoner is recently deceased. Released, Billy goes on a rampage. He wants to get to the bottom of his dad’s death. He wants answers, Goddammit! He goes back and forward between police chief Paul Winfield, crime boss Scott Paulin and his stepmother Anita Morris, figuring that if he harrasses and bellows at them long and loud enough they’ll let slip their complicity in Mayor Turner’s offing.

  Aiding him in his reign of terror are perky desk sergeant Sheedy and her brother, played by David Caruso. They hold up a local mob-operated dog track at gunpoint, throwing steaks to the mutts; they knock over gambling dens, intimidate and challenge corrupt cops. Billy even harangues his buxom stepmom, following her around the supermarket, punctuating his accusations by throwing frozen turkeys into her shopping cart. “You are the sorriest excuses for outlaws I’ve ever seen,” comments police chief Winfield, accurately. Billy, though, does not let his ineptitude stand in the way of dragging his father’s killer to justice. “I’m going to stick to him like a cheap suit in the rain,” he snarls. You think you’ve seen Judd Nelson act obnoxious? If you haven’t seen Blue City, you haven’t seen anything! He’s such a prick in this movie that, bereaved son though he may be, you’re practically begging for one of the city’s legions of felons and fascist cops to beat him to death. An equal opportunity offender is first—and last—time director Michelle Manning who, when she can’t think of any other way to advance the plot, throws in montages of Nelson moodily riding around on his motorcycle.

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  In retrospect, Wisdom (1987) was perhaps not the most appropriate title Emilio Estevez could have chosen for his writer-director-actor triple whammy. He displayed little of the title quality in his conception and execution of this tortuous tale of a schlub made ineligible for the job market because a minor felony put a stain on his otherwise spotless record. Seething at the injustice of Reaganomics, Estevez’s John Wisdom hits on the idea of utilizing his leisure time to make a stand for the property owners and farmers who are being crushed by the banks. The idea of becoming a contemporary Robin Hood gets him hot and soon he and his extremely accommodating girlfriend (Demi Moore) are crisscrossing the country, holding up banks and destroying mortgage records. Their exploits make them folk heroes and media hot items. Of course, this kind of behav
ior can’t be allowed to continue unchecked. The Man brings all his forces of oppression to bear on Johnny Wisdom who is captured at gunpoint, cuffed and incarcerated. And that’s when he wakes up! His whole great egalitarian notion was all a dream! Suffice it to say that not only was Wisdom the last movie to bear Estevez’s name as writer or director until 1996, but his then-girlfriend Demi Moore left him soon after for Bruce Willis.

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  “The best thing that could happen to you would be an industrial accident.” So says Jim Belushi to Rob Lowe in About Last Night…, in an attempt to convince him that his prettiness is a liability. But before entering into that movie, Lowe had made concerted efforts to fuck up the glacial perfection of his features in Youngblood (1986), a hockey pic which saw him getting bashed into barriers, pounded into the ice, smashed by elbows and socked by full-on fists. “Rocky plays hockey,” scoffed cynics on hearing that Lowe was playing a farmboy (stung by accusations of being privileged LA powder-puffs, the Brats felt the need to align themselves with the honest folk who tilled the soil) who joins a minor-league Canadian team. But, Van Damme’s Die Hard on ice flop notwithstanding, you can’t go far wrong with a hockey movie, and this one totally zips along. It even packs a rip-roaring climax with Lowe’s Dean Youngblood, having gone back to the farm beaten and bloodied, returning to the rink, throbbing with resolve and smashing pucks into the back of the net.

  All Grown Up

  The Brats Play House

  “Sunrise, sunset … quickly go the years…” It seemed like only seconds ago we were sharing teen traumas with Brats, now suddenly we were picking out baby clothes and combing flea markets for that perfect antique lamp.

  About Last Night … (1986) pitted the idylls of yuppie couplehood against the cold sweat of commitment. Bed-hopping babes Danny (Rob Lowe) and Debbie (Demi Moore) stop changing partners and warily test the waters of monogamy while their best buds, Bernie the boor (James Belushi) and Joan the shrew (Elizabeth Perkins), openly root for the relationship to fail. Adapted from a black-hearted David Mamet one-act play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, the movie stayed faithful to its source material in as much as it was still set in Chicago. If you remained unconvinced on the previous occasions I played the ahead-of-its-time hand, you’re not going to budge on this one. But, for a prehistoric peek at the adorable, acerbic, dizzy, muddleheaded, antics of the relationship-phobic inhabitants of Friends (and its various, less-accomplished knock-offs), look no further than About Last Night … Although they boast yuppie accoutrements, the central quartet are going nowhere in low-paid, unglamorous professions, they’re confined to cramped living quarters and they comport themselves with an ironic but wistful regard to their carefree school days. Putative star Rob Lowe is consistently and visibly outclassed by his costars (he flinches away from rollicking Jim Belushi like he’s scared the big lug’s going to hurl a sucker punch at him) but his limited access to his emotions makes him occasionally effective at conveying the ambivalence of a guy who lets slip the words “I love you,” then wishes he’d slit his throat.

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  There’s good news and bad news about For Keeps (1988), penned by the About Last Night … screenwriting duo of ex-SNL dweeb Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue. The good news is that Molly Ringwald is pretty in pink again. The bad news is that it’s pink maternity smocks. The minute you’re introduced to Ringwald’s Darcy, you know she’s doomed. She pulls down straight As, she edits the school paper, she’s got her pick of colleges vying for her favors, and she’s got Stan (Randall Batinkoff), a fresh-faced dreamboat who is her soulmate in overachievement. Up to now, they’ve restricted themselves to chaste cuddling, but on a camping trip under the stars, they finally and irrevocably Go All The Way. She starts feeling queasy in the mornings and suddenly two bright futures go down the toilet.

  Her bitter mom (Miriam Flynn), abandoned by her husband years previously, reacts in horror to the grim future she envisions for her prematurely pregnant daughter. Stan’s strict Catholic parents want the eventual child put up for adoption. Even Stan reveals himself to be less than a model of sensitivity when he says, “You can always put it up for abortion … uh, adoption.” Darcy goes through what should have been her last triumphant school year waddling under the weight of her swelling belly. “I love it when the smart kids act stupid,” sneer bitchy high-school girls as she stomps by. Her water breaks at the school prom. After she gives birth to baby Esme, her relationship with her clingy mom collapses (For Keeps is unique in the Ringwald resume because it breaks with her tradition of counseling or being cheered up by father figures, ranging from Paul Dooley in Sixteen Candles, the indulgent dad who drove her to school in The Breakfast Club, Harry Dean Stanton in Pretty in Pink and Dennis Hopper in The Pick-Up Artist. She even had a small role as Cordelia in the Jean-Luc Godard version of King Lear). She and Stan refuse all parental assistance, stubbornly subsisting in a tiny, drafty hellhole.

  This couple who seemed most likely to couple now seem like Peg and Al Bundy. She’s buckling under the weight of postnatal depression and also feeling guilty that Stan had to give up his place in the architecture program at Cal Tech to support them. For his part, Stan has actually become a miserable shoe salesman, alternately propositioned and mocked by his customers. The guilt and misery eventually causes them to separate until Darcy finds out that Cal Tech has accommodations for married students and their offspring. This inspires a tearful reunion with Ringwald running down an empty street, clutching her daughter and screaming “STAAAN! STAAAN!”

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  For Keeps, though it confirmed that Ringwald’s appeal was tied to her ability to portray a flustered young girl, holds up better than most of the Oh-my-God-it’s-a-baby! movies around at the time including, ironically, the one directed by another of Molly’s father figures, John Hughes. His first step outside the teenage arena he’d made his own was She’s Having A Baby (1988), an autobiographical and extremely unlovable account of his days as a conflicted father-to-be. Kevin Bacon fills Hughes’ shoes and conveys the young man’s fear of parenthood, suburbia and conformity via an interminable parade of those cute fantasy sequences then prevalent on thirtysomething. While Bacon wrestles with temptation and the dilemma of giving up the empty world of advertising for the life of the mind he subsequently chose, his adoring wife (Elizabeth McGovern) has next to no lines and has little to do but bear the prosthetic bulge. The movie’s few noncomatose moments come courtesy of Alec Baldwin as Bacon’s rascally best friend who besmirches his bud’s married bliss by bringing a rock-video slut into their happy home and encouraging her to demonstrate the tricks of her trade.

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  As adult life provided progressively fewer outlets for the Brats to strut their particular stuff, the incorrigible Judd Nelson happened upon a grown-up role that was tailor-made for his brand of histrionics. In From the Hip (1987), directed by Bob (Porky’s) Clark, he turned the Judd amps up to 11 and shook the foundations of sanity as Robin “Stormy” Weathers, a law student who gets into a prestigious and venerable Boston law firm, then pulls every showboating, attention-grabbing trick in his humungous book to get to argue a case in court. Unequaled in the field of overemoting to a captive audience in an enclosed space, Weathers soon becomes a smash on the court circuit. But is this master showman sufficiently skilled to dazzle a jury into acquitting an obviously guilty party? Here’s where the movie examines its protagonist’s moral mettle by giving him a high-profile case defending an English professor (John Hurt) accused of molesting and murdering a young girl. Weathers, infatuated with his own abilities, takes the case, confident he can get the prof off. Mad tactics like seizing the murder weapon—a hammer—and whacking the shit out of the courtroom with it, then yanking a vibrator out of the prosecutor’s briefcase and waving it in his face, start to tip the scales of justice his way.

  Gradually, though, the scent of doubt hanging over his snooty client’s innocence blooms into a world of compost. “You are really bloated with self importance,” Ne
lson tells Hurt, “I’m sick of seeing you strut around like some ridiculous peacock.” Instead of invoking the Pot Kettle Black clause, Hurt assumes breeding and intellect will trump raging nostrils and popping eyeballs. Big mistake. In order to manipulate the client into sticking his own foot into the beartrap, he objects loudly when the prosecutor paints Hurt as a sex offender. “He’s sexually inadequate,” booms the great defender, “A weak man. A scared man. Impotent. IMPOTENT!” The accusations, the overacting, the nostrils, the eyes—Hurt can take no more, he leaps from the witness stand, grabs the hammer and suddenly the glove fits and nobody wants to acquit.

  Pick any below-par Matlock and the chances are good it’ll be better written than this, though it won’t have the numbskull energy. Nelson, clearly convinced this movie is his And Justice for All, gets so worked up he almost ruptures a kidney. His scenes with the sly, understated, languid Hurt are hilarious to watch. One bellowing and stabbing the air, the other acting. Condolences to Elizabeth Perkins, saddled with the role as the movie’s moral center, a sweet, nice, loving, nurturing nursery-school teacher who convinces her man to do the right thing.

  The Downward Spiral

  When Good Brats Do Bad Things

  The world of letters had its own Brats. Chief among these chroniclers of eighties excess and ennui was Bret Easton Ellis, whose novel Less Than Zero (1987) painted a grim picture of numb adolescent Angelenos, drifting untouched through a haze of sex, drugs, decay and death. A required accessory rather than a rattling good read, the book still screamed movie: the white powder, the blue water, the dark glasses. A skillfully rendered film adaptation could stick a dagger into the empty heart of the decadent Hollywood lifestyle tacitly condoned by the Brats. The resultant movie excises the novel’s amoral recountings of underage couplings and same-sex encounters, showing us the sunny cesspool through the panicked eyes of Clay (Andrew McCarthy), a privileged insider, coming home from college for Christmas and shocked to the core by the way his friends have degenerated. His buddy Julian (Robert Downey Jr.) is a junkie and a hustler, his onetime girlfriend Blair (Jami Gertz) is a beautiful blank slate. Turning a vision of hopelessness into the story of how one guy attempts to straighten out his messed-up friends isn’t one of the great Hollywood rewrite crimes, but it definitely rates as a missed opportunity.