Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  Shue’s Chris Parker is a stood-up senior who is not only blown off by her big date but has to accept as a booby prize a night babysitting the two Anderson kids, 15-year-old Brad (Keith Coogan), who nurses a mother of a crush on her, and 9-year-old Sara (Maia Brewton), who carries an even more disturbing torch for the Mighty Thor. Chris gets a call from a friend whose attempt to run away from home went awry, marooning her in the bus station. Bundling up the Anderson kids and the unwelcome addition of Brad’s horndog buddy Daryl (Anthony Rapp), Chris heads for the big bad city. Here come the complications: they blow a tire, Chris realizes she’s left her purse in the ’burbs, they get a lift from a one-armed man who drives past his house to find his wife cheating on him. With me so far? Then they sneak into a car that’s being hotwired by a crook and wind up in the headquarters of a national car-theft ring. They sneak out, but not before Daryl has stolen a copy of Playboy that has vital financial information hidden in it (well, where else would you leave vital financial information?). The crooks give chase. The kids stumble into a blues club where sweaty legend Albert Collins is rocking out. He insists the suburban interlopers pay their dues. Chris leads her charges in a squeaky improvised rendition of “Babysitter Blues” to massed applause. They evade their pursuers, stranding them on a perilous rooftop.

  Chris gets the kids home before their parents show up. Adventures in Babysitting crams a ton of fun into its breathless pace, but it also wraps its cast in cotton wool. These kids don’t seem like they come from the suburbs; the big city and its attendant grouches, nuts, cops, drunks and array of black faces perplexes them so much, they come off like they’ve just been hatched from pods. At one point the car thief (Calvin Levels), whose latest acquisition the kids stowed away in, looks at the shiny, milk-fed faces of the Anderson brats and pleads with his bosses to give them a break. “They’re just kids,” he says, the subtext being they don’t belong in this jungle, not like us. Throughout scenes like these, Elisabeth Shue remains the epitome of grace, resilience and—yes!—likability. For all those attributes, the Best Babysitter Award goes to …

  * * *

  I’ve seen Citizen Kane. I’ve seen Raging Bull, Gone With The Wind, Intolerance, Lawrence of Arabia, Death in Venice and The Searchers. They’re all classics and if you add together the number of times I’ve watched all of them combined, it still wouldn’t come close to the number of times I’ve seen Just One of the Guys (1985). Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like someone’s started a cable station solely devoted to showing this stupid movie. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, afternoons, evenings, weekends: it’s always on! (Of course, it could also be argued that I watch too much TV.)

  Pert, popular, possessed of good grades and a studly boyfriend, Terry (Joyce Hiser) has everything she wants, except the chance to kickstart her career in journalism. She failed to win an internship on the local paper because, her professor claims, her essay was a snooze. She’s convinced she was overlooked because she’s a babe. So she does what anyone in the same circumstances would do; she sticks some balled-up socks down her panties and goes back to school passing for a boy. Even though Terry’s been initiated into the mysteries of crotch alignment and urinal etiquette by her hormonally strafed idiot brother Buddy (Billy Jacoby in an I’m-an-asshole performance that’ll make your teeth ache) she still flounces through the school gates looking like the perfect candidate for a thrashing at the hands of local roughnecks. Instead, a gathering of girls take in the sight of Terry, her new wave two-tone jacket, her hip eyewear and her skinny frame. Their awed response: “He looks like a cross between Elvis Costello and the Karate Kid.” One girl (Sherilyn Fenn) is warm for his form to the degree that she doesn’t even mind that his/her crotch is stuffed with socks. “How small can it be?” she says, cheerfully. But Terry has fallen for Rick (Clayton Rohner), a sardonic loner who thought he’d found a weird kindred spirit in the Costello Kid.

  Misunderstandings pile up, reaching a climax at the school prom when a tuxedo-clad Terry has to tell her bemused boyfriend she loves someone else. Rick, the object of her affections, tries to let her down gently. “I’m not gay,” she tells him, “I’m a girl.” “Right,” he retorts, “and I’m Cyndi Lauper.” Finally, she pulls open her shirt to reveal her excellent breasts, giving him the opportunity to play the Jessica Lange/Sally Field “I-feel-so-used” scene. In the end, of course, Terry gets to write a scalding “Dude Like Me” investigative piece and Rick manages to deal with her in babed-up state. This ain’t no Yentl. Despite swishing up a storm in boy clothing, Terry never stirs up any sexual confusion in Rick. She never attracts any unwarranted attention and almost every opportunity to mine girl-in-a-guy’s-world scenarios for discomfort is avoided. It’s puerile and irritating, but … it’s always on.…

  * * *

  It’s Christmas in L.A. and a comet passes overhead, turning onlookers into either piles of dust or flesh-eating zombies. That’s the situation waiting for sisters Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Samantha (Kelli Maroney) when they wake up in Night of the Comet (1984). As their day wears on, they not only have to face the end of the world as they knew it (Reggie escaped the comet because she was shacked up with a projectionist in a steel-lined booth and Sam ran away from her stepmother, spending the night in a tool shed), but they also have to engage in a shoot-out with zombie stock boys when shopping at the deserted mall. As if that wasn’t enough, out in the desert, a team of weary scientists are preparing to pick them up to use them as lab rats. With truck driver Hector (Robert Beltran) in tow, they prove equal to every challenge. Writer/director Thom Eberhardt (also responsible for the fitfully amusing Keanu Reeves Whoops-I-sold-my-date-to-a-pimp movie, The Night Before), has a low budget and limited resources, but in video-arcade addict Reggie and pep-squad member Sam, he’s got two fabulous characters and he uses them to make magic. Whether they’re discussing firepower (“The Mac-10 was practically designed for housewives,” says Reggie, dismissively) or fighting over Hector (“My sister who has swiped every guy I ever had my eye on has now swiped the only guy in the whole freaked-out world,” laments Sam), these girls light up the screen. I sought out the counsel of many respected cinema theoreticians for their perspective on Night of the Comet and the response was unanimous: Cool fucking movie.

  * * *

  A highlight of Night of the Comet is when the two sisters happily go on the rampage in the empty mall. As they try on clothes and dance in the aisles, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” plays on the soundtrack. Lauper wouldn’t, however, give her assent for her version of the song to be used in another teen movie. This one was called Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985). That is correct; she would not allow the song to be used in the movie it inspired. Lauper herself does not appear in the film, but just as a note-for-note cover of her hit blares through the film, so her presence is conjured up by Helen Hunt playing Lynne Stone, a wacky, garish, Day-Glo free spirit who liberates the wild woman lurking inside good girl Janey Glenn (Sarah Jessica Parker). Janey wants, more than life itself, to throw down on DTV, the local after-school dance party, but her major dad vetoes such seditious behavior. The faux-Lauper madcap gets her friend hooked up with a hot, throbbing dance partner, Jessie (Lee Montgomery). Snooty rival Natalie (Holly Gagnier) is driven by jealousy and insecurity to sabotage Janey and Jessie’s chances. As retribution, the good-girl-turned-sassy recruits a posse of psychotic punks to smash up the princess’ debutante ball. Finally, Janey and Jessie dance up a storm as her old dad watches on TV, wiping away a proud tear. My feeling is this: you can’t go far wrong with a dance movie, and even though Sarah Jessica Parker is no hoofer (her partner Lee Montgomery, who, to be fair, is no actor, does most of the work), the stupidity of the plot is pretty much nullified by the flailing and writhing. Weirdly, Cyndi Lauper would go on to make occasional guest appearances on Mad About You, the sitcom that stars Helen Hunt. She wouldn’t let her song appear in the movie it inspired, but she wound up acting opposite someone who played a role sh
e inspired in that movie.

  * * *

  Susanna Hoffs, the Bangle with the googly eyes, starred in The Allnighter (1987) a campus farce directed by her mom. Something about this film is a little off. The actors—Joan Cusack, Michelle Pfeiffer’s little sister DeDee, Pam Grier, Michael Ontkean among them—hurry through their lines and barely acknowledge each other. It’s a lot like watching a rehearsal. But, just as you start to slump and drool, along comes a scene so astounding it snaps you back into full consciousness. It’s not the one you’re thinking, either. It’s not the queasy mother-directs-daughter’s-big-love-scene (“Let go. Scream. Surrender to his hugeness.”) It’s much, much worse. Hoffs’ character, a brain we’re begged to believe, is desperate to get laid by somebody before her commencement from her SoCal Frisbee college. Michael Ontkean, barely playing a washed-up sixties rock star, is on the campus. She resolves to throw herself at him and prepares by painting her face like Bozo, stuffing tissues down her bra and strutting her stuff in front of the mirror in time to “Respect” by Aretha Franklin. First Andrew McCarthy in St. Elmo’s Fire, then Susanna Hoffs in The Allnighter. Two dumb movies sunk to new levels of humiliation by a single song. Such is the power of “Respect.”

  * * *

  Justine Bateman doesn’t sing That Song in Satisfaction (1988), but she slaughters enough nuggets for the effect to be the same. I always dug the Family Ties episodes where Mallory gave her little speech about not being as smart as Alex but being special in her own right, but outside the cozy Keaton sitcom set, she was D.O.A. There are two outstanding reasons for her miserable fate. One was hubris. Why would someone willingly take on the role of the firebrand front-person of a live-wire, right-in-the-socket, down-and-dirty bar band when she can’t sing? When I say can’t sing, I don’t mean not-trained-in-the-classical-sense-but-filled-with-character can’t sing, I mean the drunk-at-the-wedding-no-pitch-no-rhythm-no-control can’t sing. And there’s Mallory coughing into the microphone and making a starry-eyed convert of Liam Neeson, supposedly a dissolute former Grammy-winning songwriter. He even accompanies her on the piano, and when she’s done trying to dislodge the piece of brisket stuck down her throat, he gives her this moist look and says, “There’s nothing more I can teach you.” When they were casting a leading man for Nell, that scene probably clinched it for the big Irishman.

  The other reason for Bateman’s shame: starpower. She didn’t have it and Julia Roberts did. The then barely known Roberts had a grim part as the Bateman band’s sex addict bass player. Horrible as her role was, the one thing you took away from the movie was the thought, “Who was that girl with the big grin?” It wasn’t Justine Bateman. (It wasn’t Trini Alvarado either, who emerged from Satisfaction with the distinction of having stunk up the screen in two movies about shitty girl groups.)

  * * *

  A girl group whose tempestuous history would have made a much better movie was The Go-Go’s. One of their most poignant songs was “This Town,” a wry testament to the strange allure of Los Angeles. “This town is our town…” The song doesn’t appear on the soundtrack to Modern Girls (1986) but you sense it in every scene. As the eponymous modern girls (Daphne Zuniga, Virginia Madsen, Cindy Gibb) drift listlessly through the clubs, bars and streets of downtown L.A., you get the feeling that for these women, all of them out of school and marking time in nowhere nine-to-fives, the best that life has to offer is already over. All they have is the anticipation of going out at night in search of a mythical good time that may never arrive. When they chorus, “We never pay for parking, we never carry cash, we never pay for drinks and we never stand in line,” they may hope they’re giving the impression they’re nightlife aristocracy, but as the night wears on it sounds like an increasingly desperate cry for help. Let me be straight here, this is a piece of shit movie, but it’s one that left me in a wistful state of mind. Much like L.A. itself.

  * * *

  If Modern Girls concluded that the fun was over after 18, Smooth Talk (1985)—adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”—stated that even when you were 15, the good times were starting to run dry. Even though Connie (Laura Dern) and her friends spend every day of their endless summer vacation scampering through the mall, smearing on makeup, trying on clothes, wolfing down meatlike products and screeching at boys, director Joyce Chopra maintains enough distance to make their days look joyless and wasted. Outside of the mall, Connie’s a selfish, empty-headed, jealous brat who refuses to help around the house and complains endlessly about being bored.

  Her ennui is almost at an end, though, courtesy of the hulking, tattooed psychotic figure who’s been observing her throughout the movie. His name is Arnold Friend (Treat Williams) and one Sunday afternoon, when everyone is out, he shows up at her house and transfixes Connie with an epic monologue wherein he intimidates, seduces, bamboozles and ultimately lays claim to her. When she returns from an afternoon in Arnold’s clutches, she’s a different person: nice, caring, open and apologetic for her previous truculent behavior. The whole Arnold Friend episode is such an unexpected mood shift that once the movie’s over, you find yourself hoping someone else will say, “That Arnold Friend guy was some sort of, uh, allegory. Wasn’t he?” so you don’t have to grapple with the nagging fear that you’ve just watched a film about a bitch who gets the brat fucked out of her by a psycho.

  * * *

  This is how wars start. A bunch of local yahoos vandalize the motorbike belonging to Binx (Christian Slater). His big sister Billie Jean (Helen Slater, no relation) remonstrates with the thugs, demanding they cough up the $600 required to get the hog roadworthy again. They laugh in her face. Hostilities escalate and someone gets shot. Big sis cuts her hair short and goes on the lam, becoming a media fixture and a voice-of-the-underdog with her spirited demands for justice and $600. What the hell was The Legend of Billie Jean (1985) supposed to be? Was it a modern Joan of Arc story or a parody of how a modern Joan of Arc would be embraced and devoured by the media? Was it a clarion call conceived to shake up apathetic eighties youth? Or was it an attempt to reverse the impression left by Supergirl that Helen Slater was a wimp? In all aspects, and especially the latter, it failed. But it was an engrossing failure.

  * * *

  “I’m not gonna be slingin’ pizza for the rest of my life,” predicts Julia Roberts, quite astutely, at the commencement of Mystic Pizza (1988). Julia’s hot-to-trot character Daisy toils, along with bookworm sib Kat (Annabeth Gish) and nutcase buddy Jojo (Lili Taylor) in the Slice of Heaven restaurant, a fixture of the small Portuguese-dominated village of Mystic, Connecticut. None of the girls want to be slinging pizza for the rest of their lives. Daisy’s going to hook up with a rich guy. Kat’s going to college, and Jojo’s getting married.

  Things don’t quite work out the way they planned. Daisy’s rich ticket out of her small town snail’s pace existence turns out to be a messed-up little prince who uses his relationship with this mozzarella-scented temptress as a stick to beat his wealthy, icy family. Kat, attempting to make some extra college money by babysitting for an architect whose wife is in London, falls into a miserable affair with the swine. Jojo gets cold feet about marrying her fisherman boyfriend.

  Eventually, the trio transcend their circumstances, realizing that, like the pizza they serve with its secret ingredients, this small town they yearn to flee is what makes them and their friendship special. Or something like that. Amazingly, Mystic Pizza is still Julia Roberts’ best film, notwithstanding the scene where the three girls hijack Jojo’s fisherman boyfriend’s truck and take off, celebrating the exhilaration of liberation by screeching—yes!—“Respect.”

  * * *

  The most successful Girl movie, financially as well as in terms of its artistic and social influence, was Flashdance (1983). Adrian Lyne’s dazzling fairy story was the first feature to display openly its MTV influence (the rival Footloose was King Lear by comparison), dispensing with accepted narrative practices in order to speed the p
lot along with a million music montages. The footless tights and off-the-shoulder top sported by the movie’s heroine, Pittsburgh steel worker by day and bar dancer by night, Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) showed up on city streets and dance floors the world over. And look how many strip joints are called Flashdancers …

  9

  We Got the Beat

  The Ultimate Eighties Teen Movie Mix Tape

  If you think a lame movie can’t be saved by a killer theme song and a sexy video, you must be living in a gangsta’s paradise. The eighties saw the dawn of synergy; if kids were too late or too lazy to sit through the coming attractions, if they never read reviews or noticed posters, chances were they watched MTV, listened to the radio or bought records. And if they participated in any of these activities, the likelihood was strong that the video they watched contained scenes from a movie, the song on the radio was the theme from that movie and the record they bought contained that selfsame song. In the eighties, movies became so sound track saturated that they made Saturday Night Fever seem like The Seventh Seal. Ironically, the majority of artists approached the chore of sound track duties with the same enthusiasm they threw into whipping up an extra track for a CD single. This brought about a situation where many groups were receiving their largest exposure with material in which they had little or no emotional investment. Nevertheless, the commingling of music and images means that some cruddy filler still has the power to swell up some throats. And if you were of a sufficiently anal nature that you felt compelled to browbeat those around you with taped examples of your eclectic taste in music, these are the teen sound track selections that I would expect to hear on your mix.

  “We Got The Beat,” The Go-Go’s (Fast Times at Ridgemont High)

  From its clattering drum intro to Belinda Carlisle’s exuberantly nasal vocal, this new wave anthem celebrates the joys of being young, free, wild, hip and living in L.A. The subsequent movie depicts its characters missing out on almost all those joys, thus lending the tune something of a Brechtian quality.