Pretty In Pink

by Jonathan Bernstein

  Written and directed by Allan Moyle, previously responsible for the frightful Times Square, Volume’s big mistake was having Harry get tangled up in a suicide. An Over the Edge–style display of mindless violence and destruction would have been much more appropriate and satisfying. As it is, the film falls apart in its third act, turning into an extended kids-outrunning-cops chase sequence. But during the time it isolates Slater behind that microphone, gasping his masturbation fantasies (“Here it comes! Another gusher!”) and smirking at the hopelessness around him, it gives this self-satisfied actor his finest hour.

  * * *

  Take Ted Danson in Dad. Take Tom Selleck in Runaway. Take Shelley Long in Hello Again, Bill Cosby in Leonard Part 6, David Caruso in Jade, Don Johnson in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, Roseanne in She-Devil or Ed O’Neill in Dutch. None of these TV stars’ failed attempts to translate their small-screen success into movies—not even Julia Sweeney’s It’s Pat—was the all-out abomination that Kirk Cameron’s Listen to Me (1989) was. The idea of putting Growing Pains’ clown-faced young heartthrob into a movie that treated college debate with the same passion that a sports film would treat football seemed like it might be ripe with comic potential. And ripe it was, but with melodramatic dementia.

  Cameron, with his beaming little button eyes and red lips, looking like a ventriloquist’s dummy that’s broken free of its terrified owner, is Tucker Muldowney, the country boy from Oklahoma who gets into a California college on a debate scholarship. “This chicken farmer’s son,” as he ingratiatingly and endlessly refers to himself, is one of only two students to get such a scholarship. The other lucky recipient is Monica Tomanski (Jami Gertz, ending the eighties on a note of ignominy), a Chicago girl with a dark secret. Coach Charlie Nicholls (Roy Scheider) schools his debating rookies in the practice of turning on a dime to deliver either side of an argument, kissing up to the judges and, after delivering a heart-wrenching story of his poor old mother’s abuse at the hands of a back-street abortionist, the power of a really good lie. The team’s best liar is Garson McKellar (Tim Quill), scion of a Kennedy-like political dynasty. But the pressure of living up to the family name is beginning to tell on Garson. He wants out of the team. “How do you just walk away from debate?” asks a mystified coach. “Because I don’t love it like you do,” says the golden boy.

  After Garson is killed, saving Tucker from an oncoming car, the chicken farmer’s son and the Chicago girl, who have been sparring around with that old unresolved sexual tension thing, are paired together to go to Washington and represent their school in the National Debate Tournament in front of a selection of Supreme Court judges. They take on a pair of cold-blooded killers from Harvard who look set to steamroller them on the Abortion Is Immoral issue. They’ve got the facts, they’ve got the arguments, they’ve got the logic. But what they haven’t got is someone who’s had an abortion and never told anyone till that minute. Monica delivers a teary-eyed repudiation of Roe v. Wade and the responsibility it puts on women. She does such a powerful job that a crippled girl stands up and applauds. Then the chicken boy wraps up the argument. Pacing the floor in his shirt sleeves, his button eyes sending laser lights of truth into the souls of the potential baby-killers in the audience, he works himself up into a frenzy, bemoaning the moral breakdown of the country, climaxing with a quote from “my good buddy Dostoevsky.” The Harvard men are crushed under this tide of righteousness and the movie ends with the chilling image of Tucker and Monica running down the steps of the Supreme Court, making their way toward the White House. Help!

  11

  End of an Era

  Slackers, Students, Pre-teens, Post-twenties, Kids and Clueless

  A funny thing happened on the way to the nineties: the generation who cheerfully accepted cynical cinematic representations of themselves and their lives grew up and rejected movies that attempted to depict them in a realistic and sympathetic light. Though Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) played—along with Nirvana, the Lollapolooza mudbath and Douglas Coupland’s bumper-sticker compendium Generation X—a crucial part in the cultural confluence that forced Motley Crue into hacking off their hair and attempting to cultivate goatees, films aimed at a young-ish audience found few takers and much derision. Why should this have been? Weren’t the legions of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 pop-culture fluent to the extent that they were more comfortable in the presence of a small screen radiating images of The Brady Bunch than they were around their own fractured families? Perhaps. But a quick glance down the shopping list of accepted Gen-X characteristics reveals, nestling between minute attention spans, heavy irony, heavier ennui, fear of the future and resentment of the wasteland of a world bequeathed to them by their stoner parents, distrust of the very same media that suckled them.

  Commercials, sitcoms, rock videos, news shows and movies; they were all the same. They all wanted to sucker you in, spray soft drinks down your throat and stick sneakers on your feet. The ridicule and disgust that greeted the first, faltering attempts to market products to suit the perceived needs of the almost-growns proved that the unthinkable had occurred: the audience had got smarter. In fairness, it has to be said that the advertising campaigns in question (Subaru’s “It’s like punk, except it’s a car!” and Coke’s experimental fizzy drink, OK, with its Dan Clowes artwork) would have been laughed off screens and left on shelves by consumers of any generation and any culture in any stage of civilization at any time. Ever. Add to this lingering mistrust of the media the fact that of the approximately 45 million Americans included within the parameters of the Gen-X definition, probably over 75% were either oblivious to or resentful of the label and it becomes apparent why movies claiming to speak for the frustrations and aspirations of twentysomethings were greeted with no little suspicion.

  Ben Stiller’s film Reality Bites (1994), whose origins bore no taint of contrivance, appeared in its finished incarnation as if it had been assembled by cyborgs programmed to display Gen-X traits. It featured overeducated eggheads (Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke) failing to hold down joke jobs, it featured ironic worship of seventies kitsch (courtesy of Janeane Garofalo, the peevish woman of pop culture), it featured dysfunctional families, distrust of the demon media (as personified by Stiller’s faux-MTV exec who is innocently complicit in the co-opting of videomaker Ryder’s untarnished vision), flannel and goatees. The movie poster featured its three stars posing somberly in front of a wall spattered with graffitied buzzwords: sex, love, jobs, money. Though the film was charming and well written (plus, it took Winona Ryder out of crinolines and into contemporary mode), its assumption of generational commonality turned off more than it attracted. In fact, it turned them off to the degree that the majority of the audience who might have been relied upon to give Reality Bites a profitable opening weekend put their money down for the movie that came out at the same time, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

  A similar fate, in terms of low turnouts, greeted Cameron Crowe’s Singles (1992)—which was based in grunge mecca Seattle, featured an entire rehab ward’s worth of lumbering rock acts and Matt Dillon in the part that should have been his Jeff Spicoli. All of those ingredients failed to gel (though the center-staging of straights Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick didn’t help much) and the movie quickly fizzled. As did the likes of Threesome (1994), With Honors (1994) and Richard Linklater’s brilliantly realized exploration of the origins of the slacker species, Dazed and Confused (1993). In fact it wasn’t till the release of Pulp Fiction (the Porky’s of its day in as much as it altered the notion of what could be put onscreen in the name of entertainment and its influence could be felt in lesser works for years to come), that the twentysomething audience fully and completely embraced a movie as something that spoke to them. Here was cynicism, here was pop-culture overload but without the we’re-all-in-this-mess-together overtones that made some viewers think they were attending a college reunion with all the people they’d tried to avoid the first time around.

  If the audi
ence leaving their teens behind were less than thrilled by the movies that mirrored their progress, the kids entering double-digit–hood—and there were far fewer of them than there were in the eighties—were pretty much bereft of films designed to flatter, scare, move or amuse them. 90210 go-go boys Luke Perry and Jason Priestley, huge, internationally recognized teen stars, couldn’t pull their screaming legions of fans off the couch and into theaters for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) or Calendar Girl (1993). Married … With Children’s Oomph Girl Christina Applegate had modest success with Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (1991), an eighties movie out of time if there ever was one. Ethan Hawke, discomfort radiating from his every pore, found himself stranded in Corey territory with Mystery Date (1991), an After Hours–ish I-just-wanna-get-laid-why-is-this-shit-happening-to-me disaster. Christian Slater let his eyebrows do the talking one time too many in Kuffs (1992). Patrick Dempsey, after years of failing to get past first base with the female audience, tried his hand at action in Run (1991), notable for being one of the few movies to climax with its villain impaled on a mechanical rabbit. Slater and the aforementioned Dempsey starred in Mobsters (1991), which did for gangland what Young Guns did for the Old West, i.e., nothing. Fellow mobster Richard Booker Grieco, with his satanic eyebrows, committed big-screen suicide with If Looks Could Kill (1991). Sean Astin led a bunch of military academy brats against an unsuspecting mob of terrorist scum in Toy Soldiers (1991). The newly clean and sober Drew Barrymore’s panties fell off in Poison Ivy (1992).

  But while these movies were collapsing like undercooked souffles, the early nineties saw a sudden boom in an area that had been a dead zone in the previous decade. House Party was pretty much the only black teen movie of the eighties. But, in the wake of Boyz N the Hood, a glut of gangsta pics increased employment opportunities for young black actors.

  The other growth area was in preteen movies. Just as he had been at the helm of the adolescent explosion, so John Hughes was the king of the kindergarten. His first teeny titan was Macaulay Culkin, plucked from his deadpan scene-stealing in Uncle Buck and given Home Alone in which to run rampant. From there, Hughes’ nursery school expanded to take in Alison Porter in the hideous Curly Sue (1991), Mason Gamble in the horrifying Dennis The Menace (1993), Mara Wilson in the unnecessary Miracle on 34th Street (1994) and a couple of gurgling tots in the miserable Baby’s Day Out (1994). Rumors that he’s auditioning his next star via sonogram remain unconfirmed. Hughes’ success in the under-10 market flooded multiplexes with a new squad of child stars. Elijah Wood, Christina Ricci, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Brian Bonsall, Tina Majorino, Mara Wilson, Jesse Bradford, Jason James Richter, Thora Birch, and Gaby Hoffman were among the kids who could cry on cue.

  Then, in 1995, 10 years after The Breakfast Club, two movies were released that hinted at a Teenpic Renaissance. Larry Clark’s Kids was 24 hours of drinking, drugging, fighting and fucking in the lives of a group of thoughtfree Manhattan scumbags. Its exact opposite was Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, a pastel-shaded delight that was crafted to seem as if it had been stored in suspended animation since 1984. Heathers through the looking glass, Clueless asked the revolutionary question: what if the pretty, rich, popular girl wasn’t the evil witch? What if she was really, really nice? What if she didn’t make it her mission to lacerate the hopelessly uncool and uncoordinated new girl, but saw it as her civic duty to spread the wealth of her knowledge, friendship and taste? Not since Pretty in Pink has a teen film been graced by a star performance as accomplished as Alicia Silverstone, as Cher, delivers in Clueless. Whether throwing herself at the perfect new boy in school whom everybody but she realizes is gay or mocking her square stepbrother’s taste in “complaint rock,” Silverstone makes her every minute count. While the Kids ensemble is numbed by experience, Clueless’s Cher is like a beautifully accoutred, still shrink-wrapped toy doll; she doesn’t drink, doesn’t drug, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drive and doesn’t … well, just doesn’t. They were the dark and light sides of teen movies. Kids attracted controversy and lengthy critical wrangling. Clueless was an unexpectedly big box-office hit, scaring up an opening week take only a few pennies short of Kevin Costner’s unwieldy Waterworld.

  In the wake of those two films, 1995 saw a brief accompanying burst of teen movie activity. Angus was a fat version of Lucas. Hackers was to cyberspace what Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo was to hip-hop, i.e., nothing. Kevin Smith’s cruddy Mallrats tried to be both smart and stupid; unfortunately, the smart bits came off stupid and the stupid bits … okay, that’s not gonna work. The stupid bits were stupid but they weren’t … you know what I’m saying. National Lampoon’s Senior Trip was a doomed attempt to reanimate the Grossout corpse. Now and Then, the teenage female seventies Stand by Me, had a cute cast but scared off its audience with publicity material that indicated Christina Ricci was going to grow up to be Rosie O’Donnell.

  So, 1995? An indication of increased activity that will one day bloom forth into a whole new cinema of teen? Or an isolated burst of movies that happened to come out at the same time and target the same demographic but exhibit no tendency to spearhead a trend? Probably the latter. It’ll be a long time before there’s a teenage audience voluminous enough to dictate the direction of Hollywood, and it may be even longer before so many kids exhibit so little discrimination.

  * * *

  Whether you look back on it with fondness or anguish, whether you reveled in the food fights and crying jags or winced at the onslaught of shallowness, stupidity and affectation, you probably won’t live through another time like it. The eighties was the period when parents were away for the weekend for an entire decade, leaving the kids in charge of the movie industry. Suckers.

  12

  Don’t You Forget About Me

  Where Are They Now?

  We’re probably more au fait with the personal and professional lives of Tom Cruise and Demi Moore than we are with those of our own families. The same goes for Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, and Tim Robbins. But what of some of the others names mentioned in the preceding pages? Have the Nineties been good to them? Did they ever work again? Are they eligible for parole any time soon? The following list may help to confirm your worst fears.

  CURTIS ARMSTRONG

  Still playing Booger in Revenge of the Nerds movies. (Revenge of the Nerds: The Next Generation and Revenge of the Nerds: Nerds in Love which revolves around Booger’s marriage). His non-Booger employment includes roles in Tom Arnold’s awful Big Bully and Leslie Nielsen’s shameful Spy Hard. He supplies the voice of one of Savage Steve Holland’s animated Terrible Thunder Lizards.

  SEAN ASTIN

  Responsible for inflicting Pauly Shore on a mass audience in Encino Man, tugged at heartstrings in Rudy. He appeared in a supporting capacity in the highly-acclaimed Courage Under Fire.

  SCOTT BAIO

  Scott was most recently seen presenting the series Before They Were Stars and in Dick Van Dyke’s Diagnosis: Murder. His catalogue of small-screen work includes the short-lived Happy Days spin-off, Joanie Loves Chachi, series such as Charles in Charge and Baby Talk (a Look Who’s Talking TV ripoff), and the TV movie The Boy Who Drank Too Much.

  JUSTINE BATEMAN

  She’s done various TV movies and currently appears in the U.S. adaptation of the scuzzy British sitcom Men Behaving Badly.

  DAVID BEAIRD

  The director of The Party Animal attempted to create a Northern Exposure of his own with the quickly-extinct Fox series Key West.

  JENNIFER BEALS

  Won critical plaudits for her performance in husband Alexandre Rockwell’s film In the Soup. She received no such acclaim for her work in Rockwell’s segment of the anthology movie Four Rooms.

  JOSH BROLIN

  Appeared in David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster.

  PHOEBE CATES

  Married Kevin Kline. Her best film this decade remains Drop Dead Fred.

  KIRK CAMERON

  Went on to warm hearts in the WB sitcom Kirk.


  BOB CLARK

  The Porky’s auteur went on to establish a formidable body of work including Rhinestone, Turk 182!, From the Hip, and Loose Cannons.

  CHRISTOPHER COLLET

  Turned up as a rollerblading bad guy in the nutty Corey Haim wheeled-fascist fantasy Prayer of the Rollerboys.

  WES CRAVEN

  The veteran horror director’s name and reputation continue to thrive despite such titles as Shocker, Vampire in Brooklyn, and The People Under the Stairs. He’ll next attempt to skewer his oeuvre with Scream (formerly titled Scary Movie).