"It was nothing. It still is nothing."

Prospective viewers of the film LITTLE DARLINGS (1980) should heed the warning on the promo poster: don’t let the title fool you. The standard summertime coming-of-age story is elevated to a new level by a raw, unvarnished production style. The focus is on fifteen-year-old girls Angel and Ferris, attending summer camp away from home for the first time. What a pleasure it is to see a film where the characters are played by young actors who actually look their age! While the film never misses a chance to revel in clumsy humor, it also treats the characters with dignity and refuses to allow the scenario to deteriorate into a farce. The tone of the story is pitch-perfect and will ring true with anyone who survived adolescence.

Angel is a rough tomboy who shuns cliquish chatter about boys and clothes. Ferris is a preppy princess too fragile for dirt and outdoor sports. Both are marginal characters in the camp society, and their position is exploited a devious sexpot named Cinder. She invents an amusing summer diversion for her bunkmates: they will wager on which girl will lose her virginity first. After Ferris emerges as the betting favorite, Angel rises to the challenge. Ferris and Angel cast about for targets of their seduction. Over-confident Ferris chooses the much-older sports coach. She bats her eyelashes, shows off her French, and fakes a drowning in an attempt to win his attention. Meanwhile, Angel gathers a posse and sneaks over to the boys’ camp on the other side of the lake. There she encounters bad-boy Randy, who has the same shag haircut as she does, and the sparks fly between them. The race is on to see who will land her man first.

Their bunkmates act as a Greek chorus, egging on the girls when they lose their nerve and offering well-meaning but misguided advice. There is much hilarity as they spout misinformation in the form of literary clichés, urban legends, old wives’ tales, and superstitions. Eventually they begin to feel guilty over their role in the bet. “Maybe losing your virginity should be a private thing?” wonders one of the girls. But it’s too late. Friendships, reputations, and a lot of cash are riding on what happens. The film's scenario represents the vested interest of peers and society in sex as performance. It offers an astute commentary on how the private sexual experiences of teens are appropriated by the public sphere, in the media, politics, and religion.

The film’s brilliance lies in recognizing that for Ferris and Angel, sex boils down to a struggle to validate their identity. Ferris suffers from a nebulous confusion between fantasy and reality. In acting out her Harlequin daydreams, she wants to shed her false sophistication and overcome her reputation as the annoying rich girl. Angel has inherited a crude view of romance from her cynical mother and is desperate to be seen as more than just a sex object. When she baits Randy with the accusation, “I’m not sexy to you,” she is devastated when he replies, “All girls are sexy.” Both Ferris and Angel fight to assert their personhood through sex, and each discovers in her own way that even when you are as close as you can possibly be to another person, you can still be very lonely.

The tragedy of modern adolescence portrayed in the film is that the girls are wise beyond their years and know more than they should. Both girls have a complicated family life. On Family Day, Ferris’s father breaks the news that her mother has left for Reno. “But people get divorced in Reno!” exclaims Ferris. Angel interrogates her mother about how she lost her virginity and receives a very disillusioning response. For the viewer, there is a constant nagging horror that the girls are too young to handle the situations they have been thrust into. When Angel has an epiphany and exclaims, “I’m not a woman!” we know it has come to her at a great cost.

There are many layers of meaning in LITTLE DARLINGS. Superficially it has a wholesome, unpretentious charm. It vividly captures the exquisite awkwardness of growing up. The plot is enjoyable, full of cutesy food fight, campfire songs, and oddball costumes. However, the self-conscious scenes of sun-kissed girls frolicking in the blooming outdoors lend an unsettling element of a pastoral Eden just waiting for the Fall. There is a creepy and titillating element of virgin sacrifice, reminiscent of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975), lurking just below the surface of the straightforward plot and making the film far more nuanced than it seems.

LITTLE DARLINGS is a film is about the loss of innocence in every sense of the word. It examines the way we construct our knowledge of the world, and depicts the appeal and agony of experience. The shocking betrayals and incredible heartbreaks the girls inflict on each other awaken them to the cold fact that life rarely turns out like you thought it would be. At the same time, the film is refreshingly untainted by the crude, clinical vulgarity masquerading as realism which mars contemporary teen dramas like THIRTEEN (2003). Finally, here is a film which fully recognizes that the cerebral and emotional effects of sexual initiation outlast the physical ones. By the time the summer is over, no one is interested in the outcome of the contest. The girls learn that in the bittersweet game of growing up, there are often no winners. 4/5 stars.

ANGEL MEETS RANDY AS PENELOPE RAIDS THE BOYS' ROOM:

"Stay away from ginger ale and tequila!"

Prom night is the lens through which the fantasies, hopes and dreams of middle-class suburban American teens are filtered. You know, like white slavery, gunplay, drugs, grand theft auto, assault, armed robbery...the usual. THE NIGHT BEFORE (1988) presents a highly unusual take on the quotidian prom-night experience regularly portrayed by films. In other words, this is not your average after-school special. In fact, this film is so peculiar and offbeat, that while the story itself is a little bit primitive, the overall effect is so hypnotic that you just can’t tear yourself away. I feel justified in giving away some plot details, since the tagline outlines most of the story and the promo poster itself has the audacity to reveal the central visual gag of the whole movie.

The movie opens with a groaning Winston, clad in a dirty tuxedo and rolling in the garbage in an unidentified back alley. He has a massive headache, has no idea where he is, and worst of all, he can’t remember anything that happened. It is clear that something did happen, something major. Unfortunately, everyone around him is very unhelpful. He wanders around the unfamiliar neighborhood, groping for answers, and stumbles upon some confusing clues: a parking ticket, a wad of cash in his inside pocket, the name Tito. Memories return in painful flashes, serving as clever narrative segues which gradually reveal the backstory to the audience.

Winston is a loveable naïf, so hopelessly geeky that his sole social accomplishment is serving as the president of the high school astronomy club. Through an amazing twist of fate, he is taking the most popular girl to the prom after she lost a bet with her friends. Tara is a glamorous sophisticate, the captain of the cheerleading squad and a teen model. She is horrified when she realizes that Winston refuses to recognize their arrangement as anything less than a regular date. He brings her flowers, keeps rambling on about what a great time they’re going to have, and promises her gun-toting cop father to have her back by midnight. This proves to be impossible when they get lost on the way to the prom. Winston unwittingly magnetizes his car’s compass (pretty stupid for an astronomy enthusiast) and they end up in the bad part of town.

Tara is outraged and demands that Winston fork over enough cash to pay for her taxi ride home. But she is unprepared to cope with the disastrous ramifications of Winston’s indefatigable optimism and earnest belief in the goodness of strangers. “90% of people are murdered by somebody they know,” he reassures Tara. “Do you know anybody here?” Despite this winning attitude, Winston makes a series of fatal errors in judgment, plunging the young pair into the squalid depths of the Los Angeles underworld. Their first misstep is entering the nearest building to look for a phone to call for help. The couple finds themselves in a scuzzy dance club, filled with an assortment of bizarre and dangerous characters.

The club’s band is played by the wonderful p-funk group Bootsy Collins' Rubber Band. Look for Bootsy himself playing an amazingly cool star-shaped bass guitar. The funk soundtrack is a slice of authentic 80’s counterculture and a welcome change from the familiar new wave hits. Winston props up his flagging courage with a gulp of alcohol from a random glass, which turns out to be spiked. Luckily, Winston is a fun drunk. Inspired by the music, he riles up the band to a fever pitch, takes Tara for a spin on the dance floor, and busts some highly impressive moves to the delightful song “Baby Boy.” He caps off his performance by collapsing on a table full of drinks. He tells Tara, “If I start acting stupid, tell me, okay?” By now, it's clear that he’s way past that point. Remember, he’s wandering around downtown with no car, no wallet, no date, and no memory of what happened last night after leaving the club.

Miraculously, he finds his car, only to have it stolen right out from under his nose by a quick and enterprising car thief. If this wasn’t worrying enough, it seems that everyone he encounters knows that a man named Tito is planning to “have it out with him” at dawn on Beacon Street. How do they know? Because the word on the street is that Winston is marked for his doom as “that dude in the white coat and pink carnation.” After extensive investigation and assorted misadventures, he discovers that he sold Tara “by mistake” into prostitution to an infamous pimp named Tito. The race is on to find Tara before the johns and the cops get to her first.

The script is hilarious, full of endless comical non-sequiturs and deux-ex-machinas. However, despite the exceedingly sordid subject matter, the film never really escapes G-rated territory and the boundaries of good taste. Lori Loughlin as Tara is gorgeous and charming, but it is Keanu Reeves’ performance as Winston that is truly a tour-de-force. For me, the touchstone of an excellent performance by a leading man is when I fervently wish that he was a real person so I could date him. Winston is so guileless, so genuine, so courageous, that I was truly sorry he was only fictional.

THE NIGHT BEFORE is different than the typical 80’s movie. Through the classic fish-out-of-water device, the film addresses prejudices of all kinds, from adolescent intolerance of nerds, to more serious forms of discrimination against the homeless and ethnic minorities. I love this film because it depicts an aspect of the decade which isn’t very glamorous, but it does so with such creativity, quirkiness, and good humor that it is stands alone in the history of 80’s films as something really special. When the end credits roll, it’s a wonder they even felt the need to include the disclaimer that “the characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictitious.” For goodness sake, I certainly hope so! 4/5 stars.

HERE IS THE SCENE WHERE WINSTON AND TARA DANCE:

"He's not just some guy, he's Bruno X!"

MODERN GIRLS (1986) has no direction, no moral lessons, no lasting impact, and nothing new to say. In that sense, it's kind of like life, if you think about it... which is what makes it awesome! Like a documentary of the misspent youth I never had, but wish I did. Three friends share an apartment in the glamorous party district of Los Angeles. During the day they work to make ends meet, but at night they live for the wild and exciting parties in the city's hottest clubs. Their nonstop debauch is interrupted one night when Kelly disappears with the car, at the same time that an annoying nerd named Clifford shows up looking for her at the apartment.

Margo and Cece trick him into driving them to the club, thus roping him into a series of improbable, dangerous, and exciting events. It's fascinating to watch the changing allegiances and relationships between the characters developing over the course of the night. The highs and lows, triumphs and defeats, follow such a natural and organic rhythm that the viewer can't help but get caught up in the aimless and meandering plot. Margo and Clifford turn out to be intense "frenemies" at first sight. Kelly is an unreliable stoner who finds herself in several tight spots and needs rescuing. Cece falls for the infamous rocker Bruno X and chases him all over town. Things are further complicated when it is discovered that Clifford bears an uncanny resemblance to Bruno X, and the gang must escape from passionate fans and angry music video producers. I did not realize that the same actor plays both Clifford and Bruno X until the film was over, so I guess I fit right into the target audience for this film.

What truly sets apart these throwaway films of the 80's and elevates them into the realm of classics is their flawless attention to detail. Just watch the hilarious method that the girls use to make coffee in the opening sequence, or the way the DJ refuses to take off his headphones while making out because "they help him concentrate." Even the "fake" songs sung by the fake rock star are sort of amazing! The club setting is the perfect showcase for a nonstop string of danceable hits with a lot of verve and edge. My favorites include "Iko Iko" by the Belle Stars and "No Promises" by Ice House. But the biggest highlight is Depeche Mode's haunting tune, "But Not Tonight." I have read that the band themselves do not like the song or the movie, which is really a shame! It's one of their best works and is used wonderfully throughout the film.

Behind all the wild hijinks is a strong undercurrent of melancholy angst. This story resonates with the experiences of many young people trying to find their way in the big city. All the cheesy bits and pieces come together perfectly to create a complete, sincere portrait of a certain time and place. And isn't that's what all great movies should do? It's a delightful film not to be missed. 4/5 stars.

HERE IS THE SCENE WHERE CECE GETS BRUNO X'S ATTENTION:

(Images credited to Jenny at http://www.moderngirlsmovie.com/)

"A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid!"

I picked up this DVD in the video store purely because of Matt Dillon's gorgeous mug on the cover, not really knowing what to expect and with pretty low expectations. I'm happy to say that I was pleasantly surprised, overwhelmed even. OVER THE EDGE (1979) is a gritty, honest portrayal of adolescent angst in suburbia. What else is new, right? Wrong! While the story is as old as the hills, I've never seen it portrayed on an earnest and epic emotional scale quite like this. It feels like a teenybopper Greek tragedy, and looks like something that Francis Ford Coppola might have filmed if he swapped some disillusioned midwestern kids for an Italian crime family.

The film follows the sordid events that transpire in the suburban planned community of New Grenada, Colorado. The families who moved here yearn to escape from the vice and crime of the inner city, but neglect to provide any diversions for the bored preteens of the town. Indeed, it seems like the adults are a little embarrassed to have the kids around at all and treat them like an unwelcome infestation, closing down their youth centre and trying to hide them away when some bigwig Texan investors come for a tour of the town. The kids get mad, get a little wild, get a little stoned, make some crimes, and eventually run amok in an all-out spree with predictably devastating consequences.

What sets this film apart are its flawless performances, production values, and screenplay, which approach the characters from the perspective of anthropologists, not paparazzi. Unlike the faux-teens often played by actors in their thirties, most of the young actors seen here are acting for the first time. The dialogue and action feels improvised and completely natural, and the actors play their parts with such forthrightness and sincerity that they seem like doppelgangers of characters three times their age. There are several very memorable scenes, particularly when Carl calls Johnny from a payphone to ask what happened to his brother, Richie. Johnny, who is mute, finds his own way to let Carl know what happened. This scene was so simple and moving that it broke my heart.

Every aspect of the film-making is top-notch. The sets are lovely in their stark simplicity, full of big iconic symbols of Americana, with acres of dusty lots and ubiquitous television sets blaring in the corner of almost every scene. The soundtrack is electrifying, lots of frenetic rock-n-roll mixed with a haunting instrumental score. Even the minor adult characters, often nothing more than cardboard cut-outs, are interestingly developed in this film. The plot unravels effortlessly to the inevitable bittersweet finale.

It's a special treat to watch Matt Dillon in his first ever movie role as the incorrigible Richie White. Director Jonathan Kaplan's commentary on the DVD includes some highly amusing anecdotes about what it was like wrangling with the young star on the set. It's not an overstatement to say that Matt Dillon had more sheer talent and authenticity than James Dean had at the same age.

Overall, a winning film, rough and raw and uncomfortable to watch, because it feels just a little bit too real. 4/5 stars.

HERE IS THE SCENE WHERE RICHIE AND CARL STEAL A CAR: