"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:

"Fair is fair!"

Here is a film whose iconography is instantly recognizable as emblematic of the 80's, however, most people would have trouble naming the movie. THE LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN (1985) tells the story of pretty young things Billie Jean (Helen Slater) and Binx (Christian Slater in his first movie role, with blonde hair!), two Texan kids who unwittingly become embroiled in a media circus when they flee a shooting and go on the lam. Billie Jean is an ordinary girl who looks after her younger brother, Binx, who harbors an abnormal attachment to his scooter and a hatred for hot Texan weather. When a neighborhood thug destroys Binx's beloved scooter, Billie Jean tries to extract restitution from Mr. Pyatt, the thug's father, who almost rapes her. Binx defends his sister by shooting Pyatt and the pair must go on the run, along with a couple of Billie Jean's little friends.

While dodging the law, Billie Jean makes her ragtag bunch of fugitives adhere to a strict code of ethics. "We may be outlaws," she says, "But we're not crooks." They leave IOU's in stores they rob and rescue hapless children along the way. She meets an asthmatic filmmaker named Lloyd who is so besotted with her that he films her manifesto and stages his own abduction in service of her cause. He also introduces her to the film "Saint Joan" and Billie Jean immediately chops off her long golden locks, styling herself as a modern-day Joan of Arc. She becomes an overnight sensation, pursued by the media and idolized by hundreds of teens who copy her signature haircut. There are plenty of action-filled chases and tender moments before the inevitable big showdown, and happily these likeable characters get the satisfying ending they deserve.

This film preceded NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994) by almost a decade, so it is interesting to see the progression of the media's cult of the criminal from the early 80's to current examples, both fictional and real. I have no doubt that Billie Jean's journey provided some inspiration for Oliver Stone's portrayal of Mickey and Mallory. But this is a far tamer picture, backed by a great soundtrack (Pat Benetar's "Invincible" and Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell" are used to great effect), cool sets (including those perennial 80's favorites, the mall, the beach, and the neon lights of the city at night), and adorable actors (keep an eye out for Yeardley Smith, famously known as the voice of Lisa Simpson). However, the only lasting impact of this film is in the iconic image of Helen Slater as punk gamin, preternaturally beautiful with her luminous green eyes and blonde hair cropped boy-short: the face that launched a thousand haircuts.

Overall, not a bad film, worth seeing for a look at the decade's best pixie cut. But once you've watched it once, you probably won't want to see it again. 3/5 stars.

HERE IS THE SCENE WITH THEIR ESCAPE FROM THE MALL:

"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: