Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Emilio Estevez, Mare Winningham, Rob Lowe
Well hey. If this is life after University/College graduation, I'm staying until I'm too old, senile, and rich to care about anybody and their pathetic apres-school lives. Or to worry about getting a job. All Hail the Unemployment Line!
This bratpack movie, the second I've reviewed here (the other is the Breakfast Club), is another 'character movie' where the plot is more about following the characters around than anything...you know, plausible. In other words, if you don't like any of the characters, you don't like the movie, and you've wasted three bucks renting it, even if you did get to talk to the cute blockbuster guy in the meantime...oh nevermind.
I had a few problems with this movie, which apparantly summed up the fate of College graduates in the 80's. My first problem: The ensemble cast. All fairly good actors, but in a character movie, it's better to have a smaller group of people than a whole passle of them. In this movie there were seven main characters, and a bunch of supporting roles. I had trouble remembering most of the names, and this doesn't happen to me often. Cutting down the cast by a few uneeded, pointless characters would have been a nice treat, but unfortunately, no one gets killed unexpectedly.
Not that I hated the movie, I just thought that it was a little too skittish, bouncing around from one loser to another completely losing its audience in the meantime. I must have said, "Which one is that?" so many times during the course of the movie...
Taking a look at the characters, I found it hard to pick a favourite, because they all seemed to lose integrity with every scene and become bigger losers then they were five minutes earlier. But what the heck: There's Leslie (Sheedy) who seems to be the most stable of the group. But her sanity simply means she gets to do very little other than have a sex scene with Andrew McCarthy. Speaking of Mr. McCarthy, he played Kevin, a morose, depressed, cynical 'journalist' who has a morose, depressing, cynical crush on Leslie. However, moving on in this sordid tale of lust and betryal, Leslie is firmly ensconced in the boring, overly political world of Alec (Nelson), the guy who made it with some blonde chick in the lingerie store and then came home to continually ask Leslie to marry him up to the point that he just became a big loser (I guess he was trying to fit in.). Demi Moore played Jules, a true loserette, who loses her job and then pretends she screwing her boss on the side. But her life is just a really big excuse to tease her hair, snort coke and wear gaudy jewlery worthy of the 80's hall of gaudy fame. Mare Winningham was Wendy, truly a self-destructive person, who dressed like a school marm, and put up with the drunken antics of Billy (Lowe). Lowe was also a big loser (and that's pretty much all I can say about him.) However, the biggest tremendous 'maxi zoom dweebie' of this movie would have to be Kirby (Estevez) who spends the ENTIRE movie chasing Andie MacDowell. That's it. That's his function. Oh, real plot integrity here, people.
This is a take it or leave it movie. If you happened to have graduated from college in the mid-80's, then maybe you'll understand this movie and all its deep little intricacies, which I'm sure MUST'VE been there, only they were too deep for any 90's child to actually get. However, if you didn't spend the first year of your life in the real world wearing pouf skirt and having BIG hair, then you'll understand the general 'huh?' feeling I get from this movie.
My advice: If you're a loser, you'll feel right at home.