Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

I'm down with 80's teen movies. The John Hughes canon, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, River's Edge, hell even Back to the Future is kind of a teen movie. It was a good era for the genre.

Cameron Crowe has written and directed several movies I absolutely adore, namely: Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky and Say Anything (also one of the great 80's teen movies).

And Amy Heckerling, maybe I'm not a huge fan, but Clueless is one I'm quite fond of, one of the best and funniest teen movies of the 90's.

So a head on collision between all three should be something right up my alley, especially since Fast Times at Ridgemont High has something of a klassik status. Turns out it kinda sucks, though.

Mostly, it's just not very funny. The characters are a bunch of cardboard stereotypes defined by only one character trait, and the the movie's idea of depth is to reveal that they also have a second character trait. Wow! So it's all goofy and broadly done, though not particularly amusing, and then somewhere in the middle it actually gets kinda serious at times, which is just fucking deadly.

There are a handful of laughs, but I was left pretty mystified as to why some people seem to cherish this one so much. Was it just because of Phoebe Cates's tits?