Nineteen Years Went Under The Bridge Like Time Was Standing Still

I just finished watching Pretty in Pink. I think it has to be about ten or fifteen years since I've seen it. I picked up a tape from the free table at my last job and it has been languishing under the VCR in its cellophane wrap for about two years now. It stared out at me while I watched various entertainments, taunting me, hissing Contend with me! Face the fact that I might suck, and how! Also, I just feel like my generation puts enough masturbatory nostalgia out into the world, and I should in this little way be a conscientious objector. Boys and girls, it does suck, and how! I suppose I am the last one on earth to realize this. I guess the chief thing I'm taking away from this is that Molly Ringwald is not a good actress. She acts, it turns out, solely with her bottom lip. I did not remember this. I think I thought she was Audrey Hepburn in granny boots. Perhaps this is why Betsy's Wedding, etc. She can't act! But this does not mean my idolization was in vain. She's still amazing to stare at, and she seems like a real girl, not something created in a Disney test-tube, and Paramount let some band (the Rave-Ups) play in the film because she liked them, not because they thought they could sell records on the synergistic label. And unlike the ladies Duff and Lohan, she didn't demand, even though she could actually sing (now my mania is known), to parlay her teen queendom into poptartlet stardom. It's still true that she gave hope to all the little disgruntled but not yet cynical thirteen-year-olds who would soon don their own thrift store dresses to get all worked up about Unrest and the patriarchy. They shot the thing in Chicago, too, at Wax Trax and some club and setting scenes in Annie Potts' character's kitsch Chinatown lair, which sort of makes the movie an Adrian Tomine story with even less traction and worse dialogue. Verdict: They Still Don't Make Teen Movies Like They Used To, And Putting Death Cab For Cutie on The OC Doesn't Make Up For It.

Also: how strange to watch a John Hughes movie at home in the evening and not on channel 11 through dust motes and self-loathing at 3 in the afternoon on Sunday, so that shit and fuck are not dubbed over with socks and fudge. Piquant!