Valley Girl (1983)

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Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

My journey into Nicolas Cage begins not with a bang but a whimper.

You probably didn’t know Nic Cage was even in this movie. That’s because he’s only in one scene and has no lines. Here it is right here:

Didjaseehim?! At 1:20! That’s it! That’s all he does in the movie! His character is just called Brad’s Bud! He didn’t even have a name!

This is Cage’s big screen debut, which is kind of awesome. I mean, it just goes to show that even A-list actors come from humble beginnings. I imagine the trajectory of fame probably goes something like this:

1. Fry cook in real life
2. Fry cook in a movie
3. Bang Elisabeth Shue in a drunken haze
4. Ghostrider

Personally, I haven’t gotten past the ‘fry cook in real life’ stage, but I got to watch Elisabeth Shue get banged so that’s pretty good too.

Here’s some trivia about this movie:

Fast Times at Ridgemont High was written by Cameron Crowe, who as it turns out, is not actually a crow but a human being.

Sean Penn won the Academy Award or something.

During the watching of this film last night, I drank an entire bottle of sauvignon blanc followed by 3 delicious Yards Tavern Ales followed by making blackout pancakes. Blackout pancakes are pretty much the same thing as regular pancakes except you don’t remember making them.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is okay. Not great. Not terrible. There’s a bunch of good nudity in it that really stands the test of time. Sometimes you watch an 80’s movie and some chick flashes her boobs and they’re all pointy and weird. Total 80’s boobs. But then you get Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason Leigh whipping out those teenage tatas and they look as good in 2013 as they did in 1982. Timeless titties, those two ladies have. They should take Penn's Academy Award away, chop it up into 4 equal parts and then give it to those boobs. Did I mention there's boobs in this movie? BOOBS! 

The pace of the movie is slow compared to, say, Crank 2: High Voltage and Judge Reinhold shows all the emotional range of a nutcracker doll. Judge Reinhold is so uninteresting you're actually transfixed by how boring he is. It's like being hypnotized.

Speaking of Crank, don't you think they should make a new Crank movie? They can call it Crank 3 at Ridgemont High. Here’s the plot: You thought Chev Chelios was dead. Well now he’s back and this time, he's pissed. Chelios must go undercover at a suburban California high school in the 80’s. He does blow with Damone, gets into a blazing gun fight with Mr. Hand and then bangs Stacy. Then Nicolas Cage is all like “What the fuck, man? Why am I barely in this fuckin’ movie?” and he channels his inner Cageiness to delivers a 10 minute long monologue about the ephemeral nature of youth. All the girls at Ridgemont drop their panties and beg for Cage’s seed. “No!” says Cage, “For it is my seed that gives me such magnificent power!” Then he explodes Brad by shooting a lightning bolt out of his hand. Then Phoebe Cates whips out her boobs again, this time for a 20 minute jogging scene where we follow her in slow motion as she runs laps around the gymnasium. Oh – and while all this is going on, Chelios’s heart stops working and he dies. The end.

Come to think of it, nothing about Fast Times at Ridgemont High is fast. The times aren’t fast. The Ridgemont isn’t fast. The high’s not fast. And also that Crank 3 joke I made in the last paragraph would’ve probably been funnier if I chosen Fast and the Furious instead. Then I could’ve made a Fast and the Furious Times at Ridgemont High joke, which I guess I just made anyway so...ya. Go me.

I think the real reason I wasn’t into this movie was that I didn’t really relate to any of the characters. It doesn’t really matter that all the clothes and pop-culture references are SOOOOO dated because I don’t imagine being a teenager then to be all that different than being a teenager now. Except its super easy to get porn now so that is probably awesome. I mean, it’s awesome for me and I’m 30. If I was 13 and just discovering masturbation it’d be like Sir Walter Raleigh sailing into El Dorado. THE FABLED PORN CITY IS REAL! What I’m saying is teenagers, like all people, are real and complex and multileveled and movies like Fast Times tend to boil the teenage experience (or, more than that, the human experience) down to flat, one-dimensional caricatures: The nerd. The cheerleader. The jock. Etc. It’s difficult to empathize for the people on the screen when they’re only representing such a small faction of what should be making them interesting. So the comedy, drama, awkwardness, triumphs – almost all of it – falls flat. And almost none of it rings true. At least not for me.

Look, I’m not saying the movie was bad. It certainly wasn’t. I’m just not going to watch it over and over and over again...

...except for the Phoebe Cates pool scene, of course.

 3 Cageheads out of 5.