Pretty in Pink (1986)

Hungarian title:
“Pink Dream”

Directed by: Howard Deutch

Written by: John Hughes

Starring: Molly Ringwald, Harry Dean Stanton, John Cryer

Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

Rating: PG-13

Pre-Conceived Notions: My first thought watching the trailer is that it’s going to be hard to separate John Cryer from his 2 1/2 Men character. I’m going to be expecting Charlie Sheen or Holland Taylor to pop out of the woodwork all throughout the movie. And then it just boils down to a typical ’80s John Hughes movie dealing with the same themes: teenage angst, status, sex, Molly Ringwald, etc. Two things I’m looking forward to seeing: a freaky-looking Annie Potts in a weird wig, and John Cryer having too much of a good time lip synching in a video store.

Why I Haven't Seen This Film: I’m not a John Hughes freak. Don’t his fans have names? If they do I can’t think of what they’re called. Hit me up in the comments if you know.

1 hour, 36 minutes later…: Aah, prom. So many memories. Especially my senior one. For me, it was basically a normal high school dance, except instead of getting funky and doing the worm and the Bartman in jeans and a t-shirt, people were doing all that stuff in formalwear. Maybe I was above it all in high school, or maybe I didn’t give a monkey’s about it, but I didn’t feel like it was a huge deal to go to prom alone. It could be because I actually brought three dates to prom because, y’know, I’m me, but seeing those people who went stag, it didn’t seem to faze them. In this movie? They act like prom could make or break somebody’s life! Maybe it could back then. Or, maybe I forget what it’s like being in high school, where everything is such a compressed, simplified microcosm of society, where people have to worry about popularity and wanting to fit in, and hormones and mystery meat and stuff like that, so everything is magnified one thousand percent.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. This movie was pretty good. It wasn’t really over the top like Sixteen Candles got in certain places, and there was a whole lot more action than in The Breakfast Club. It was sort of a mixture of the two. You have your themes of status and angst like in the Breakfast Club, and you’ve got the romantic end of things like in Sixteen Candles. Which reminds me: Is it just me, or did you get confused between James Spader and Andrew McCarthy? They look so much alike, it took me a while to notice that they were two different people. Maybe it’s the jet lag. Or the four doughnuts I had today. I’m going to blame it on the jet lag. Okay? Okay.

The thing I liked the most about this film is that it wasn’t entirely angsty. The film really addressed the whole topic of parents and how one goes about getting the support they need. She had the best father in the world, and her boss was as good as any mother figure she could have had. And Duckie was like a brother in a twisted sort of way. Y’know, I like Annie Potts in insane, out-there roles. It’s kind of a shame that she steered away from that when she got on Designing Women. ADHD anyone?

Final Thoughts: 5 slices of pizza out of 6. John Cryer stole the movie with a character you could root for, but always knew things weren’t going to work out for him; there was excellent chemistry between McCarthy and Ringwald, and a nice balance with the parental characters. And Molly Ringwald has above average clavicles. There. I said it.