Meet the new kids. Same as the old kids. Having been a teen during the Golden Age of Teen Movies, I consider myself a connoisseur of teen movies. John Hughes would be proud of “Booksmart” (2019). Two nerdish girls who abstained from fun for the sake of high school achievement find out the day before graduation they could have had just as much gain without all the pain. BTW, there’s a big, unsupervised graduation party that night. Cue the hijinks. Director Olivia Wilde creates perfect cinematic stasis, bringing in sudden comic weirdness every time things get serious, and vice versa.
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In the 1980s, high school was actually more boring than we remember, but “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982) has been adopted as one of the definitive stories of my generation. So many scenes have been permanently absorbed into pop culture, they are too numerous to list (everyone my age has their favorites). The abortion and stoner subplots made it a controversial film at the time – and not worth an argument with my mom – so I didn’t see it in its entirety until several years after it came out. By then, I’d heard all the spoilers, but it didn’t matter.
Patrick Galen Dempsey, born eight days before me in 1966, was once a nerd. I have visual evidence from 1987 vis-a-vis “Can’t Buy Me Love.” In it he plays a high school geek who has a crush on the cheerleading captain. Through the familiar formula in which a nobody makes a deal to become a somebody and loses his moral compass but regains it through implausible soliloquies (while learning a valuable lesson about himself), we briefly see the essence of what would someday become McDreamy. It’s a good time-killer on a lazy afternoon. You’ll wonder whatever became of the cheerleader, Amanda Peterson.
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