When he rings her up to invite her to a graduation party, Diane has to look up Lloyd’s picture in the yearbook to remember who he is but she is won over by his persistent charm and a curiosity about her fellow graduates and the social experience she missed out on through excessive studying. The basic plot of Say Anything… goes thus: following graduation, Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) decides to seize his last chance to ask out the seemingly untouchable Diane Court (Ione Skye). But even those were only a captivating aside whereas Say Anything… makes Mahoney every bit as important and fully-rounded as the younger characters. Only in Pretty in Pink did Hughes come close to such an interesting adult-teen relationship, in the touching scenes between Molly Ringwald and her father Harry Dean Stanton. Say Anything… focuses more closely on the father-daughter relationship between Jim Court (John Mahoney) and the apple-of-his-eye daughter Diane (Ione Skye), whom he spoils rotten and would do anything to please. Adult characters in John Hughes films were usually either bufoonish villains like Dean Vernon in The Breakfast Club and Dean Rooney in Ferris Bueller… or oblivious parents who could never hope to understand the importance of their offspring’s dreams, like Cliff Nelson in Some Kind of Wonderful. One of the most famous lines in The Breakfast Club is ‘When you grow up, your heart dies’ and few 80s teen films seemed interested in exploring adult viewpoints in any more depth than that. The most important and effective characteristic that sets Say Anything… apart as a more mature film is its inclusion of a fully-rounded, pivotal adult character. There is a sense of melancholy throughout Say Anything…, the feeling of a bygone era the details of which we were never privy to.
#Scenes like the famous say anything boombox scene movie#
This is a High School movie in which we never get inside the High School. The film is set during the summer following graduation which immediately eliminates staples of the genre such as the High School Prom or goofing off by the lockers. To begin with, Say Anything… opens at the end of High School. It differs significantly from the average High School film in several important ways. Say Anything… stands head-and-shoulders above most films in the High School genre as a realistic, sophisticated comedy-drama about the belated romance between a directionless but charismatic academic-underachiever and a studious, Oxford-bound but socially-inexperienced valedictorian. He followed this up by scripting Art Linson’s little seen The Wild Life but it was only a matter of time before Crowe got the chance to direct a film himself and, when this chance arrived, he pulled out all the stops to write as good a script as possible. He began by writing the script for Amy Heckerling’s great Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a raunchier precursor to the John Hughes ouevre which launched the careers of many future stars including Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Forest Whitaker.
But before all this, Crowe began his life in the film industry with a handful of teen pics. He also wrote and directed one of my favourite films of the 00s, the semi-autobiographical Almost Famous. Crowe is unfortunately best known for Jerry Maguire, a confused, draggy romantic comedy that throws itself emphatically into the mawkish sentimentality that Crowe’s best work so skillfully avoids.
The 80s film work of Cameron Crowe offers an excellent alternative to Hughes’ wish fulfillment movies-cum-music-videos. He was also involved in writing and/or directing many family/adult films that were every bit as enjoyable as his High School movies, such as Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck and the National Lampoon’s Vacation series. While he undoubtedly wrote and/or directed the most famous examples in his flawed but infinitely enjoyable films The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it would be lazy to attribute the whole High School genre to this one proponent (it is also worth mentioning that Hughes should not be thought of as only working within the teen genre. The 80s High School movie genre is often boiled down to just two words: John Hughes. Starring: John Cusack, Ione Skye, John Mahoney