Pretty In Pink: Movie Review

Cause I review movies from thirty years ago. Don't judge me.

Honestly, I was expecting to be blown away by that John Hughes movie magic. Well, I wasn't. It was kind of mediocre.

I guess at that time, John Hughes was kind of the "magic director", where everything he made was pure gold (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, etc.). But I really had trouble with this one.

First of all, a short John Hughes general analysis (not just for this movie, but in general). John Hughes seems to enjoy experimenting with breaking the rules of screenplay writing. For instance, a fairly well known rule is that you NEVER address the audience/camera. Because that breaks the reality of the movie. Well, not only was Ferris Bueller all ABOUT addressing the audience and talking to the audience, he also did the same thing in Sixteen Candles (right before the King of Nerds starts making out with the popular party girl, he looks at the camera and says "THIS is getting interesting") AND there's even a short little nod to the audience in Pretty In Pink (when the girl at the prom is inviting Duckie over to her, Duckie looks at the camera incredulously, then looks back at the girl).

Another fairly well known rule is not to stereotype characters - characters should be three dimensional, not one-sided. But the John Hughes SCHTICK is to stereotype characters. In the Breakfast Club, you had the jock, the princess, the rebel, the nerd, and the weird emo girl. They of course fill out and dimensions are added by the end of the movie - that's kind of the whole point of that particular movie - but in other movies, not so much. In Sixteen Candles, you have the stuck up rich kids, the awkward nerds, the weird asian kid...... and a lot of them never fill out.

A lot of John Hughes movies seem to like putting "normal characters" (usually played by Molly Ringwald) in a sea of stereotypes. I think it's supposed to be because to that character, they ARE stereotypes - it's not reality reality, it's the main character's reality, and I THINK that's what is trying to get across. John Hughes uses that device to hit the audience over the head with the moral of the story.

But Pretty In Pink kind of bugged me.

First of all, a short synopsis of the film:

Andie is kind of a poor girl, living on the wrong side of the tracks. She makes her own clothes because they can't afford to buy her clothes. She has a deadbeat dad who doesn't have a job and her mom left them when she was quite young, but her dad still loves her mom even though he hasn't seen her since she left. Andie's best friend is Duckie, who she's known since they were children. Duckie is in love with her, but doesn't know how to tell her. Andie's other friend is the girl who works at the record store she works at, and she's gotta be I guess around thirty or forty in that movie, but they're still friends. Andie goes to a high school where the poor kids and the rich kids are all separated in different social groups. She likes a rich guy called Blaine who actually likes her back. They go out, but are shunned by both their friends because the rich kids hate the poor kids and vice versa. Feeling pressure from his rich friends, Blaine blows her off after he asks her to go to prom with him. Then Andie goes to prom anyway, escorted by Duckie, then somehow makes up with Blaine and Duckie finds another girl at the prom and somehow they all live happily ever after.

It was better put together than I made it sound.

The thing is, Blaine was supposed to be the love interest, but he's actually a really blah character. He's a really boring person. The only interesting thing he did was somehow send her a picture over a computer chat - which back in the eighties was not easily done. Besides that..... I mean, one minute he's saying "You know what, this could work. This will work. We can do this," and the next day he's avoiding her in the hallways and not returning her calls, and then he's all sad because she got mad at him. Uh, HELLO? YOU blew HER off, not vice versa!!!! Gosh de gosh, as my french teacher would say. And there's this part at the end where he delivers this one-liner to his friend that's supposed to be like sticking it to the man or something, but it's actually really lame.

It was actually kind of awkward for me, because Duckie was the best character in the entire movie, and I realize that it would have completely screwed up the moral of the story, but the whole movie I was rooting for Andie to end up with Duckie (even though the moral of the story would have changed from "Social class doesn't matter" or something like that, it would have changed to "stick with your social class because relationships that cross that line don't work out") but Duckie was actually such a better character than Blaine! Not just because he was funny, but because he was just all around the better man.

For instance, Andie and Duckie had a fight about Blaine because of the whole social class issue, but Duckie forgives her and escorts her to the prom anyways. Then when Blaine comes up and apologizes to Andie, and Andie's looking back at him, she looks pleadingly at Duckie. And rather than Duckie getting mad at her again, he says "You came to this prom alone." And he lets her go to him.

Duckie was also hilarious, and Andie was almost constantly mad at him, but he's awesome. For instance, he's trying to figure out how to tell Andie he loves her, and he starts like singing a song really loudly and dancing around Andie's room. And when Duckie got thrown into the girl's washroom by the guys he pissed off that were bigger than him, at first he's about to run out of the room, then he stops and looks around. "So, this is what it's like in here? What the heck?! Look at all this stuff! We don't have this stuff! Doors on the stalls! A candy machine! (pointing at the tampon dispenser) I'm not leaving until I see the principal in here right now! This is ridiculous!"

And Duckie was the character in the movie that was the most developed. You see him goofy, you see him angry, you see him in despair. He's a character that you can actually understand as a human being. You'd think Andie would be the most developed character, but it was Duckie. And he doesn't get the girl. Come one.

But the thing is, I am prepared to believe that Blaine actually had some character development, but that all the scenes that DID develop him just ended up on the cutting room floor (even though they kept in Duckie's random irrelevant musical interlude that has nothing to do with anything). It seems to me that John Hughes focused a lot more on Duckie than Blaine. Which would be fine, if Duckie were one of the main protagonists. But he's not, in fact he kind of plays the part of an antagonist through a bit of the movie. Blaine should be one of the main protagonists, but he's boring and not very likeable. So it's a very unbalanced movie that way.

What me and my mother decided was that Blaine was actually probably supposed to be kind of an intellectual rich kid - he did the cool thing on the computer chat, and he was an heir to a large electronics corporation. He's also rather awkward, like he doesn't quite fit in with the cool kids, but was thrown in with them because of his social status. All these threads were there, but they didn't serve any purpose to his character. They were just..... there. And as a result, his character simply didn't make a lot of sense, and was generally unlikeable (though he does have one or two charming moments).

Another thing that didn't make a lot of sense in that movie was the catty rich girls. Sure, Andie's clothes were handmade and weird and such, but it's kind of implausible that the main rich girl would go out of her way to insult her - it would make more sense if she just didn't care, if they sort of ignored each other. But the rich girl actually went out of her way to insult Andie, whispering insults to her in Calculus even though she didn't even know Andie's name, and then acting insulting to her while she and Blaine are there, and being insulting in gym..... she just seemed to go out of her way to be catty and nasty to her, which seemed weird because it would just make more sense if they just sort of didn't care about each other.

There were just a few pieces in that movie that were kind of lazy and strange. Kind of a mediocre movie, all in all. I give it 3/5 stars.

There, my longwinded review.

Thank you for your time.