Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1981)

 

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

I am struggling with my review of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”. Or more precisely, I am struggling with my opinion of this movie. It sounds like something that should be great. A teenage movie about high school children going through all those awkward things teenagers deal with: friendships, sex, jobs, school and an undefined future. Irresponsibility and doing things for the heck of it. Since “American Graffiti” this has been the recipe for fun, if juvenile, movies. “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” has a cast that is sort of a who is who of the eighties and a very neat production value. Why do I then sit back with a “meh” feeling?

I have spent a few days contemplating that and my best answer is a complete anachronism: “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” must have been made by an AI!

The AI was fed with all the ingredients such a film should have: A stoned surfer dude, the shy, inexperienced guy, a know-it-all, the neighbors daughter, the experienced girl, a bit of school, but only enough to present the really intolerable teachers, a bit of sex, not too much mind you, just some breast here and there, as few parents as possible, a party and some sport game to bring the school together. Preferably use some up-and-coming actors, but for heaven’s sake not real teenagers. You cannot miss. Problem is, it is not funny, and I care only minimally for the characters. I think I smiled once (when Brad wanks off to a dream of Linda and she walks in on him, very juvenile), but instead of developing the joke, it just stops there.

It is a fairly chaotic movie, mostly based on vignettes, so a summary can only be sketchy. We follow a group of high school students from Ridgemont High, but since almost all of them work at the local mall, most of the movie takes place there. Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Linda (Poebe Cates) are friends and spend their time at their food stand discussing boys and particularly sex. Stacy has a one-night stand with an older guy who immediately after disappears and Stacy then hooks up with Mark “Rat” (Brian Backer). Rat has a biology class with Stacy and a serious crush on her. He works as an usher at the mall cinema and after some coaching by his dodgy, know-it-all friend Damone (Robert Romanus), he works up the courage to invite her out. When he does not want to have sex with Stacy, she is disappointed and jumps on Damone instead. He makes her pregnant and then ditches her. Stacy’s brother Brad (Judge Reinhold) messes up a number of jobs until he comes into his own saving a 7-11 from a robbery. Surfer dude Spicoli (Sean Penn) makes poor friends with the tough history teacher, Mr. Hand (!) (Ray Walston), but they make up in the end. Also, he wrecks football star Jefferson’s (Forest Whitaker) car.

Yeah, that is sort of it. The vignette format means that it is all a bit disjointed and I had some difficulty working out the point of some of the characters, until I realized that the characters or the scene is there because it is part of the formula. There is no true rebellion anywhere, very little development of character, most scenes are so exaggerated they lose resemblance anything I would recognize, but worst of all, it is not funny.

In many ways this all sounds very much like “American Pie” around 20 years later, but despite being not less juvenile, it was actually fun and, crazy as it sounds, it saves it. No such mercy for “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”.

The most amusing element of the movie is the game of spot-the-star. Half the characters went on to have great careers and even those who did not are quite recognizable from other movies in the eighties. There is even a short part for Nicolas Cage.

I keep coming back to how similar and yet completely different “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” is to the previous movie I watched, the Danish movie “Kundskabens træ”. Despite taking place in the fifties, it was completely recognizable, it used real teenagers who were hardly actors and had both a deeply sincere story to tell and the hilarity of teenage pranks that were actually funny. Everything “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” does not even though they cover exactly the same territory.

“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was disappointing, but probably mostly because I expected so much more. It is a movie I wondered why I never heard of it and now I know why.