Word: blane
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...film, Judy Garland, while shouldering its burden, the wan, uneventful plot. It seeks not only happy endings but also happy beginnings, happy middles, happy everything in between. Yet its charms include six songs from the film plus eleven more from the same team, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane; a Disneyesque confection of Victorian houses; ice skating on a real-looking pond; a trolley that moves; and a lighted-up 1904 World's Fair...
...pretty acutely attuned to the exposed nerve ends of ordinary kids. Nice kids like Andie, a middle-class high school senior who plays nurse to her sad-sack dad (Harry Dean Stanton), puts up with the suffocating devotion of a funny dork named Duckie (Jon Cryer) and moons over Blane, a wealthy classmate (Andrew McCarthy) who maybe loves her back...
...ostracize poor Andie and Duckie (in their junk-punk-funk handmades), at base the picture is Love Finds Andie Walsh. And when Stanton must play a Judge Hardy on the skids, the psychodrama can get awfully wet. But within this familiar format, Hughes creates edge, surprise and romance. Blane and Andie's first chat, conducted on their school computer terminals, is a lovely '80s twist on meeting cute. Blane's snooty friend Steff (James Spader) could be a tired stereotype, but with his all-year tan, his hip-blase voice and his view of high school as a "career," Steff...