Word: ridgemont
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years ago David Mamet beheld Art Linson (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) across a Manhattan dinner table. "David," Linson recalls saying, "now that you have just won the Pulitzer for Glengarry Glen Ross, don't you think the right career move would be to do a remake of a TV series?" Mamet was faced with correcting a familiar flaw of biographical drama: "That something is true does not make it interesting. There wasn't any real story. Ness and Capone never met. Capone went to jail for income tax evasion, which is not a very dramatic climax. So I made...
...like reruns already. You Again (Jack Klugman as a divorced father) and Tough Cookies (Robby Benson as a Chicago police detective) are about as dumb and hackneyed as the genre gets. CBS's Fast Times, though based on a smart, funny movie about high school life, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, is nearly as lame. The problems start with the casting. As Spicoli, the spaced-out surfer played hilariously in the film by Sean Penn, Dean Cameron projects nothing more than a 5-o'clock shadow; a baby-faced Sean Penn lookalike, Patrick Dempsey, plays Damone, the school's cool...
...rules as a pseudo-intellectual guru over his class is hilarious. So is Lane's battle against the unrequited love songs that invade his car stereo. These gags play on the real perceptions of teenage life in a surreal way, like the better moments of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But most of the gags are borrowed from the more common genre of teenage film. They are simple improbable cartoon slapstick like when Lane's brother builds a space shuttle, or when Lane's food walks away from him. This brand of humor is only remotely cute...
...film about the tough life of reform-school inmates, they determined to refer not to life but to all the other movies that have preceded them down melodrama's last mile. Sean Penn (memorable as the spaced-out surfer in last year's Fast Times at Ridgemont High) plays the youth who recognizes his own decency and sensitivity about two hours after the audience has been tipped to it. Penn is fine; so are most of his companions in misery. But waiting for this film to embrace every known generic cliché is like serving an indeterminate sentence...
Slab Boys is drawing an uncustomary Broadway audience, many in leather jackets and punk haircuts, perhaps because the cast features leading exponents of baby-faced macho: Kevin Bacon (Fenwick in the movie Diner), Sean Penn (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Jackie Earle Haley (Breaking Away) and Val Kilmer...