Between watching I Love You, Beth Cooper and introducing Pretty In Pink for Harbourfront’s Retro Reels series the other day, I’ve been thinking a lot about high-school movies from the 1980s. Too much, probably.
And what I’ve concluded is that the subgenre of teen pictures – created by Amy Heckerling in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, then machine-tooled to a fine gloss by John Hughes with Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club – has no place in our pop-culture moment. After My So-Called Life and Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars and even Gossip Girl, we’re so over the angsty, synth-tracked travails of overly moussed, fussily wardrobed Molly Ringwalds and Ally Sheedys.
But we can’t let it rest.
See, I Love You, Beth Cooper is based on a book (by former Simpsons writer Larry Doyle) which plays out a classic nerd-meets-girl scenario with real-world consequences. It turns Hughes’s stock characters into real people – more or less – and attains surprising gravity by the final chapters.
Doyle wrote the screenplay himself, but somehow none of the tenderness, insight or comedy made it onto the screen. Which is really weird, because director Chris Columbus’s adaptation is as obsessively faithful to its source as his two Harry Potter movies, right down to retaining huge chunks of dialogue. Well, almost an off-stage act of penile groping has been downgraded to a deep kiss in post-production, presumably to secure that all-important PG-13 rating.
But that change is precisely why Columbus – who actually worked with John Hughes back in the day, directing the prolific producer’s script for Home Alone – is the wrong man to make a contemporary teen movie.
Yes, it’s very clever that he cast Alan Ruck – still instantly recognizable as Ferris Bueller’s panicky sidekick – as Dennis’s warm, sensible dad. It shows us that characters from John Hughes movies can grow up and overcome their insecurities. But the point of I Love You, Beth Cooper is supposed to be that the movies themselves are what really need overcoming – and Columbus spends the whole thing trying to deny or bury that point, and turn it back into the kind of banal, generic cookie-cutter product that teen audiences left behind in the ’90s.
Incidentally, if you want to see a good, reasonably recent teen comedy, take a look at Mike Mitchell’s Sky High. Yes, it’s a Disney comedy about a high school for super-powered teenagers, but it’s also the best repurposing of the John Hughes formula I’ve seen in years, right down to the soundtrack made up of ’80s pop covers. They Might Be Giants covering Devo? That’s my happy place, right there.
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