The Classics According to Keith - Valley Girl
Every Time I Die frontman Keith Buckley waxes cinematic on the more important films of our time. Sort of.
VALLEY GIRL (1983)
STARS : Nicolas Cage, Deborah Foreman, Michael Bowen
THE PLOT : I have found myself up late at night wondering where on God’s great earth I could find a movie devoted to the irresistible charm of some dude with chest hair shaved precisely into the shape the opening your shirt makes when you don’t button the top three buttons. It was then I remembered Valley Girl, in which Randy (Cage), a punker from Hollywood, is smitten with a girl from the Valley named Julie (Foreman). Knowing he is not welcome among the preppies at a party she is attending, Randy sneaks into the bathroom and waits in the shower for Julie to come up and do her makeup. Just imagine how different the story would be if she had come in and took a vicious shit. But alas, she is smitten with him as well, and for about an hour-and-a-half he creeps up on her in similar fashions. However, her stuck-up Valley friends soon convince her he is trouble, so she dumps him and, much like me on all of my birthdays, he gets hammered and stumbles around town, weeping. But his punker friends convince him he needs to pick himself up by his Doc Martin bootstraps and win her back. He decides to sneak up on her at her prom. Then he kicks her new boyfriend, Tommy (Bowen), in the dick and throws some food. Somebody’s getting’ laid!
THE POINT : Director Martha Coolidge has no compunction about making this a very obvious re-telling of an age-old Shakespearean classic. At one point, Randy and Julie are even kissing under a marquee where the
name of the story-turned-movie-three-times-over is flashing in big red letters. They were the Romeo and Juliet of the 1980s. You know, that brilliant and eloquent story of poor boy meets rich girl, girl is enthralled by boy’s Mohawked friends, girl’s parents totally love the boy because they were once pot-smoking hippies, girl dumps boy to date a guy who likes hamburgers a lot, girl totally doesn’t want anything to do with boy anymore, boy ruins girl’s biggest night of her young adult life with violence, girl and boy get a cheap hotel room outside of Los Angeles. “For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”
