That’ll never be me! That’ll never be me!
At the end of the 80s, movies were slowly transforming from happy endings to unpredictable ones. For nearly a decade audiences were spoiled with guarantees of the guy getting the girl at the end. You couldn’t throw a tiny pebble without hitting a feel good ending. Enter Cameron Crowe’s first big dive into filmmaking in 1989 with Say Anthing…
Lloyd Dobler is a man without ambition. Dobler has hope for his future, but he hasn’t made any plans to pin him down. A good kickboxer, who is loved by many, Lloyd only has one true goal in his simple life; he wants to date Diane Court. Court is one of the most popular girls in school that has her future already planned, and that future is quite bright. When Dobler throws caution to the wind and gets Court to go to a party with her, they slowly begin to fall in love. The problem with the love is that their two different worlds don’t seem to fit, even though they really want it to. Fighting off their friends and parents, and the pressures of their lives, Dobler and Court do their best to stay together, even when Court has to journey to England to attend school.
There are so many things I want to say about this Crowe film. As a younger bloke in high school/college, I appreciated Crowe’s vision of true love blooming between two different worlds. This is somewhat of a modern day Romeo & Juliet, but without the strange lingo and death at the end. This film gave so much hope to lovable losers across the world and inspired people to take chances. Crowe has always seemed to tap into the pulse of the American psyche and the wrong/right morals of his viewers. What makes this film different from every other 80s love story is that Crowe doesn’t simply make the improbable happen out of nothing. Crowe takes everything human about each character and cultivates the improbable into a probability that makes complete sense. Lloyd and Diane may come from two different worlds, but Crowe’s single trait of ‘compassion’ in both characters develops and drives them together. It’s quite touching seeing the two cultivate and merge together into one love (as corny as that sounds).
Crowe has always gone that route with the human element. Compassion has driven many of his popular characters, including Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire. An agent who has everything is suffering for the one human element he doesn’t possess as a money driven character; compassion/understanding. Crowe has perfected this process since Say Anything… and what comes out of it generally is something very touching and compelling. Of course, he can’t have such love between two different characters without having the right actors to lead those roles. John Cusack’s nervous, yet calm/cool, Lloyd Dobler is likable and unpredictable. For a character that doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, Cusack makes certain that the viewers understand that the one certainty he does have is dating Diane Court. Diane Court, played by Ione Skye, is shaped into a prim and proper girl that Skye completely embellishes and understands. Skye plays Court like she should and understands that Court’s life is restricted with expectations. Both characters are played perfectly within a small world they create thanks to Cusack and Skye. Without these actors the movie probably doesn’t work.
So what makes this movie so memorable after 20 years? Well, you can throw out the tacky 1989 styles and take this entire formula for the story and apply it perfectly to life, now. The story has such longevity that even in 2009 people can respect and enjoy what the actors and Crowe have thrown together; that thing that was thrown together is ‘hope and compassion’ and that pretty much fits in any decade.
Now, shifting gears a bit to what the DVD does to make it more worth your while. The audio and video has been improved from the original DVD (which I bought a while ago). It’s not quite up to the impressive par that a North by Northwest: 50th Anniversary Edition, but comparing Hitchcock’s classic to this would be insane. Anyway, the video and audio are great and the features you get are quite cool. Here’s what you’re looking at:
– Commentary by Cameron Crowe, John Cusack and Ione Skye
– A Conversation with Cameron Crowe
– I Love Say Anything…! Featurette
– Five Alternate Scenes
– Ten Deleted Scenes
– Thirteen Extended Scenes
– Vintage Featurette
– Theatrical Trailers & TV Spots
– Photo Gallery
While you get two more featurettes with the blu-ray version of this film, it’s still nice to see two additional featurettes on the DVD. Both are good and the rest of the special features are quite complimentary of the movie. For a DVD special edition it’s still darn impressive.