Synopsis
The romantic dark comedy follows Lane Meyer after his girlfriend dumps him for a more popular guy. After many unsuccessful attempts to win her back, he decides that suicide is the only answer until he befriends a beautiful foreign exchange student who helps him turn his life around.
This 1985 comedy was written and directed by Savage Steve Holland (yes, that is his actual name — imdb.com / google.com for details), and done so brilliantly. In the same vain as Holland’s other Cusack comedy, One Crazy Summer (that’s a must-see as well), the storyline is lighthearted, simple and just damn funny. Seeing Cusack go through hell and back to win a girl’s heart that dumped him (who hasn’t gone through that in high school) really opened up for some off-beat comedy. For example, as Lane is torturing himself with ways to win Beth (Amanda Wyss -grrr, baby!) back he meets wonderful characters like two Japanese street racers, one who speaks no English, while the other mimics Howard Cosell; he also runs into a bitter paperboy (who reappears over and over) and Chuck Mitchell’s slobbish Rocko, who carries over his Porky attitude from the movie of the same name. Cusack’s character is actually the only sane, normal character in the bunch, which makes this story work very well and it magnifies the wacky moments.
Credit Holland for understanding how comedy works. He basically laid out a simple story concept of a guy losing his girlfriend to a bully. Cusack’s character’s quest from point A to point B was to get her back. Along the way, Holland inserted these little reoccurring moments that kept the simplicity of the original story going and going. It made you laugh and made you forget that this story was nothing special. That’s the genius of it all, though, because the comedic, off the wall moments work and don’t feel like ‘extra’ stuff. Anyway, Holland did a superb job with this film and it’s worth a viewing, though it’s highly predictable.
It does have a badass 80s montage included, so you got that to look forward to.
Now, as for the Blu-ray portion of the film, it was lacking. The majority of the film had a lot of graininess and artifacts included. Much like the Blu-ray of Rain Man, this one seemed to be a quick transfer to HD without a lot of careful thought in the clean-up job. While there isn’t a lot of color banding to be had, there are just gobs and gobs of grain and artifacts. Now, when the shots aren’t dark, like the shot of Lane and Charles De Mar (Curtis Armstrong — Booger for you 80s geeks) on top of the K-12 when it’s nicely lit, you get some great detail out of the HD. Regretfully, there are more darker shots versus lighter shots. Still, it’s better than the DVD, but only slightly.
As for the features, you get a trailer. Trailers are fun, but it would have been nice to hear some commentary or perhaps a ‘look back’ with the cast/crew. I would have died to see a reunion of everyone involved.