Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

I love Phoebe Cates she is so beautiful but Jennifer Jason Leigh is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay way hotter and I grew up on Phoebe Cates in this and Gremlins and Paradise and Private School and Drop Dead Fred and that's hard to say but it's true. JJL looks so good in FTaRH, like somebody's baby alright! OMG. I love Jennifer & Phoebe!!This is the best movie ever. To all the newer generation kids watching this for the first time, even though older movies aren't as consistently stimulating as newer ones evolved to be, kinda lully, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is all about sex and it is so, so sexually stimulating that I don't even remember what I was talking about...........something to do with like, you learning to love it as you grow older like I learned to love megahot Jennifer over supersweet Phoebe, or something. Phoebe AND Jennifer's pool scene is the hottest nude scene in movies forever thanks to Phoebe AND Jennifer...........but Phoebe's part is particularly exquisite ODL, ODL! I love Phoebe Cates & JJL.BEsT tEEnAge hIGh SHcoOL SeX CoMEDy EVER!!

This sits alongside other decidedly "classic" 80s comedies, like Caddyshack and Trading Places, that I just don't get. This is sporadically funny, but mostly it just feels like a collection of random vignettes whose final product is just a lesser version of so many better 80's teen comedies.

This is the movie made famous by the bikini sequence carried out so talentfully by Phoebe Cates, shortly after she starred in the controversial nudity-filled movie PARADISE. It also features some intimate scenes with a very young Jennifer Jason Leigh at the beginning of her career. On the extras of the DVD, she mentions that though they were controversial, she felt that they were more realistic, spoke more to real-life average people, than Brooke Shields' highly glamorous scenes in THE BLUE LAGOON and ENDLESS LOVE, which she felt were just too pretty. Yeah, Jennifer's really cute, and lots of girls would be able to relate to that supremely inglorious botched sex scene.Phoebe Cates is an unforgettable standout in the annals of movie eroticism. It would take much more to create an iconic scene nowadays than merely filling out a red bikin (and then going topless) but back in 1982, she made bikini history indelibly locked into the minds of the young generation of that time.Without the red bikini sequence, my score would have been considerably lower, as I do not find neither the movie nor most of the characters particularly entertaining. Amy Heckerling did much better with CLUELESS, which ranks as one of my personal favorites.Let me just add that the insane song at the end "Goodbye, Goodbye" by Oinka Boinka or something goofy like that, is so atrociously bad, so maddeningly irritating, that if I could break the original and thereby wipe it from recording history, no matter how I would be chastised for it, I'd stomp on the damn thing.

... before zero tolerance and before hand held computers. It is a year in the life of a bunch of high schoolers, accent on Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh), 15 years old. The first thing you notice in the first shot of the film is the traditional mall - people used to have to go OUT to shop, or meet other people or do anything else. The internet is 15 years in the future. Furthermore, teenagers used to work at minimum wage jobs in the mall for spending money. At some point in the past 35 years this got to be beneath them.Stacy works at a pizzeria with her friend Linda (Phoebe Cates). The mild mannered and rather non-descript looking Mark Ratner who works at the movie theater has a crush on Stacy. Both Mark and Stacy get very bad advice from their friends Mike Damone and Linda, respectively. Judge Reinhold plays Stacy's older brother, a senior in high school. He takes life just a little too seriously and thinks he has life by the reins. Life is about to teach him differently.Meanwhile the inexperienced Stacy is actually believing the advice Linda is giving her, who says she is in a long distance relationship with a much older boy. The adults in the audience can tell that Linda is obviously lying about her experience and is clueless about the value of the advice she is giving out and even how this so-called boyfriend of hers sees their relationship. Linda doesn't know the difference between sex and love because sex is still a thing of wonder to her, and she is leading Stacy down the same road to - if not ruin, heartbreak - that she is on.Now I'm making this sound like some kind of tragedy, but it is also extremely funny. This is almost like Charlie Brown because although you hear about the adults, they are seldom seen except for the no-nonsense history teacher Mr. Hand played brilliantly by Ray Walston. Then there is Mr. Hand's nemesis Jeff Spicoli also played brilliantly and just a little too genuinely by Sean Penn. Spicoli is a stoned out guy who fancies himself a future surfing champ and really has no place in his life for rules and schedules, the stuff Mr. Hand lives and dies by. Don't worry, Mr. Hand gets his revenge in the end, and not by failing Spicoli either. Mr. Hand is smart enough to know that would only hurt Mr. Hand. When I say Penn plays Spicoli just a little too genuinely, Penn said in an interview one time that playing Spicoli was easy for him because all he had to do was channel his teen aged self.Highly recommended as a bit of a cross between Clueless and "The Last Days of Disco" as far as relationships and the sexual revolution go. It's a look at teen aged life when we didn't take ourselves quite so seriously.