Valley Girl (1983)

Valley Girl (1983) is the first movie where Nick Cage is billed as Nick Cage and not Nick Coppola. It's also the first movie in the '80s directed by Martha Coolidge (City Girls, Joy of Sex, the fantastic Real Genius, and the underrated Plain Clothes). It also has a fantastic soundtrack, which I'll cover in a bit. 

The story is simple - our heroine Julie (Debbie Foreman, who is otherwise known to me from the horror movie Waxwork) is having what passes for an existential crisis in the San Fernando Valley - she is popular, her dick boyfriend Tommy (Michael Bowen, who's career has really picked up lately) is popular, her friends are popular, she looks great, wears the right clothes, talks, like, the right talk... but something is amiss.

Julie dumps Tommy, and ends up falling for bad boy Randy (Cage), who is most certainly not from the Valley. He's a punk, as is his friend Fred (Cameron Dye) and extremely uncool among the upper-middle class circle Julie runs with. Fred's opening line on the "date" with Julie and her friend Stacey is extremely memorable: "Hi, I'm Fred. I like tacos, '71 cabernet, and my favorite color is magenta." ZING. 

As you might imagine, there are many Romeo/Juliet like struggles with love between forbidden sects of society - Julie's friends HATE Randy and love Tommy the superjerk... Randy is romantic, in his way, and smart, and keeps trying. Eventually he gets traction... but how will that play out? 

Let's make an aside for the soundtrack. If you like early '80s New Wave / New Pop / Pop Wave / Wave New / Synth Wave / Wave Wave / whatever you want to call it, you are doing just fine here. Let's examine this murderer's row of great synth pop: 

• Johnny, Are You Queer? by the Josie Cotton
• Girls Like Me by Bonnie Hayes
• A Million Miles Away by The Plimsouls
• Eyes of a Stranger by the Payolas
• I Melt With You by Modern English
• Who Can It Be Now? by Men at Work
• Love My Way by the Psychedelic Furs
• Jukebox by the Flirts

Awesome. I Melt With You is probably the best-known song these days, and closes out the movie... but my secret favorite is Love My Way. That's an all-nighter in my book. 

This movie was made on the serious cheapside. To the tune of $350,000, which is crazy low. ESPECIALLY when you consider it became an instant hit and made something like $17,000,000. That is highly impressive, and helped launch Nicholas Cage into more '80s movies like Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc. etc. 

I also really like the subplot with Skip and Suzie's mom, especially when Beth (the mom) drops all kinds of reference to The Graduate ("plastics") and Skip, dumb as a stone, stares back at her vacantly and uncomprehending. 

This movie looks, sounds, and probably smells thoroughly '80s. Everything is bright - bright purple and pink jackets ... bright yellow pants ... bright red punk hair ... bright pink lipstick. And the dialog is, of course, famous. Everything plays off the success of the Frank/Moon Unit Zappa song of the year before. Like, totally, whoa, whoa, like ... yeah, totally. Maybe most famous is Randy's mocking rejoinder to Julie late in the movie: "Well fuck you, for sure, like, totally." 

This is definitely a pure '80s artifact, in that the culture is one of the characters in the film rather than just a backdrop. Recommended.