Amazon.com Essentials:
You remember high school? Really remember? If you think you do,
watch this film: it'll all really come racing back. After changing the
world with the generation-defining Slacker, director Richard Linklater
turned his
free-range vérité sensibility on the 1970s. As before, his all-seeing
camera
meanders across a landscape studded with goofy pop culture references and
poignant glimpses of human nature. Only this time around, he's spreading a
thick layer of nostalgia over the lens (and across the
soundtrack). It's as
if Fast Times at Ridgemont High was directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
The story deals with a group of friends on the last day of high school,
1976. Good-natured football star Randall "Pink" Floyd navigates
effortlessly between the warring worlds of jocks, stoners, wannabes, and
rockers with girlfriend and new-freshman buddy in tow. Surprisingly, it's
not a coming-of-age movie, but a film that dares ask the eternal,
overwhelming, adolescent question, "What happens next?" It's a little too
honest to be a light comedy (representative quote: "If I ever say these
were the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself."). But it's also
way too much fun (remember souped-up Corvettes and bicentennial madness?)
to be just another existential-essay-on-celluloid. --Grant Balfour
