![]() The movie's plot is basically about how he gets crushed. He is a phenomenally guileless individual, all big eyes and "gee whiz!" smile and total lack of critical distance from anything in his life and therefore a total inability to see what's right in front of him. And that's part of what makes the film kind of nasty, as well, since it's virtually impossible not to regard Keith as being, fundamentally, a complete idiot, an impression pushed along considerably by Stoltz's determined, almost militant earnestness. To her credit, she feels pretty bad about it, but this is never fundamentally a movie about the boy stuck between two girls who love him it's about a boy who thinks that the girl loves him who is actually just too guilt-stricken to let him down easy. Simply put, Amanda is not a terribly good person, no matter how many incidental details Hughes plugs into her backstory to make us like her: she is using Keith as a prop and she knows it. The biggest single change is that the Rich Kid in this case is not actually in love with the Working Class Protagonist, and this has the net effect of making Some Kind of Wonderful considerably nastier than its predecessor. As it is, it's mostly interesting for seeing how the filmmakers reconceived the character relationships and conflicts without much changing the setting. This isn't exactly the same as Pretty in Pink, though it's close enough that if anybody but Hughes and Deutch had been responsible for making it, we'd recall it today as that one movie that was a complete Pretty in Pink ripoff. Deprived of both her love interest and her BFF, Watts tries to shut this new relationship down, reasonably pointing out that it cannot possibly go well, but Keith just muscles on past Amanda's reluctance to find even more reluctance, and he muscles past that as well observing this, Hardy concocts a scheme to turn Keith into a small puddle of goo. And that's what makes it doubly painful for her when he asks out the beautiful daughter of privilege Amanda Jones (Lea Thompson), who says yes not because she has any particular regard for Keith, but because she's trying to cut off her rich bastard ex, Hardy Jenns (Craig Sheffer). ![]() His best friend in life is Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), an aggressive tomboy who has just started to realise, when the movie kicks off, that she is in love with Keith. This message, loving though it is, has been communicated with a ferocity that has left Keith in a state of constant resentment and rebellion and anti-college furor. Here, it's Keith Nelson (Eric Stoltz) who lives in a working-class home, with a father (John Ashton) who has spent these many years driving into his son's head the value of college and not ending up a miserable laborer. Once again, we have the tale of a kid from the poor side of a Southern California community falling in love with one of the most desirable rich kids at school, all while the genderfucking best friend sits on the sidelines and pines with unrequited love. This is Some Kind of Wonderful, the second film by Pretty in Pink director Howard Deutch, still in his guise as the face Hughes slapped on the films that were just too dark and serious and edgy for the main line, as it were. ![]() Whereas his farewell to the teen genre as a screenwriter and producer and brand name is the polar opposite: it is indeed so much a continuation of the ideas driving Hughes's run from Sixteen Candles to Pretty in Pink that it is, functionally, little other than an uncredited remake of that latter film, with the sexes reversed and with the writer's original ending restored. If I have it right, Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a deliberate half-step away from the teen angst pictures upon which the bulk of John Hughes's reputation rested in the mid-'80s (and continues to rest), redefining and to a certain extend refuting the entire worldview of films like The Breakfast Club, and serving in all ways as a most suitable farewell to the first portion of the filmmaker's directorial career.
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