Valley Girl: Martha Coolidge

I'll admit up front that I am not the target audience for Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl. I don't like teen romantic comedies and try to avoid them whenever possible. But a film critic's job is to try and give an impartial evaluation to each movie they see regardless of personal taste. So I went into Valley Girl with an open mind. Too bad I was rewarded with one of the most cringe-inducing films I have seen recently. In fact, my experience with Valley Girl can be charted by how many times I physically cringed. I cringed whenever I saw naked high school girls. I cringed during a slumber party scene where a group of high school girls danced around in their underwear (this movie was directed by a woman, right?). I cringed when the soundtrack repeated songs that were unrelated to the plot. I cringed whenever the film tried to hammer the fact home that it was "based" on Romeo and Juliet (watching the Valley Girl and the Hollywood Punk make-out under a movie-theater sign that was advertising 'Romeo and Juliet' made me groan out loud). I cringed at how two-dimensional the main character's female friends were: when Julie Richman's friends realize that her relationship with Randy, the aforementioned Hollywood punk, might hurt their popularity, they immediately scheme to break them up and drive her back into the arms of her violent, possessive ex-boyfriend. I cringed at how uninspired and creatively bankrupt a film supposedly based on a play by the Bard was. The film's gender politics are retrograde to the point of parody, the acting is plasticine, and the characters completely unlikeable.

4/10