Thursday, January 17, 2013

Valley Girl - Of Nic Cage and montages



And here we are: the first fully-fledged Nicolas Cage feature film.

This pretty much sums up the general feel of the movie. Unsurprisingly, this scene is part of a montage

Valley Girl is a now-fairly traditional tale of the down-and-out inner city kid ("Randy," from Hollywood) who through some accident or other (crashing a party, in this particular case) falls for a posh out-of-his-league girl ("Julie," from the Valley).

Our hero, the Hollywood punk.

It's a story that has become cliche - rich girl falls for strange, aloof and 'wierd' outsider, only to be berated by her friends into picking 'the right guy' and then in the end her feelings win out so the outsider gets the girl.

I don't know enough about film history to know where this falls as far as when this story became worn goes, but it's very, very familiar now. Thirty years ago, however, I don't know.

Anyway, as a story, it's not bad, although there are, I must say, an awful lot of montages in the movie.

The acting's not bad in general. Cage (and this is the first time he's billed by his stage name) wears mostly the vacant expression that he has, fairly or otherwise, become known for, but even here, there are moments where he pulls off fairly subtle exchanges with other characters that makes you (or, at least me) think that it may have been the director's choice in order to underscore his aloofness or whatever rather than Cage's own interpretation of the character.

Anyway, if you're interested in any of the following:

A) flashy neon clothes,
B) New Wave tunes,
C) Valley girl lingo,
or
D) Nicolas Cage,

you're probably going to want to see this. But just so you know, if you're allergic to outdated technology, people talk on phones that have cords, someone actually suggests a genuinely productive use of a single dime, and people play a record (that one happens while girls are dancing around together in their underwear... that happens, right?).


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