Pretty in Pink 1986, Rated PG-13

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Starring Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer, et al.

Arguably trapped in the eighties, or at least the early nineties, my favorite musical group is the British synth-pop band Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark (OMD). In my eyes, their 1991 release Sugartax is the end-all be-all in music. These facts are important and relevant here because, besides Arthur 2, Pretty in Pink is the only motion picture to take advantage of OMD's supreme talent and include a song of theirs in the soundtrack. However, it should be duly noted that the OMD song included here, their biggest hit "If You Leave", wasn't just 'included' in Pretty in Pink; "If You Leave" was the cornerstone of the last eight minutes of the movie, the song that brings everything together. And even so, with a prominently featured song by the Gods of Music in OMD, I found this movie was truly a wretched piece of hack filmmaking courtesy of writer John Hughes and director Howard Deutsch.

Returning to the screen for a third time reading Hughes written dialogue was teen sensation Molly Ringwald, whose career shriveled up and went to B-Movie Town soon after this movie was released in 1986. Ringwald stars here as Andie, a high school senior who only dresses in pink and comes from a poor family. Andie's only friend is Duckie (Jon Cryer), a severely fashion retarded product of the '80's. For some reason, two rich preppies, Steff (James Spader) and Blane (Andrew McCarthy) have had their eye on Andie for the better part of high school. As senior prom nears and with it, the end of their formative years together, Steff and Blane and Duckie all declare their intentions with Andie. Andie chooses Blane, Duckie gets mad, and Steff gets even, telling Blane that Andie is a terrible person and morally casual, if you know what I mean, and causes the two to split temporarily. Then comes the prom, and "If You Leave" and matters are soon set straight.

Whether you choose to view this movie as an updated version of Romeo + Juliet with a happy ending, or Sixteen Candles with economic disparities being the decided difference between Ringwald and her beau, not age, the result is negligible; the material feels familiar. Given Hughes' penchant for pairing up teens with shockingly different backgrounds, something best seen in The Breakfast Club, the latter option seems to be more accurate. However, unlike Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink has virtually no character development and/or warm moments that make you smile.

Andie's male sidekick Duckie is a distinct character--he likes Andie and wants to tell her, but can't screw up enough nerve--but Andie, Blane, Steff and Steff's girlfriend Jena (Alexa Kenin) are barely one-dimensional characters. Andie is poor, Blane is rich, Jena is popular; Spader should feel lucky that Steff was written to be both rich and an asshole, garnering twice the development of the other characters.

This was surprising given Hughes' ability to create slightly deeper than normal teen characters. More vexing still was the extraordinarily small number of shallow characters created. Throwing Andie's father (Harry Dean Stanton) and Andie's boss (Annie Potts) into the mix brought the total number of somewhat major characters to six. To put this into perspective, there were almost four times that number of somewhat major characters in Sixteen Candles.

With Ferris Buehler's Day Off, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and National Lampoon's Vacation to his credit, John Hughes was synonymous with blockbuster movies during the mid-eighties. Pretty in Pink felt like a poorly conceived project, put together quite hastily in order to capitalize on the marketability of Hughes' name. Unfortunately, it shows and shows dramatically in the final cut of Pretty in Pink. The writing is poor, the acting isn't very strong and even the lighting of the film was poor. This movie was anything but pretty.