Love in the time of big hair and neon

Let’s return to a time when girl-power had more to do with romance than showing a male superhero that she can be his equal. Follow links to rent online.

Valley Girl (1983)

A savage on the outskirts of civilization (Nicolas Cage, at his unpredictably unhinged best) crosses into enemy territory to win the heart of a buckskin beauty (Deborah Foreman). Sounds like a western, right? It could be, were our Romeo not a Hollywood punk and his fair Juliet not a subject of Sherman Oaks. There’s an anomaly lurking within the DVD’s special features section. Ask a director if, during production, they could have predicted their soon-to-be-smash hit was going to score at the box office. Most will adopt a sheepish, “Aw, shucks” approach, saying, “It never once crossed my mind.” Not Martha Coolidge, who, without a hint of swagger, confesses, “I knew it was going to be big. I just felt that.” Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest play Foreman’s totally tubular parents with an open-door manner not found in contemporary teen exploitation comedies. The same goes for the romance, which nowadays takes a back seat to derisory situations and patronizing yuks. Why the John Hughes catalog continually gets revived and not this is a question for the ages.

Can’t Buy Me Love (1987)

A winsome romantic charmer about a nerdy power-mower jockey with a bit of the pariah in him (Patrick Dempsey), who drops $1,000 to persuade the most popular girl in his class (Amanda Peterson) to pretend they’re an item. Director Steve Rash came out of the gate swinging with his successful biopic The Buddy Holly Story, only to have his follow-up picture, the ill-fated Munchkins romp Under the Rainbow, leave a crater at the box office. In this, his third effort, Rash saw a delightful return to form. It also has the distinction of being one of the few applause-worthy pictures released by Touchstone Pictures, Disney’s otherwise limp distribution arm created to take on projects that were more adult in nature. The conclusions reached by the Tucson twosome are the stuff after-school specials are made of, but getting there is more than half the fun.

Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)

Most aliens come to earth armed with the cunning it takes to level cities. Excluding their ability to generate more body fur than Ed Asner, the only other-worldly skill our trio of Technicolor extraterrestrials (Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, and Damon Wayans) appears to possess is the “love touch,” a superpower that causes anyone they tap to fall head-over-heels. Earth Girls continues to cast the same feeling of ebullience thirty years after its release. Long before the term “genre mashup” became popular, Julien Temple — the cinematic house of worship who brought us Absolute Beginners — whipped up this frothy blend of sci-fi, romance, musical numbers, and teen romcom. Goldblum and Geena Davis were a red hot item during the production and their passion inflames every frame. Co-Earth Girl Julie Brown had a hand in both script and songs. How can you go wrong with lyrics like, “If you want to be a femme fatale, you can’t rest on your L’Oreal” or her show-stopping production number, ‘Cause I’m a Blonde?