St. Elmo’s Fire (1985)

Fascinatingly 1980s “Brat Pack” drama about seven friends who have just graduated. They are about to embark upon adult lives, and they drink and smoke excessively while attempting to navigate their tangled relationships.

It’s possibly the template for Friends, but without the jokes and the strong writing. In fact, there’s something rather unappealing about the film’s self-consciousness.

Morally, it seems quite confused and the troubles encountered by these wealthy, spoiled kids – what we’d now call “first-world problems” – don’t seem especially important.

There’s a completely flawed thread about one of them (Emilio Estevez as Kirby) becoming obsessed with a medical student (Andie MacDowell). Something in the execution of this plot simply doesn’t ring true. It would have been a tighter storyline if he’d been infatuated with one of his six friends, pulling the focus back into the main group.

The seven main actors get equal billing in the credits (named alphabetically), which suggests there were ego and/or payment disputes in the background, but some of them are stronger than others. Demi Moore is probably the most credible as the cocaine-addicted party girl. Rob Lowe is hard to believe as the thrill-seeking, sax-playing Billy, who somehow had time to have a wife and child already. I also don’t believe Judd Nelson’s character would have liked Andrew McCarthy’s character, or that glamorous yuppie played by Ally Sheedy would have had time for earnest, frumpy girl played by Mare Winningham.

While there are some good lines (the script is better than it might have been), it’s ultimately as immature and shallow as its characters.

Pretty in Pink (1986)

John Hughes teen drama. The plot is simple: poor girl dates rich boy while social prejudice threatens to tear them apart. Molly Ringwald acts with her lower lip and is a curious mixture of mature and immature. She has three interesting relationships – with her depressed father (Harry Dean Stanton), with her supportive colleague at the Tracks record shop (Annie Potts) and with her nerdy friend “Duckie” who’s in love with her (Jon Cryer). The big flaw is that her central relationship – with preppy, well-off Blane (Andrew McCarthy) – just doesn’t convince. It’s not clear what, if anything, they have in common and this forms a vacuum at the centre of the film. And when they do finally end up together, the film seems to betray its own instincts. Weren’t we supposed to be rooting for Duckie, with his goofy underdog charm? In fact, the ending we see was reshot because the “truer” ending – in which she did wind up with the far more appealing Duckie – wasn’t popular with audiences. That commercial decision was the wrong choice aesthetically and means that the plot and motivations fail to ring true.

The soundtrack is omnipresent and brilliantly of its time (The Smiths, New Order, Psychedelic Furs), but that’s not enough to save the film. Having heard this raved about as a cult classic, I was very disappointed to finally see it.

Mannequin (1987)

Ludicrous romantic comedy about an enterprising young man in Philadelphia who discovers he has a gift for window-dressing, then falls in love with a shop mannequin...who just happens to be a reincarnated beauty from Ancient Egypt. The main couple (Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall) are entertaining and the impossible fairytale romance has a certain charm – as in Splash. However, the bit-part actors including James Spader, are uniformly appalling, with poor lines and a complete lack of comic flair. Entire scenes fall flat, many of them involving the pathetic security guard and his dog. As with The Secret of My Success, from the same year and which I had watched the day before, it’s very much a film about upward mobility, such were the prevailing values of the time. And yet, despite its awfulness, there are some entertaining and even heartwarming moments. The soundtrack is utterly of its time and when “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship begins playing, it’s not remotely surprising. I don’t regret watching it, but I probably don’t ever need to see it again.