It’s a way of looking at that wave and saying, ‘Hey bud, let’s party!”Ĭoming from rural Scotland, I don’t exactly know why I have such a fondness for films set in American high schools, even now, but a lot of it could be down to how the lives of the students, although just like our own in many ways, always seemed much more glamourous and adrenaline-packed compared to what we experienced. “Well Stu I’ll tell you, surfing’s not a sport, it’s a way of life, it’s no hobby. Hand, do you have a guy like me in all your classes? You know, a guy you make an example of?” “What Jefferson was saying was, ‘Hey! You know, we left this England place ’cause it was bogus so if we don’t get some cool rules ourselves-pronto-we’ll just be bogus, too!’ Get it?” (I can now see where the makers of the Bill and Ted movies got their inspiration.) If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Sean Penn, playing Jeff Spicoli, was the original ‘stoner surfer dude’ and gets all the best lines in the movie, some of them quite deep and observationally spot on. It is essentially a comedy-drama, but the drama is limited to observing the lives of a diverse group of characters as they navigate a single year of high school.
#American dad rock your body song movie#
The various characters that make up the student body of a high school were all represented and most of the lead actors went on to great things: Sean Penn, Judge Reinhold, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Forest Whitaker, with more minor roles played by Eric Stoltz and Nicolas Cage (or Nicolas Coppola as he was then).įast Times… was the first teen movie of its type and it seems to have formed the template for all that came afterwards.
In some ways Fast Times… hasn’t aged very well, as certain scenes just wouldn’t have been made nowadays, for all sorts of reasons, but in other ways nothing has changed. I don’t quite know how Fast Times… had slipped through the net for me as I’ve watched all those similarly themed ’80s movies many times over: Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off etc.
It’s certainly no coincidence that I write about songs from the late 1970s more than any other era in this retrospective music blog, just when I was that age exactly. It doesn’t matter how old you get, the themes that crop up in these movies – good and bad – still resonate, as those years when you are aged 16 to 18 are probably the most highly charged and memorable of your life.
When multiple references were made to Fast Times at Ridgemont High in the phenomenally successful Netflix drama Stranger Things, also set in the 1980s, I decided it was high time I watched it, and I’m so glad I did. Am I now too old to appreciate, and really enjoy, a coming-of-age movie from 1982 set in an American high school? Apparently not.