John Sayles has done the inevitable and has upped his standards of professionalism. This accomplishes nothing so much as to make his movie look more ordinary -- less needy, in other words, of the critical charity that so benefited The Return of the Secaucus Seven and (less so) Lianna. The very ordinary storyline tells of a "nice girl"/"bad boy" dalliance between a pampered Jewish princess accustomed to having anything she wants, including the plum role in the high-school production of The Time of Your Life, and an Italian "greaser" who is a sort of better-dressed, suit-and-tie version of the TV-sitcom characters portrayed by Henry Winkler and John Travolta. The re-creation of high-school life in the 1960s is tied almost entirely to the two principal players, Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano, and is thus on a very short tether. Both of them, but particularly Arquette, come across as young adults -- old enough, that is, to have graduated from college and then acting school -- pretending to be kids again and overplaying the innocence, self-consciousness, bravado, etc., to the point of parody. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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