Martha Coolidge, who made a semi-autobiographical, semi-documentary film on rape, called Not a Pretty Picture, is a serious filmmaker. And one does not have to look hard to discern here a serious interest in social documentation: an interest, that is, in the lifestyle of the San Fernando Valley teenager, the shopping-mall and fast-food hangouts, the clothes and the colors thereof (pink, lavender, aqua), the weekend parties and the music played and food served thereat (sushi is still the thing), the issues discussed in a round of girl-talk (the amount of hair on a boy's back, etc.), and, of course, the Val-Speak immortalized in the Frank Zappa song from which this film takes its title. All this, in fact, is laid on a bit thick, and does not blend in with any very well-shaped or well-paced narrative episodes. But the problems with the narrative go deeper than mere clumsiness. A Romeo-and-Juliet forbidden romance -- between an exemplary Valley Girl and a Hollywood High street rat with a punk haircut -- demands that we take a rooting interest, and demands, too, that Coolidge abandon her stance as social documentarian: the boy's lifestyle, clothes, haircut, etc., are thus required to serve as the symbol of nonconformism, free expression, and all things liberal, rather than as simply a different design of straitjacket. Nicolas Cage, Deborah Foreman, Frederic Forrest, Colleen Camp. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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