Allan Moyle
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It’s a promising concept, somewhere between Pump Up The Volume and Gossip Girl , with Olivia Wilde’s similarly right-on teen comedy Booksmart supplying a recent comparison point.
This is easily both the best and most realistic film about a small-town girl who makes peace with her roots in the process of trying to run away from them since the criminally underrated 1999 Canadian classic New Waterford Girl .
Parts of Donnie Darko, entertaining as they may be, are familiar from many other films [Rock & Roll High School (1979), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Pump Up the Volume (1990), Dazed and Confused (1993), and many others] the broad caricatures of several of the adults, including the grotesquely insensitive, new-age teacher, Ms. Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant), and the sleazy self-help guru she adores, Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze); the slow-motion, pop-song scored steady-cam sequences introducing us to Donnie's home and high-school (the latter a real tour-de-force); the reveling in '80s culture, pop and otherwise (E.T., Faith No More, Dukakis).
During the 1980s, teen movies predominantly splintered into two categories: John Hughes "dramadies" and the raunch of Porky's.
Yet although his cinematic beginnings predate those of John Hughes, Moyle's Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records are eclipsed by even the lesser entries in Hughes' teen canon, such as Sixteen Candles and the Hughes-produced Pretty in Pink .
By day, Mark is a conscientious student whose writing teacher, Jan Emerson (Ellen Greene, Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors), praises his work, and who attracts the attention of goth girl Nora Diniro (Samantha Mathis).
But he does show off writing talent in an English class (taught by Ellen Greene, of "Little Shop of Horrors").
Yet although his cinematic beginnings predate those of John Hughes, Moyle's Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records are eclipsed by even the lesser entries in Hughes' teen canon, such as Sixteen Candles and the Hughes-produced Pretty in Pink .
"Pump Up the Volume" is a teenage version of "Talk Radio" that has aspirations of being this generation's "Rebel Without a Cause."
This noncommittal job setup, too, is part of what lends the movie a kind of “90s feel” with the “slacker energy” of the characters (think: Empire Records or Reality Bites).
Robin (Maya Hawke) has gone full Pump Up the Volume with a radio show, assisted by Steve (Joe Keery), where she critiques the occupation and communicates secret information to Hopper.
The story, one more variation on "rescuing the princess from the evil castle," has the Marios trying to save pretty Daisy (Samantha Mathis of "Pump Up the Volume") from the Fascist empire ruled by evil King Koopa (Dennis Hopper, made up and coiffed like a corrupted Rutger Hauer), his race of reptile people, his idiot cohorts Iggy and Spike (Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson), his "devolution" machine and his army of pin-lizard-headed "Goomba" guards--who march around in outsize military coats, and are crazily susceptible to Frankie Yankovic renditions of "Somewhere My Love."