Clueless (1995)
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Shallow, rich and socially successful Cher is at the top of her Beverly Hills high school's pecking scale. Seeing herself as a matchmaker, Cher first coaxes two teachers into dating each other. Emboldened by her success, she decides to give hopelessly klutzy new student Tai a makeover. When Tai becomes more popular than she is, Cher realizes that her disapproving ex-stepbrother was right about how misguided she was -- and falls for him.
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Shawn is the more immediately recognizable of the two because of his work as a film actor; at the time of the film’s release, he was best known for a small role in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), but has since come to be identified most often with his role as the hilariously egocentric Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987) and as the much put-upon speech teacher in Clueless (1995).
In the juiciest roles, Smith, Pine, and Moore stand out, but perhaps most especially Shawn, who surprises with a performance of astonishing feeling, muscularity, and nuance that's a far cry from his Hollywood typecasting as a clownish stuffed shirt (in films like The Princess Bride and Clueless).
Consider something like Born Yesterday , wherein a similarly superficial and ditzy woman has enough integrity to realise that her life is all wrong, and reaches out in some tentative way to fix it, to find just how far afield from the traditional character arcs Clueless finds itself.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, directed by Clueless's Amy Heckerling from a script by Almost Famous's Cameron Crowe, has always struck me as overrated, and a recent revisit did little to change my mind.
You can argue that the film's spirit derives as much from the sensitivity of writer Cameron Crowe (who went on to direct Singles) or the cast of dedicated performers -- Penn, Reinhold, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whittaker -- as anything, but I've always been rooting for the director, Amy Heckerling, to concoct a worthy followup.
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I liken it to "Saturday Night Fever."
Calling it the Citizen Kane of high school movies may be accurate from the zeitgeist perspective, but it's a dubious designation.
Playing Christian, Silverstone's star-crossed crush (Hint: He brings videos of "Some Like It Hot" and "Spartacus" over for what she thinks is a hot date), Justin Walker is to Brando as Christian Slater was to Jack.
Silverstone�s good looks and Austen�s obvious cachet aside, the real hook for Clueless is the language, which is sort of a modified Valley Girl dialect that�s occasionally hysterical, but usually non-intrusive -- consider these linguistic permutations the catchy flip side to A Clockwork Orange, if you like.
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Director Amy Heckerling (Clueless) almost encourages the film's shapelessness, letting the individual moments speak for themselves, rather than molding a cohesive whole.
First-time director Amy Heckerling (“Clueless”) knew exactly how to bring Crowe’s screenplay to life on the screen.
The movie was written and directed by Amy Heckerling , who made " Fast Times at Ridgemont High " (1982).
Directed by Amy Heckerling, Clueless is among the best teen movies or comedies ever made (and that includes Heckerling's own 1982 Fast Times at Ridgemont High).
Even the Heckerling who directed Fast Times at Ridgemont High , one of the smartest of all '80s teen comedies, can't be entirely responsible for this film that mines so much humor out of making fun of not just its protagonist, but its whole cast, no exceptions, without ever feeling sour or nasty or misanthropic.
And it's directed by Amy Heckerling, who crystallized early-'80s L.A. in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," returning to the scene of the teen genre movie, clearly her art form.
Same problem applies to Matthew Leutwyler's winking gorefest Dead & Breakfast, a spam-in-a-cabin flick that takes its cues from The Evil Dead pictures and Dead Alive but comes off as a flick wilfully goofy without any commensurate smarts or, really, any truly memorable geek thrills.