September | 2014 | Through the Shattered Lens

Originally, my 32nd entry in my Back To School series was going to be Made In Britain, a film about a 16 year-old Neo-Nazi played by Tim Roth. And, while I still suggest that you track down and watch Made In Britain (mostly for Roth’s amazing performance in the lead), I have to admit that, as I rewatched it, I found myself really struggling to find a way to fit it into the Back to School theme. Made in Britain is a good film about a juvenile delinquent but it just didn’t seem like it was right for this series. Maybe I’ll revisit it when I do my long-threatened series of “Europe Is As Messed Up As America” series of film reviews.

Instead, I decided to close out the 1983 portion of this series by taking a look at Losin’ It. Along with Risky Business and All The Right Moves, Losin’ It is one of the three films released in 1983 that starred Tom Cruise as a high school senior who is obsessed with losing his virginity. Much as in Risky Business, Cruise’s initial plan is to hire a prostitute. And much like in All The Right Moves …. well, actually Losin’ It doesn’t have much in common with All The Right Moves beyond the presence of Cruise. For that matter, it doesn’t really have much in common with Risky Business either. Whereas All The Right Moves was a coming-of-age drama and Risky Business was a satire on capitalism, Losin’ It is pretty much a straight comedy.

And an amazingly generic one at that!

Set in 1965 and featuring a soundtrack that appears to exist solely to remind you that the film is set in 1965, Losin’ It tells the story of four teenage boys who go down to Tijuana, hoping to get laid. There’s Woody (Tom Cruise), who is the nice guy who smiles all the time. There’s Spider (played by future director John Stockwell), who we’re told doesn’t have to pay for it but wants to go down to Tijuana so he can see a “donkey show.” (If you don’t know what a donkey show is, I’m sure it can be looked up on Wikipedia.) And then there’s Dave (Jackie Earle Haley), who is short, loud-mouthed, and idolizes Frank Sinatra to the extent that he even wears a Sinatra-style fedora. Tagging along is Dave’s younger brother Wendell (John P. Navin, Jr.), who is too young to get into any Mexican brothels but is hoping to buy some fireworks that he can then sell at school.

Anyway, they may think that they’re just going to Mexico but it soon turns out that they’re on a collision course with wackiness! Dave and Wendell end up being held hostage in an auto junkyard. Spider gets in a fight with a bunch of Marines and ends up in a Mexican jail. And Woody — well, listen, we all know that there’s no way fresh-faced, All-American Tom Cruise is going to lose his virginity in a dirty old brothel! Instead, he ends up pursuing a tentative romance with Kathy (Shelley Long), a newlywed who has come down to Tijuana to get a quickie divorce.

(Do they still give out quickie divorces in Tijuana or is that just something that happens in the movies? I’m just asking for future reference…)

Anyway, of the Tom Cruise Must Get Laid Trilogy, Losin’ It is easily the most generic and forgettable but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a terrible movie. Curtis Hanson keeps the action moving at a steady pace (and, if that sounds like faint praise, just try sitting through a film with an unsteady pace) and the cast is likable. Tom Cruise is the one who gets all of the attention on the back of the DVD and he’s likable enough but really, if I had been alive and a film critic in 1983, I probably would have picked the handsome and charismatic John Stockwell as the one most likely to become a star.

Instead, 31 years later, Tom Cruise is the star (albeit a fading one) and John Stockwell is the one directing movies about life on the beach.

It’s a strange world.

Jackie Earle Haley, John Stockwell, and Tom Cruise

For the past week, we’ve been taking a look at 80 of the best, worst, most memorable, and most forgettable films ever made about being a teenager and going to high school. We’ve been posting the reviews in chronological order and now, 30 reviews since we started this series with a film from 1946, we have reached the 1980s, a decade this is often considered to be the golden age of teen films. For our 31st Back To School review, we take a look at 1983’s All The Right Moves.

How did you spend your Labor Day weekend? Me, I spent it visiting with my family down at my uncle’s place. Sunday afternoon, I was laying out by the pool and listening to my cousins Peter Paul and Paul Peter have a conversation. (And yes, I do call both of them “Paulie.”) They were talking about the Dallas Cowboys and I have to admit that I could not understand a word that they were saying. It was like attending a Latin Mass, in that all I could do was hope that I was nodding at the right moment. I can’t help it. Football goes right over my head. I know that the players are trying to score touchdowns and I know that whenever fall and winter come around, everyone I know is going to be complaining about the Cowboys. But that’s it. (I also know that, what we in America call soccer, the rest of the world calls football. But, to be honest, I really don’t care.) Football talk might as well be a secret language.

However, I’m clearly in the minority as far as that’s concerned. America loves football and so does Texas. (Yes, I do consider my home state to be its own independent nation. Take that, Vermont.) And the American film industry has a long tradition of making movies — like All The Right Moves — about football.

In All The Right Moves, Tom Cruise plays Stefan Djordjevic. Stefan lives in a poor town in Pennsylvania and happens to be one of the stars of the Ampipe High School football team. And that’s a pretty good thing because this town is obsessed with football. The proud Coach Nickerson (Craig T. Nelson) is under constant pressure to win and Nickerson responds by pushing all of his players. However, it finally looks like his approach is going to pay for both him and Stefan. Nickerson is being considered for a college coaching job. Meanwhile, Stefan has a chance to get a scholarship to play football in college. Interestingly, Stefan’s ambition is not to play professional football. Instead, he wants to go to a good college so he can get an engineering degree. Stefan’s main fear is to end up like everyone else in the town, working in a steel mill and not having any way to escape from a life of poverty.

All The Right Moves starts out as a standard sports film but, halfway through, it takes an unexpected turn. Ampipe High plays a game against their main rival, Walnut Heights High School. This is the big game. This is the game that most sports movies end with. This is the game that you watch knowing that Nickerson and Stefan will overcome their differences (Nickerson is stubborn, Stefan is cocky) and that they will manage to narrowly win.

Except, of course, Ampipe doesn’t win. As the result of a last minute mistake, Ampipe loses their lead and they lose the big game. Nickerson yells at the team in the locker room. Stefan yells back and Nickerson kicks him off the team. Suddenly, Stefan finds himself with no future. And Nickerson finds himself and his family being targeted by the angry, football-crazed citizens of the town…

For a football movie, All The Right Moves is actually pretty good. Of course, it’s not really about football. It’s about the desperation of people who have found themselves trapped in a cycle of poverty and how something as seemingly inconsequential as the high school football team can become an entire town’s life. It’s about how two stubborn men — Stefan and Nickerson — allow their own fear of being trapped to keep them from thinking and acting rationally.

The film is also distinguished by good performances from Tom Cruise (who, in the same year, would play a much different high school senior in Risky Business), Craig T. Nelson, and Chris Penn (who plays Stefan’s best friend on the team). However, the film’s best performance comes from Lea Thompson, who is so good in the role of Lisa, Stefan’s girlfriend, that you can’t help but wish that the film had been more about her than him. In probably the film’s best scene, she calls out Stefan for being selfish and points out that, regardless of what happens in Stefan’s future, she’s going to be stuck in the town that he’s so desperate to escape from. The scene where she and Stefan make love is sensitively handled and it also features a split-second or so of Tom Cruise full front nudity.

So, there’s always that.

It’s no Risky Business or Fast Times At Ridgemont High but, as far as high school football films are concerned, All The Right Moves is not a bad one.