Say Anything (1989) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

It is a sweet, simple teen love story, filled with credible situations and characters. John Cusack, as always, is Everyman, the guy that most of us probably were when we were 18 or 19, called Lloyd in this story. He's not especially brilliant or talented, and he doesn't have a clue what will happen to him after high school. He hasn't been accepted into any college, and he isn't even interested in going to the local community college. His future is "undefined", or perhaps "open", if you prefer a positive spin. He's pretty much of an underachiever. Right now, the only thing on his mind is Diane, the class valedictorian, a pretty but aloof girl who has gone through high school without ever becoming part of its community. She is headed to England shortly, having accepted a prestigious fellowship.

That's pretty much the entire story. There is a sub-plot about Diane's dad and an IRS investigation, but that's really just a backdrop for the Lloyd-Diane story. I do admire the fact that even the father, who has some unpleasant character traits, is also a real person with powerful positives as well.

Crowe scored a big hit with the critics, and a moderate box office success, if for no other reason than the movie is almost completely bullshit-free. Like all of Crowe's characters, they are real people doing thing and saying things that people might actually say and do. That sounds simple, but it is a surprisingly rare quality in films. You know how many movies I watch per year? About 1000. You know how many feature real, normal, people doing real things? Pretty much none. Big budget films usually compress an inordinate amount of action into someone's life, or present a totally contrived gimmicky plot: vampires, gunfights, murders, aliens, detectives, explosions, monsters. Tell me, how many murders have you seen? How many gunfights? How many vampires and aliens? How many private detectives do you know? If you know any, how many of them have ever done anything interesting? It is possible to watch hundreds of movies, even acclaimed ones, without ever seeing a real moment, let alone a real person.

Don't misinterpret me. It is possible to make good movies about kids who see dead people and comic book characters, as we all know. I don't object to those movies at all. I have given rave reviews to highly contrived films like X-Men and The Princess Bride and A Clockwork Orange. I don't object to archetypes, or even to stereotypes. But I bless ol' Cameron Crowe for his ability to make warm, credible, honest, decent movies in a Hollywood environment. Not only does he really know the people he writes about, but he likes them. And, eventually, so do we.