Redheadedgirl: I have, in fact, never seen seen this movie.

White boys trying to sing Whitney Houston. This is the Most Eighties.

Why isn’t Lili Taylor in more things?

Sarah: I don’t know. I’d watch Lili Taylor and Joan Cusack do anything.

Carrie: Actually I can tell you that – Lili Taylor has said in interviews that she turned down a ton of roles because she refuses to be in a role that denigrates women or reduces them to “the chick” or “the girlfriend.”

Redheadedgirl: That fucking sucks.

Carrie: Right now she’s in the TV series American Crime.

Sarah: Are all graduation speeches the same? They are, right?

Redheadedgirl: Yes.

Sarah: I love Diane’s discomfort. Ione Skye is very good at communicating how trapped she feels with a smile on her face.

Redheadedgirl: She is! She should be in more stuff, too.

It’s June, why is he wearing a trench coat?

Carrie: Oh honey, I was a California teen at that exact time and I totally wore a trench coat in June. You have to suffer for fashion.

It was my goth phase. Which overlapped with my hippie phase. Which led to some weird, weird outfits.

Notably, it was also pre-Columbine and trench coats did not have the connotations they do today.

Redheadedgirl: He just looks overly warm!

Carrie: Why are you trying to make a teen fashion choice make sense?

Redheadedgirl: This poor girl is dressed like an old lady.

Amanda: I feel like that statement should be the tagline for the movie. Or all eighties movies.

Redheadedgirl: There were times we dressed like we were in an aerobics class ALL THE TIME.

Carrie: OH SHIT Y’ALL

I wore that same dress (basically) to my college graduation! Big flower pattern. I did not look like Ione Skye.

Redheadedgirl: What was that store. Deb? Did you have that store?

Carrie: Jessica McClintock.

Redheadedgirl: That was my senior prom dress.

Elyse: Oh God. The Deb. So many terrible memories.

Redheadedgirl: So many terrible choices.

Sarah: So much Jessica McClintock. So much taffeta and ruffles.

Carrie: My friend James braided my hair using a braid he had practiced on horses’ tails for show. I was pure class.

Elyse: At least I never wore anything with an ass bow

Carrie: Don’t mock the ass bow, Elyse.

Redheadedgirl: Mock the ass bow

Elyse: Who thought that was a plan? Hey! Let’s really draw attention to the ass by putting a huge bow on it.

Sarah: There used to be a wedding dress mockery website with a whole section titled “HELP HELP IT LANDED ON MY BUTT.”

Carrie: Oh the glory days when you had to talk to parents on the phone to ask a girl out.

Redheadedgirl: Messages written on paper!

Elyse: I have an intern here who has never heard a busy signal before. She tried to fax something and was like “what was that noise?”

And I died inside a little

Carrie: This little kid is adorable.

Redheadedgirl: Lloyd is great with his nephew.

Carrie: I’ve reached the age where I still can see that Joan’s character has to lighten up but also I have total sympathy for her, even the playmate line.

Redheadedgirl: It’s totally a case of she’s trying the best she can, but being in loco parentis to your brother is just weird. And stressful.

Carrie: And she resents that she never gets to be the fun one, she has to be the one to get the kid cleaned up for daycare etc etc while Lloyd gets to be the kid’s BFF.

Redheadedgirl: I have total sympathy for everyone in that situation.

Sarah: Wow. John and Joan Cusack are really good at playing siblings.

Redheadedgirl: You’d think that would be obvious, but it’s not always that easy!

Sarah: I know! And they are wonderful together.

I have a growing list of people I’d watch do buddy films. Thor and Selvig, Stark and Banner (we’re doing a chronological Marvel re-watch over here).

I’d legitimately watch anything the Cusack duo did together. Can they take a road trip? Maybe with BIG HAIR?!

Is that… Jeremy Piven?!

Carrie: Yep!

Sarah: OMG

Carrie: Most of the guys in the movie were Cusack’s real life friends and in a scene later the director flew them in to film a scene on his own dime.

Also Lili and John were friends before the movie started, and Ione Skye was dating someone else but says if she hadn’t had a boyfriend she totally would have slept with Cusack after the scene where he teaches her to drive. The movie has such a relaxed chemistry I think because people had these pre-existing relationships and real attractions/histories with each other.

Sarah: Oh yeah. The chemistry between the actors is unreal. Like they’d all been friends for years and we dropped in for two hours.

I told you guys that I watched Grosse Point Blank being written, right?

Redheadedgirl: …no.

Sarah: So I worked a hotel front desk outside of Chicago for a spring and a summer, which convinced me that (a) working the front desk is the hardest job in the hotel aside from housekeeping because I went through OSHA training with them and it was horrifying, (b) Chicago is trying to kill the people that live there in every season because if they made it through winter, summer is waiting to try it again with 90000 degrees, and (c) John Cusack is a great writer.

I worked a lot of evening/nights, and one day I came in to find a weird set of instructions from the day staff. The guests in one of the top floor suites were faxing down pages every hour or so. Our job was to make six copies of those pages, then have a bellman bring those copies back up to the room.

Sure enough, every hour, the fax machine would spit out a bunch of pages – remember that weird scroll paper? – and we’d cut them and copy them and send the copies back to the room.

Turns out, it was John Cusack and his friends writing the script for Grosse Pointe Blank, and it was SO FREAKING COOL to watch a script being written.

I think they were there all night, writing it. It was unreal.

Carrie: OMG that’s amazing!

My heart’s dream is to have a guy pick up Linden and make the same manic yet reassuring speech about how she will be safe with him and he rarely drinks. It’s super weird watching this movie as a parent and not as a teen.

Redheadedgirl: I hope that the date in question has the class to make the speech to you and Glenn, and not just Glenn.

Carrie: But of course!

We just got to the scene with the glass outside the 7-11 and Linden said “What a gentleman!” Remember the conversation about this scene in Bet Me?

The second date is dinner with the family? Not cool, Diane, not cool.

Sarah: Second date as family dinner?!

Redheadedgirl: It’s not even “family” it’s “friends of family” and also second date you have the dude helping pick out your clothes?

Like

What

You don’t know him well enough to see if he’d be good at that.

Carrie: Linden’s advice for this kind of question is: If you don’t know what you are going to do after high school, just go back to whatever you were going to be when you were eight. You can be all, “Firefighter!”

Redheadedgirl: “What I want to do for a living is be with your daughter.” That’s not really a LIVING, dude.

Carrie: We just watched the scene where she tells her dad she had sex. I remember watching this scene with my mom and feeling like my mom was appalled that two people had sex and it wasn’t presented as terrible. But for me, watching that scene with my tween daughter was such a great moment and such a good opportunity.

Sarah: WHY WOULD YOU TELL YOUR DAD THAT OMG GIRL.

John Mahoney, this conversation is nothing compared to future conversations you’ll have with Frasier Crane.

Carrie: She has no friends – it’s an especially amazing scene because there is literally not one other person she can talk to about this.

Sarah: “You can say anything to me,” is a powerful thing.

No. It really is an amazing scene.

And her dad is kinda… awful.

Redheadedgirl: Mmmhmmmm

Carrie: The stuff between Diane and her Dad is unbearable for me to watch.

It’s interesting to me that in the 1980s I also thought maybe Lloyd was a slacker but actually the dude has a job – a teaching job, no less. I was fascinated that Linden listed ways he was good to marry and it didn’t seem to occur to her that earning potential was part of this, she thought he was nice and good with kids and good with old people and also good at teaching.

I know as a parent I would think, “Is this guy just going to sponge off my daughter, or what?” But I adore the fact that in this movie the guy drops everything to follow the woman’s career path, not the other way around. And Lloyd never tries to keep Diane from going to England – he wants her to be her best self.

If he does need to bring in some serious income, he could run his own dojo and earn a decent living, but of course that’s because he was right – kickboxing and martial arts in general really did become more popular in the future.

Redheadedgirl: I just worry about him. If it doesn’t work out, and the proportion of bitchery who’s made it with their high school sweetheart notwithstanding, I just want to know that he’s got something to fall back on.

And planning your whole life around one person is just so…. Don’t do that. It’ll be easier for him in the 80s to find a job in the UK, but still.

Carrie: I don’t think many high school graduates know what they are going to be when they “grow up”. I think Lloyd will find a Dojo to teach at in England and maybe in 5-10 years decide to teach martial arts full time, or he’ll decide to get a teaching credential and teach kindergarten – he’d be good at those things.

Redheadedgirl: I just worry!

Carrie: He’s not dropping any opportunities at home so he can afford to flounder around for a while, whereas if Diane gave up her fellowship she’d be screwed.

What do you picture being different if he stayed in Seattle?

Redheadedgirl: It’s not tying his choices to one person.

Carrie: So what happens if he and Diane break up in England? He’s in the same position he was in before. How is he worse off?

Redheadedgirl: I’m not saying “oh my god this was a terrible choice he made. I’m just saying that I worry that the stress of “I picked up everything for you” / “oh my god you left your whole life for me” and then they both get into suck-cost fallacies.

“I can’t break up with you because I put/you put so much into this.”

You know that happens.

Carrie: It is a lot of pressure, except Lloyd isn’t giving up any opportunities, so that helps a little.

How would you like the movie to end?

Redheadedgirl: I don’t have an answer. I am not saying it is bad. I am saying I worry. Why isn’t that enough of an answer?

Carrie: Maybe the answer is that the transition out of high school sucks no matter what you do.

Redheadedgirl: Maybe there is no answer. I can worry without saying, “I need this to be different.”

Carrie: I think that’s why the movie ends so abruptly and ambiguously. It’s not promising a happy ending; it’s just gotten us this far in their lives.

Sarah: Lloyd as a hero is fascinating for me, then and now.

Lloyd wants to take a risk because he likes a girl who is out of his league.

I love that he knows who he is, and where he fits in the external status structure, and really doesn’t care

I think Lloyd a hero that resonates with people because he knows who he is, and he goes for it even when he’s afraid. He kickboxes a gym bag to get the nerve and adrenaline to call her.

Carrie: ‘Cause basically that’s true. For a guy who is into kickboxing he has no truck with toxic or performative masculinity: he just does his thing.

Sarah: He sees his path clearly, and he won’t be dissuaded. With another actor or in another context, the pushy guy is annoying and potentially dangerous or at least a warning signal. Here, he’s already earned the charm because of the first few scenes with him and his friends.

And I already know that Diane wants to be less of a ‘priss,’ and feels trapped by the life she’s been directed in, and Lloyd SEES her, which she’s desperate for.

HOLY SHIT BEBE NEUWIRTH is in this?!

Carrie: Sarah, EVERYONE is in this!

Sarah: And here’s why Lloyd works for me:

“How many of them really know what they want, though? I mean, a lot of them think they have to know, right? But inside they don’t really know, so… I don’t know, but I know that I don’t know.”

He’s honest about who he is and what he wants and is true to himself. That’s amazing. I love that he knows who he is and he wants Diane to be happy. Her dad wants control. Lloyd wants her to be herself. Her dad wants to take care of her by doing all the wrong things; Lloyd wants to support her decisions and her being herself by doing as much as he can that’s right and honest.

Carrie: When she goes to the car to cry I realized it’s the car he taught her to drive. So I cried too. Much weepy.

Sarah: I can’t remember. Was he evading taxes?

Redheadedgirl: Skimming from the old folks in the home. Not telling Medicaid when they died.

Stuff like that.

Sarah: Oooooooh. Got to the Very Beige IRS scene.

“I’m skimming from old people for YOU.”

And can we talk about the “people who watched this…” marquee?

Redheadedgirl: I wonder if my slightly “welp” reaction is due to a) not having a history with this movie and more importantly b) that I’ve seen so many teen movies that get their DNA from this that this felt derivative, even though I know it’s not.

Like I KNOW that Can’t Hardly Wait can trace a direct line from Say Anything, I KNOW THAT, but I saw Can’t Hardly Wait first.

Sarah: I’m seriously considering rewatching it – which is weird for me.

Carrie: As a teen I would have given it a B and I don’t know why I like it so much better now.

Sarah: I love the ending. Hear the ding, everything’s going to be ok.

Carrie: And – the no smoking sign is off, and I have to say this movie gets better the older I get. A.

Switch the genders. In the movie, the female character is super driven. She’ll probably earn a huge salary doing a high pressure job, and the guy will prob end up staying home and being a house husband. So yeah, in the moment he’s a slacker ditz, but personality wise it’s all perfect and if you switched the genders no one would blink

Except maybe to say “look you are pinning your whole future on your first love maybe have a fall back plan.”

Sarah: I know there were other 80s movies that were replete with Ringwald, but for me this was the perfect movie. I can totally see why Lloyd is a perpetual favorite. He’s probably one of the reasons I really like clever beta heroes. A grade, all the way.

Did you watch the movie along with us? What did you think about Lloyd? Was the ending satisfying enough for you? Leave your comments below, even if you just want to weigh in on the ass bow debate!