![]() I sometimes have the peculiar feeling that the kids in Hughes's movies are more grown up than the adults in most of the other ones. Bob Lefsetz wrote about the song Some Kind of Wonderful, made into a hit by Grand Funk Railroad, which prompted the song’s writer and original singer John Ellison, of the great, forgotten Soul Brothers Six, to respond.I found his story about how and why he wrote the song really great, and I love the original version of the song which you can check out at the bottom of this post. ![]() "Some Kind of Wonderful" is yet another film in which Hughes and his team show a special ability to make an entertaining movie about teenagers, which is also about life, about insecurity, about rejection, about learning to grow. She has a lot of tricky scenes in which she has to look one way and feel another way, and she's good at them. There's something a little masochistic about the way she volunteers to chauffeur him on his big date, but something sweet, too, in the way she cares for him. A teen love story, told with some great understated humour, very quotable one-liners, a great soundtrack, excellent performances from the principle cast members, arguably one of the best kissing scenes in any movie, and the perfect audience. This disagreement doesn't quite degenerate into a shouting match, and by the end of the film the two are able to have a surprisingly civilized fight about it.Īll of the actors in this story are appealing, but my favorite was Masterson as the tomboy whose love is totally overlooked by this guy who thinks he knows all about her. Probably John Hughes least known teen movie from the 80s. Ashton wants his kid to go to college the kid would rather devote the energy to his artwork. "Some Kind of Wonderful" is a worthwhile film, all right, but it's also entertaining - especially in the scenes between Stoltz and John Ashton, who plays his father. I guess I'm making this sound like a film they should show in sociology class. By the movie's end, everybody has learned something about themselves. And in the final sequence, in which the tomboy acts as chauffeur on the dream date, the dialogue isn't about sex it's about learning to be true to yourself and not fall for the way people are packaged. The tomboy doesn't just pine from afar, but helps Keith in his campaign to win a date with this girl of his dreams. The Thompson character, for example, is not just a distant, unattainable symbol, but a young woman with feelings. But Hughes always gives his characters the right to be real, and by the end of "Some Kind of Wonderful," I felt a lot of empathy for these kids. Here we have all the ingredients, I suppose, for another standard John Hughes teenager film. He even has a song written about her, which is performed about three times on the soundtrack. Keith has a crush on Amanda Jones ( Lea Thompson), who is the school sexpot. He would rather be an artist than fit in with the crowd, and his best friend is another outsider, a tomboy ( Mary Stuart Masterson). It is about whether the hero should get the girl, and when was the last time you saw a movie that even knew that could be the question? The film stars Eric Stoltz as Keith, a pleasantly shaggy young man who is an outsider at his high school. But it is not about whether the hero will get the girl. ![]() It progresses slowly at times and it uses some fairly standard characters. "Some Kind of Wonderful," which Hughes wrote and produced, and which Howard Deutch directed, is a movie like that. ![]()
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