Valley Girl series

  • Valley Girl (2020)

    Valley Girl (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Remaking 1980s cultural touchstone Valley Girl – terrible idea or awful idea? As it turns out – neither: director Rachel Lee Goldenberg gives just enough of a different spin to her film to become its own thing while clearly paying homage to its inspiration. Cleverly, this Valley Girl ends up being a recollection from a late-2010ish mom talking about her own childhood to a twenty-first century teen – meaning that we get musical numbers, lavish use of a 1980s soundtrack (but new age 1980s, not necessarily the most irritating stuff), self-consciously romantic/mythologic recreation of the era and more than a few forward-looking jokes. The narrative isn’t anything special and unthreatening lead actor Josh Whitehouse isn’t Nicolas Cage, but Jessica Rothe does rather well as the protagonist, and there are enough familiar faces in the film for a few pleasant surprises. Where this Valley Girl does much better is as a retro-pop jukebox-musical – the framing device gives permission to just enjoy the material for what it is – a gentle colourful bubble-gum concoction that is not and will not become a classic, but is fun enough for a spin.

  • Valley Girl (1983)

    Valley Girl (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2019) Considering that Valley Girl is a quasi-anthropologic study of life and love between Los Angeles neighbourhoods playing off the eponymous stereotype popularized by Frank Zappa, I clearly made a mistake by watching it in its French-Canadian dub: No amount of repetition of “… genre…” as an accurate translation of “… like…” is as charming as the stereotypical overuse of the word as punctuation in the original Valley dialect. At least the translation is on firmer footing when it comes to presenting a different-sides-of-the-track romance between a hippie Valley girl (Deborah Foreman) and a punk rockfish boy (Nicolas Cage) from Hollywood—the vaguely disreputable Hollywood as seen from another L.A. neighbourhood. Amusingly enough, Cage is here introduced by teenage girls squealing in admiration about his body, screaming, “He’s like a god!” One thing that doesn’t get lost in translation is the time-travelling aspect of going back to 1983 and taking a look at how teenagers (approximately) lived at the time, in between malls and music joints. (And that strange thing called sushi.)  The soundtrack may not be to everyone’s liking, but it is certainly evocative of a time and place. Director Martha Coolidge wasn’t looking to make a document for the ages with this low-budget romance, but that’s roughly what happened—Valley Girl wasn’t just a sizable hit at the time, but it endures as a fond memory. Next time, I’ll watch the original dub.