Julie sits her down to share her wisdom, revisiting her own final semester of high school, a time when “Life was like a pop song, and we knew all the words.”Ĭue a needle drop and a sugar-rush explosion of pastels and candy-colored neon as the perky young Julie (Jessica Rothe) and her posse hit the Galleria in the early ’80s for a shopping montage set to “We Got the Beat,” the first of many era-defining songs covered for the movie, either as production numbers or background soundtrack cuts.Īdult Julie talks about the bougie bubble of the Valley in relation to the edgy Sunset Strip punk scene: “It was just a few zip codes over but it seemed like a million miles away.” Cut to Randy (Joshua Whitehouse), who sings lead in Safety Recall, a band that also includes his jaded lesbian roommate Jack (Mae Whitman) and spike-haired drummer Sticky (Mario Revolori). Silverstone plays the adult Julie, a cool mom rocking a Bowie T-shirt under her shawl cardigan whose daughter Ruby (Camila Morrone) has just broken up with her boyfriend over her plans to follow school with a study program in Japan. The new film gets less hung up on the dialect but it finds an amusing way to stick to the original period while bringing some contemporary perspective. From Coolidge through Clueless director Amy Heckerling to this remake’s key creative team, having women in the drivers’ seats seems significant in the warmth and respect these movies shower on their well-rounded female characters. Goldenberg and Talkington honor that tradition by affectionately crafting a storyteller role for an uncredited Alicia Silverstone, forever a queen of the genre thanks to her divine work in Clueless, which was pretty much Valley Girl 2.0 by way of Jane Austen. It helped launch the eternal is-he-really-good-or-really-bad? debate around then little-known Nicolas Cage, and also marked a shift in American teen comedies away from horny boys to girls looking for love without surrendering their individuality. While the Zappas shunned involvement in Coolidge’s film and tried unsuccessfully to sue over trademark infringement, the movie mainlined the vernacular parodied in the song, so much so that a TV guide blurb once memorably described it as, “The story of a girl with a regional accent who falls in love,” or something to that effect. The song - a crunchy guitar riff accompanied by a stream of deliciously vapid Valspeak - helped popularize “Oh, my God” and “like” as conversational punctuation that would take over the world, as well as ushering in the ubiquitous reign of the upward inflection. The 1982 single by Zappa père et fille broke into the Top 40 via early airplay on KROQ, which gets a shout-out from Goldenberg and screenwriter Amy Talkington as the Los Angeles radio network that hosts a live broadcast of that aforementioned senior prom.
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