Of course, Amanda already has a boyfriend-nasty, sneering rich kid, Hardy Jenns (Sheffer), whose life revolves around looking good, cheating on Amanda and keeping the school social class system in order. Watts: Yeah, but you can sure tell how much it’s gonna cost.Īlso helping out is school bully, Duncan (Koteas), who Keith meets in detention and whose sole purpose appears to be to provide the comic relief in the film.
Keith: You can’t judge a book by its cover. To this end, he enrols the unwilling help of his tomboy best friend, Watts, who is so overtly in love with him, you wonder how sensitive Keith can be as an artist if he’s missed something this obvious right in front of his face: Keith has decided that he can be accepted within the confines of the modern American high school if only he can engineer a date with Amanda Jones (her character is always referred to by both names, so that when they play a remake of the Rollling Stones hit Miss Amanda Jones later on, we’re all quite clear who’s being referenced). This time, we get arty outsider Keith (Stoltz) in love with the school’s most popular girl, Amanda Jones (Thompson), not realising that his best friend and fellow outsider, Watts (Masterson), is in love with him.
Pretty in Pink, released two years earlier, was such a success that eighties teen movie king John Hughes decided to give the love triangle in that film a bit of a gender flip. Starring: Eric Stoltz, Mary Stuart Masterson, Craig Sheffer, Lea Thompson, Elias Koteas