The Screengrab : Ally Sheedy

Screengrab Review: "Perestroika"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Perestroika is only the third feature that the Russian-born writer-director Slava Tsukerman has completed since 1983's Liquid Sky, and only the second of those films to open in U.S. theaters (after the 2004 documentary Stalin's Wife). That's enough to arouse the curiosity of movie freaks of a certain age who remember Liquid Sky, including--maybe especially--those who were too young and/or too far away from an art house to actually see the thing when it was released but who spent a fair amount of time imagining what it might be like, based on the print ad in the movie section of the Village Voice and whatever written or spoken reports might come one's way. (It was the kind of movie that inspired witnesses to try to describe its basic outlines as if they'd seen Bigfoot.) A sci-fi New Wave atrocity exhibition, Liquid Sky was mostly shot in a Greenwich Village loft, and it by God looked like something that had been shot in a loft. (Specifically, it looked like something that was shot in a loft whose owners were trying to economize by lighting the whole place with lava lamps.) The plot involved a bunch of aggressively repellent downtown-scene types whose building had been invaded by extraterrestrials who fed on the endorphins that these charmers released when they shot up or had sex; as if this weren't freaky enough, the movie's co-writer, Anne Carlisle, appeared in a dual role as a pair of pouty, disagreeable male and female fashion models who, inevitably, had a climactic sex scene together. Both the Fairlight synthesizer score and the special visual effects (which look like early video art) have a "circa-1982" time stamp, but, like a lot of '80s cult hits, the movie has a lot about it that appears to be the result of incompetence and lethargy but that, if you're in an indulgent or insecure mood, might be taken as deliberate, part of some campy postmodern "style." (Along with such self-aware gorefests as The Evil Dead and Basket Case, Liquid Sky was one of the very last pictures to establish a niche on the midnight movie circuit before home video killed off midnight movies. It got in just under the wire.)

Perestroika has more on its mind than Liquid Sky, and seems to come from a place closer to Tsukerman's heart; compared to Liquid Sky, it's a more down-to-earth, conventional movie. (Compared to Liquid Sky, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is more down-to-earth, conventional movie.) But it, too, has issues of technical competence that make it seem like a throwback to those heady days when Ronald Reagan was president and there was always someone sitting in the back row of the theater showing the latest cult masterpiece who was ready to explain to you that the movie was supposed to look like puke--it was part of the director's cunning strategy for delivering his statement that the world looks like puke. There's a lot of rear projection that's so glaringly obvious that it could be taken for either a deliberate alienation device or an homage to Bert I. Gordon, or maybe, just possibly, an expression of that aesthetic code best summed up in the phrase, "Who gives a shit, I'm going to lunch." There's also a lot of dubbing, the quality of which one normally encounters only in third-grade Spaghetti Westerns or black and white European horror movies featuring rubber skeletons and past-their-prime pre-Schwarzenegger bodybuilders who were laughed off the set of Steve Reeves pictures. On the other hand, there are things wrong with the movie, notably the colorless, uninvolving central performance by Sam Robards, that I'm positive aren't part of some avant-garde artistic plan. They're just wrong.

Robards plays Sasha Greenburg, a Russian astrophysicist who married an American named Helen (Ally Sheedy) and sought refuge in the West, and who, in 1992, returns to Moscow after seventeen years in America to pay witness to the post-Soviet period of transformation. In voice-over, Sasha tells us that this was that special time in his life that he'll never be able to forget--"Moscow was in turmoil, and so was I"--but all the camera shows you is an actor with chalk dust in his hair wandering through a location shoot, looking as if he hadn't yet fully recovered from jet lag. Ally Sheedy came to play, but like the other actresses in the movie whose characters find Sasha devastatingly interesting--these include Jicky Schnee as Sasha's blonde American mistress, Oksana Stashenko as his redheaded Russian old flame, and Maria Andreyeva as the old flame's teenage daughter, who may or may not be Sasha's daughter--are stranded by Robards's failure to supply the charisma that would make their fascination with him halfway credible. Nor does he suggest the intellectual firepower that's essential to his character, who's supposed to be cooking up a theory that will "explain" the universe. The only thing he seems to be a genius at is moping.

Perestroika wants to say something about the nightmare of life in the Soviet Union and the untenable choices that were forced on Russian scientists and other intellectuals who had to decide whether they preferred to leave their homes, perhaps forever, and try to do meaningful work in exile, or, like Sasha's mentor Professor Grosss (F. Murray Abraham), consign themselves to working for a state apparatus they fear and depise. It comes closest in the flashback scenes in which Sasha is denounced in the classroom by his colleagues for wanting to defect to Israel ("Greenburg doesn't belong in Israel. He belongs in prison!")--the same colleagues who will later accost him in private to assure him they didn't mean it, and who, seventeen years later, will welcome him back as a conquering hero. With its dead lump of a hero and a stalled dramatic motor--and with surprisingly little to say about the effect of Perestroika itself, aside from the news that you had to pay through the nose for a bottle of vodka--the movie is mostly just talky. This does no one any favors except for F. Murray Abraham, who tears into his role with the gusto of an actor who loves playing the cultured, world-weary ironist and has figured out that he has no real competition for the audience's attention. If Perestroika had a life of its own, Abraham's performance might look distractingly hammy, but as it is, he's the closest thing on view to an orgasm-powered flying saucer, and you cleave to him gratefully. Sometimes professional showmanship is its own reward.

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

SATURN 3 (1980)

To be honest, the scariest thing about Stanley Donen’s Cheez-Whiz science fiction chamber piece isn’t the giant “Demi-God” robot Hector (not even after the human-brained cyborg is reprogrammed with the horny, homicidal impulses of Harvey Keitel’s Abby-Normal cerebellum). Nor is it the terrible acting by Farrah Fawcett or the sight of Kirk Douglas’ naked rump in action. No, for me, the scariest thing about Saturn 3 is the inexplicable streak of Puritan fundamentalism it elicited when I saw it on the big screen many moons ago, prompting me to sit down and fire off an angry letter to Starlog magazine about all the unnecessary sexual content Donen had slipped into a genre (science fiction) that was usually a non-threatening, safely asexual haven for pubescent, maladjusted geeks like my then (barely) 13-year-old self. The fact that Keitel stared at the private parts of (scantily-clad) Fawcett’s dog, Sally, then later wrestled with a nude Douglas filled me with moral outrage (masking hormonal unease) that was later replaced by massive embarrassment when the aforementioned letter was actually published and, worse, discovered (and mercilessly mocked) by my friends. And now, thanks to the wonders of modern bloggage, I can share my Saturn 3 embarrassment with the whole wide world, all at the touch of a button...thanks a bunch, technology! (AO)

WARGAMES (1983)

In WarGames, Matthew Broderick is the first kid in America with the Internet, but unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to know how to use it to download porn. He does know how to hack into his high school’s system and change his grades, which is useful, but not as useful as changing his cute classmate Jennifer’s (Ally Sheedy) grades. He also tries to break new ground in the field of cyber-piracy by downloading a cool new game from the manufacturer before it’s even released, but instead inadvertently hacks into the NORAD supercomputer known as WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) and launches a potentially apocalyptic game of Global Thermonuclear War. From a modern standpoint, WarGames plays like a goofy shotgun marriage of John Hughes-ian ‘80s teen comedy and dated technothriller, but I’ll give the movie credit for anticipating the potential for cyber-terrorism long before any of us knew what that meant and also for tapping into Reagan-era anxiety about nuclear war, accidental and otherwise. It’s harder to forgive the simplistic, preachy “tic-tac-toe” ending (seen above), but maybe they can fix that in the inevitable remake. (SVD)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

Steven Spielberg turned a Philip K. Dick story into an action vehicle for Tom Cruise, with results that actually trash the ideas in the original material less thoroughly than a lot of other moves based on Dick's work. The ideas can't said to be far from timely, either. Cruise is the head of the Washington, D.C. "Precrime" force, which uses psychics and a vast electronic surveillance network to pick out people who are contemplating committing crimes and arrest them before the crimes actually occur. Cruise, as twittishly self-satisfied as ever, sees nothing troubling about this way of doing things until he himself is identified as a potential evildoer, at which point he suddenly detects certain flaws in the system. A good movie up until the last fifteen minutes or so; not even Dick ever imagined a drug that could make the ending go down easily. (PN)

SERENITY (2005)

Most of Joss Whedon's space-cowboys fantasy (spun off from his criminally short-lived TV series Firefly) revels in futuristic technology, treating it as a blast, but it has a sting in its tail: the revelation of what terrible secret the government is sitting on. In one of his novels, William S. Burroughs once invented a drug called Bor Bor, which was "held in horror" by Burroughs' heroes and "only used as a weapon against our enemies"; its effect "is to lull the user into a state of fuzzy well-being and benevolence, a warm good feeling that everything will come out all right for America." The crew of Serenity discover the remains of a city that consists of functioning, automated buildings filled with dusty corpses; they are all that is left of a population that was fed on an experimental drug that was designed to produce a more tranquil, non-violent people less inclined to object to or protest anything, and who became so satisfied with the state of things that they stopped moving altogether and quietly starved to death. That's one version of Morning in America. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

So, we’ve just survived a teeth-grindingly suspenseful presidential election, and now we’re entering the prestigious “serious film” season of Academy Award predictions and Best of 2008 lists...but in between all the high-minded political rhetoric and contemplations of quality cinema, Screengrab’s chief pollster and trailer-meister Paul Clark thought it might be a good idea for us to get down off our high horses for a week and reveal the movies we’re REALLY watching on our laptops when we SHOULD be dissecting the eschatological subtext of Synecdoche, New York.

Yes, I’m talking about Guilty Pleasures...NOT the overlooked indie gems we totally “get” because we’re smarter than everyone else, NOT the films that were unfairly maligned by the philistines in the mainstream media, but rather the truly flawed and disreputable movies we’re downright embarrassed to admit we kinda like.

So, c'mon, fess up...I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, as we here at the Screengrab reluctantly reveal our ALL-TIME GUILTIEST PLEASURES!

ANDREW OSBORNE’S GUILTY PLEASURES:

Okay, so to get this shame spiral spinning, I figured I’d go ahead and rank my unmentionables from least embarrassing to most indefensible, starting with...

5. MEATBALLS (1979)

So, okay, maybe this one isn’t so bad. Sure, the Animal House-lite Bill Murray vehicle doesn’t really try very hard (while at the same time occasionally trying too hard)...but you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Sure, it’s painfully sincere in its sweetness, and not as remotely hep or ironically detached as, say, Wet, Hot, American Summer...but it just doesn’t matter! Sure, it’s not as highly regarded a “slobs vs. snobs” comedy as Caddyshack (which I never really dug as much as my friends anyway), and, true, it spawned a series of truly horrible sequels...but it just doesn’t matter! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER!!! Indeed, that rousing Camp North Star "doesn't matter" chant became my very own motivational Geek Creed throughout high school and college, and while my classmates were rockin’ out to Foreigner, Rush and Zeppelin, I was singing along to the Meatballs soundtrack LP (featuring the “hit” single “Makin’ It”), and to this day I still know all the words to the “Counselor in Training” campfire song (“We are the CITs so pity us...”) -- but for me, the most embarrassing thing about this particular guilty pleasure was how much I yearned (and still yearn) for the simple niceness and camaraderie of its summer camp world (as opposed to the mean, boring streets of reality), and also the extent to which I subsequently modeled my adolescent behavior on Murray’s cool jerk class clown self-assurance in a desperate attempt to hide the full extent of my own breathtaking dorkiness.

4. GUMMO (1997)

There’s a lot of guilt (and guilt-by-association) just being a Harmony Korine fan in the first place. Admit to liking Kids, for example, and people automatically assume you’re some kind of disgusting pervert who actually thinks sexy teenage girls are sexy. Whereas liking Gummo just makes you look crazy: many critics and viewers reacted to Korine’s ugly, plotless, mess of a movie with boredom, confusion or flat-out hostility, and according to Wikipedia, during the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, “numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.” And, honestly, I can’t blame them. In many ways, Gummo is completely indefensible: it’s not exactly entertaining, it’s not really about anything and it’s hard to argue with people who find it pretentious or, in the words of film critic Ken Hanke, “the vilest waste of two hours of my life.” It’s not a movie I’d normally recommend to anyone...unless you’re the kind of person who's spent a little time in the kind of aimless trailer park wonderland where beating the everlovin’ shit out of a helpless chair makes for a good-time Saturday night. As for myself, I was only ever a dilettante visitor to the type of world Gummo portrays in its artily artless depiction of a fictionalized Xenia, Ohio – a town where the “Pets or Meat” lady from Roger & Me or the “Coven” crew from American Movie might feel right at home – and like those films, it’s easy for viewers to find themselves wondering if Korine is depicting offbeat humanity for its own sake or merely exploiting his subjects (a combination of real people and slumming actors like Chloë Sevigny) as “white trash” art objects (or both). Yet just by questioning whether you are or should be judging, say, the feral kid in the pink bunny ears or the widowed mother tap-dancing in her disaster area basement to get a smile out of her grim-faced son, you’ve instantly become more self-conscious than any of the characters you’re watching...hence the guilt.

3. THE BROWN BUNNY (2004)

And speaking of pretentious art films starring Chloë Sevigny...this one’s a major source of guilt, and I haven’t even SEEN it yet. The Brown Bunny’s been lingering on my Netflix queue for two years now, partly because I’m too embarrassed to just move it to the top and be done with it. Don’t get me wrong: though I’m perfectly willing to believe Vincent Gallo lives up to his reputation as an arrogant pain in the ass, I also thought his auteurial debut Buffalo ’66 was flat-out brilliant, and so I’m willing to believe there’s some merit in his follow-up effort, even though most reviewers (including, famously, Roger Ebert) have condemned The Brown Bunny as 93-118 minutes (depending on the cut) of shameless, tedious navel-gazing with all the entertainment value of, well, a long, boring road trip with Vincent Gallo (though Ebert did later amend his original harsh review after seeing the shorter cut). I suppose the potential boredom factor is the main reason I’ve never quite gotten around to watching the movie...yet it nevertheless remains in my queue month after month, year after year for pretty much the only reason most people have ever heard of The Brown Bunny: the infamous scene near the end where Sevigny blows Gallo on camera. Never mind my wife’s perfectly good question about why on earth I would ever want to see Gallo’s icky gnarled penis. Never mind reports I’ve had from reliable sources that the fellatio is totally faux anyway, and real or not it’s one of the least erotic sex scenes in the history of cinema...I just can’t help it: when it comes to the perverse American fascination with celebrities engaged in real (or even simulated) sex acts, I’m guilty as charged.

2. CAMP (2003)

And now things get really embarrassing. Like the teen drama geeks of its titular summer theater retreat, Camp is homely, dorky, amateurish and way too earnest for its own good...but also sweetly charming and downright irresistible to a fellow drama geek like me. Despite increasingly hostile and exasperated reactions from my loved ones, the "Turkey Lurkey" production number from the movie's super-peppy soundtrack was my holiday theme song for 2003...and, as if it’s not embarrassing enough to own the Camp soundtrack (including a musical theater version of Todd Rundgren’s “The Want of A Nail” you’ll often see me belting at the top of my lungs in traffic whenever my wife’s not in the car...yes, that’s right, I said wife...I am, indeed, a closeted heterosexual), I actually went back for a second dose of inexcusable pep and summer camp geekery (are we beginning to see a pattern here?) when Alexandra Shiva directed a documentary called Stagedoor about the real Catskills inspiration for the Camp camp, featuring a counselor named Jeff Murphy who just so happens to be one of the stars of my own “hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” indie film directorial debut (and fantastic stocking stuffer!), Apocalypse Bop (featuring the Screengrab’s very own Scott Von Doviak)!!!

And finally, my deepest shame...

1. ST. ELMO’S FIRE (1985)

Good Lord. What can I say? There’s so much to hate about Joel Schumacher’s 1985 Brat Pack circle jerk I don’t even know where to begin. Leonard Pierce has gone on record with his belief that Andie Macdowell is just about the worst actress ever committed to celluloid, and she’s just a co-star here, sharing the screen with the quivering lips of Andrew McCarthy, the flaring nostrils of Judd Nelson and Demi Moore in full effect. For those who could barely stomach Friends, St. Elmo’s Fire is a thousand times worse, chronicling as it does the loves and lives of six bland white yuppies as they struggle to become even more rich and privileged. Oh, wait, except for Rob Lowe, who’s the sax-playing pretty boy “rebel,” who’s saddled with all the very worst of the film’s terrible, terrible frat-douche dialogue (“It ain’t a party ‘til something gets broken,” “I suppose a blow job’s out of the question,” etc.). Even as a teenager, I cringed at Demi Moore’s gay stereotype buddy and the fact that the only black character in a movie full of smug whites is an icky black streetwalker (who McCarthy’s struggling writer character raps with ‘cuz he’s such a man of, y’know, “the people”). Yet despite all the movie’s glaring flaws, it remains my Guiltiest Pleasure. I even like the godawful John Parr title song (a.k.a. “Man In Motion”). Why? I can only plead nostalgia on this one. I was and remain a sucker for movies like The Big Chill or Dazed and Confused that feature romanticized groups of witty friends hanging around and kvetching about their problems...and St. Elmo’s Fire featured Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez in a mini-reunion from one of the all-time classics of the genre, The Breakfast Club (released earlier the same year), coinciding, as it happened, with my own transition from high school to college (and all the attendant coming-of-age melodrama thus implied), when lines like, “We're all going through this, it's our time at the edge,” were a soothing balm to my sheltered teenage soul. Aaaahhh-booogeda-booogeda-booogeda, ha, ha, ha!

Click Here For More Guilt From Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984) & THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)

I’m no sociologist, but I’ll nevertheless hazard the following thesis: no matter how good any particular teen film may be, there’s nothing that compares with the high school movies you saw while you were actually IN high school. And so, no matter how good, say, American Graffiti or The Last Picture Show or Rushmore or American Pie may be (and yes, Commenters, we know we left all these ultra-worthy contenders off this week’s list, and apologize profusely!), they’ll never hold the same hallowed place in my heart as Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, which I saw during my junior and (best of all) senior years at good ol’ M.H.S., home of the Middleboro Marching 100 and the Speech & Theater Workshop...GO SACHEMS!!!! WOO-HOO!!!! CLASS OF ’85 RULES!!!! Writer/director John Hughes also ruled way back then, before he tumbled into the bottomless vat of Cheez Whiz better known as his post-‘80s directing career. But, just like your goofy yearbook photo, his two best films are eternal: Molly Ringwald as wised-up, self-conscious everygirl Sam and Anthony Michael Hall’s noble Geek are Clearasil icons for the ages in the endlessly quotable '84 classic that established many if not most of the future clichés of the modern teen movie: the ironic, pop culture post-modernism, the clueless but caring parent/guardian and, of course, the climactic cast-of-thousands suburban blow-out. But as good as Sixteen Candles is, The Breakfast Club seemed even better at the time, if only because it gave my senior class “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” as our official swan song. Even when I was squarely in Hughes’ demographic, of course, I recognized the occasional pretentious, simplistic and overwrought moments of the '85 dramedy, and Ally Sheedy’s conversion from cool Goth to Emilio Estevez’s boring prep girlfriend still rankles...but looking back now, I can’t help feeling nostalgic for an era when teens could be still be captivated by a talky character study that played like a one-set, seven-character off-Broadway show with no gratuitous violence or nudity (except for the second big screen close-up of Molly Ringwald’s panties in as many years). Hey...hey...hey...hey!

HIGH SCHOOL (1969)

The cinema-verite documentarian Frederick Wiseman has spent the bulk of his career boiling down one American institution after another -- often in movies with generic-label titles such as Hospital, Juvenile Court, Basic Training, and Domestic Violence -- to reveal the lives being helplessly fed into the bureaucratic grinder. It stands to figure that high school would have been one of the earliest subjects on his list. This film, which was shot at Philadelphia's Northeast High School, conveys the experience of being trapped there for a typical day, and in the process pins to the wall the regimented drills, the impatience with nonconformity, imagination, or anything else that might take things off their carefully scheduled course, the seething resentment of the authority figures trying to hammer the kids into well-behaved, smiling cannon fodder. It was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry in the third year of that list's existence, but it might be a greater tribute to it that it was banned in Philadelphia for years because it made the educational process look dehumanizing and depressing.

LORD LOVE A DUCK (1966)

Probably many will automatically nominate Molly Ringwald or Winona Ryder for the title of high school movies' definitive prom queen, but for some of us, Tuesday Weld blows them all out of the water. The Drew Barrymore of her time -- besides having the weird name to have to explain to people, she was a veteran actress-model, supporting her family while coping with a drinking problem and a nervous breakdown, all before she was thirteen -- she was also a white-hot talent, an inventive actress who was both sexy and affecting even in the cheesy, early rock and roll exploitation pictures that served as her entry point into the movie business. She was twenty-three but still looked like a teen queen when she starred in this bizarre satire, directed by George Axelrod. She plays Barbara Ann Greene, a child of divorce (back when that was still supposed to be shameful) who wants to be loved by everyone but can't even crash the important girls' club she needs to join to take her first steps towards school-wide popularity, because she can't afford the twelve angora sweaters that are a non-negotiable requirement of establishing any girl's true worth. Luckily, she attracts the admiring attentions of Alan (Roddy MacDowell), who begins greasing the wheels for her steady ascent, by whatever means necessary: he's something between a wish-fulfilling genie and a psycho on the make. Before graduating forever from high-school age roles, Weld would follow Duck up with another cult classic, 1968's Pretty Poison, in which the roles were reversed: in that one, her frustrated young miss hooks up with a lonely young man (Anthony Perkins) with a history of emotional disturbance, who realizes too late that she's ensnared him in a murder plot. Once again, Weld demonstrates her ability to do the near-impossible by making her character believable and seductive while managing to make Tony Perkins look like the sane one.

ELECTION (1999)

Alexander Payne's movie, closely adapted from Tom Perrotta's slim, sharp novel, may be the best of all attempts to use high school life as a metaphorical testing ground for everything that comes after it. Matthew Broderick explodes his Ferris Bueller persona as the upstanding, much-admired high school teacher who preaches the virtues of democracy until it becomes clear that, unless checked, democracy is going to make a terrible mistake and reward Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), the superachiever student who is the personification of everything that he hates and thinks is wrong with the world (i.e., everything that makes other people more successful than him). Broderick hasn't had a role half as good since, and neither Witherspoon nor Chris Klein (as the sweet golden boy dope of a jock who's Tracy's natural enemy in spite of himself) has ever been better, but a special Screengrab Missing in Action shout-out goes to Jessica Campbell, the young actress (sixteen at the time) who gives a wonderful performance as Klein's lonely, frustrated lesbian sister, whose acting out turns her into the anarchist heroine of the student body elections, and who, except for a couple of low-profile TV and movie roles, hasn't been seen since.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Geek Love: The Ten Sexiest Nerds in Cinema, Gen-XX Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

With Smart People, Ellen Page reprises her wise-ass, brainy-sexy persona from Juno, reaffirming her place as the current It Girl for a brand new generation of future I.T. professionals and I.T.T. graduates.

Lord knows I enjoyed the standard-issue sex dolls of my Gen X adolescence, from Catherine Bach’s Daisy Duke to Sylvia Kristel’s steamy French maid in Private Lessons (which my parents naively allowed me to go see all by myself because it co-starred that nice Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP In Cincinnati).

But horny fantasies aside, I knew from the get-go I was far too much of a Starlog-reading, drama club-joining, Honor-Roll attaining nerd to ever wind up with the hot blondes or the Bond babe, and so it was always the relatable, approachable freaks and geeks of cinema that gave me hope. And while most of the actresses on the following list were actually gorgeous starlets in real life, it was reassuring to believe the following characters, at least, would maybe lend you their panties if you ever needed to win a bet for a dozen floppy disks. (And don't worry, we'll get to the GUY geeks next week...but suggestions are certainly welcome!)

10. MOLLY RINGWALD AS SAMANTHA BAKER IN SIXTEEN CANDLES

Sure, she wound up with the hunky popular guy at the end, but she WAS nice enough to lend Anthony Michael Hall’s Geek her underwear, and I was always hot for Ms. Ringwald, especially when I read in later interviews that she eventually grew up, fell hard for a French guy and became quite the sex enthusiast.

9. ALLY SHEEDY AS ALLISON REYNOLDS IN THE BREAKFAST CLUB

A pivotal character in my early development, who inspired a life-long love of freaky Goth girls but also broke my heart, dropping the knowledge on my adolescent ass that even the misfit girls would usually choose the Jocks over the Brains of the world if given half a chance. Traitor!

8. MEG TILLY AS CHLOE IN THE BIG CHILL

Sexy, exotic and a little odd-looking, Chloe made me want to be the kind of cool, smart rebel her soulful misfit would dig (a.k.a. William Hurt’s drug-dealing Vietnam vet Nick) as opposed to the gabby neurotic Jeff Goldblum-y type I actually was (and am).

7. HOLLY HUNTER AS JANE CRAIG IN BROADCAST NEWS

Friends still mock me for my obsession with Holly Hunter’s t.v. producer character, but Broadcast News was the movie to beat in 1987 for nailing the friends vs. lovers dilemma faced by supportive, dorky guys in love with female “friends” who think of them as brothers. The scene where Albert Brooks’ character finally tells off Jane, then dumps her from his life is still one of my all-time favorites, finally teaching me the best way to avoid “nice guy” syndrome with girls was not to be so goddamn nice all the time.

6. DAPHNE ZUNIGA AS ALISON BRADBURY IN THE SURE THING

This Gen-X version of It Happened One Night dramatized the other side of the friends vs. lovers dilemma: once you finally figure out how to attract girls, do you go for great sex or great conversation? With Alison Bradbury, John Cusack’s Walter Gibson found the perfect balance.

Click here for part 2!