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1:15. The BMW streaks across the Hollywood Hills toward the gigantic Tower Records store on Sunset Boulevard. Molly pops into the dashboard tape deck a cassette by her favorite Los Angeles band, the Rave-Ups. The glove compartment is so stuffed with tapes it won't close, and the back seat is littered with the plastic placentas of cassette containers. The bikers and pink-haired punkettes hanging out in front of Tower Records recognize Molly even before she parks, but the mode is cool: a slow nod, a thin smile and distance. In one corner of the store, David Lee Roth, the motor-mouthing rock star, signs autographs, but Molly is too shy to approach him. Instead, she gets down to business, striking surgically at every rack in the store: rock, pop, jazz, country, blues. The tab is $93.59.
$ Next stop: Melrose Avenue. To shop the trendy boutiques of Melrose with Molly Ringwald is to watch elegant saleswomen grovel. Having word get out that this young fashion plate buys from your shop is the rag-trade equivalent of hitting all six numbers in the California lottery. At Comme des Garcons, a tiny Frenchwoman behind the counter compliments Molly on her Paleolithic do and watches her try on a pair of suede lace-up granny shoes. $49, and out she strides, in her late-for-the-train gait, past two punked-out teens. "That was Molly Ringwald!" one insists. "No, it wasn't," her elder companion sighs. "It was just one of those people dressed up like her."
Ned Tanen, president of the motionpicture group at Paramount, calls John Hughes "the Steven Spielberg of youth comedy." Fair enough: Hollywood has always been a town that rewards arrested adolescence and those who can profitably memorialize it. If E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark seem made for children of all ages, from four to 14, then Sixteen Candles provides their older brothers and sisters with answers to the question: Is there life after junior high? Hughes' first film as writer-director is, sure, a sentimental fantasy with just enough wild-party footage to keep the Porky's crowd from nodding off. But for teens in search of tips on language, behavior and all the right moves, Sixteen Candles functions as a therapeutic documentary, a sort of survival kit of '80s cool. And for the rest of us, it offers a fine old time at the movies.
It is Samantha Baker's 16th birthday, but her preoccupied parents have forgotten it. Sam (Ringwald) is a sophomore, in strangulated love with a dishy senior (Michael Schoeffling) and shadowed by a crypto-hip freshman called the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall), who, in one of his more winsome moments, asks Sam if he can borrow her underpants. The plot, which will be reprised in Pretty in Pink, is familiar from schlock immemorial, but Hughes' acute ear for teen talk makes it fresh and funny. Listen to Sam and her girlfriend Randy (Liane Curtis) wax ironic on every girl's dream for the day she turns sweet 16: "There'd be a big party, and a band and tons of people, and a pink Trans Am in the driveway with a ribbon around it, and some incredibly gorgeous guy that you meet, like in France, and you do it on a cloud without getting pregnant or herpes."
Sam: I don't need a cloud.
Randy: Just a pink Trans Am and the guy!
Sam: A black one.
Randy: A black guy?
Sam: A black Trans Am. A pink guy.