Quick Recap: Girl and Boy date. Girl loves Boy, and Boy doesn’t know what he feels except horniness. Boy breaks up with Girl because of said horniness and Girl goes insane. Both lower their expectations significantly and marry other people. A classic tale of romance, indeed!

Memes are hilarious still……right?

Fun(?) Fact: In real life, the actor who plays Warren Beatty’s father is only 13 years older than Beatty. It must have been a very hard 13 years.

I don’t even.

My thoughts: Sex is bad and you should never have it unless you are married. Then again, Deanie, played by Natalie Wood, refused to put out and she ended up in a mental asylum. So…..sex is good! Have lots of it and with lots of different guys! And everyone knows that the best place to meet young suitors is your oil tycoon father’s New Year’s Eve party. That’s what Bud’s sister, Ginny, did! But she also died in a car accident years later, which no one was surprised by. So who the hell knows what the point of this movie is?

Trying to start an orgy with your brother just a few feet away is the classiest way to go

When the synopsis of the movie included the word melodrama, I curled up into a little ball while nightmare-ish visions of ‘Written on the Wind‘ danced around my head. But, while that movie’s ‘melodrama’ consisted of nothing more than a guy going crazy because he couldn’t have children, this one took the description and owned it. SO.MUCH. MELODRAMA.

The point is driven home so many times how much Deanie is in love with Bud. She has pictures of him plastered to her wall and kisses them goodnight often. Instead of paying attention in class, she spends the time doodling her name over and over again with Bud’s last name attached. She patiently waits in his car while he finishes football practice. That kind of adoration will never end well. As for Bud, I think he loved Deanie too, but he also wanted to get in her pants so it was hard to tell. And speaking of getting into pants, Deanie’s mom was all over who was and was not in her pants. She has several conversations with the poor girl about not going too far because it would ‘spoil’ her and no man wants that. And for added proof we see the high school slut that all guys sleep with because they don’t want to ‘spoil’ their girlfriends. Despite all the over the top emotion about love, Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty acted so perfectly and natural that I could see various people I knew from high school in this same exact situation.

Beatty and Wood did such a superb job making their characters likeable and able to be sympathized with that I kept hoping they might end up together. Even though that would’ve been a very bad idea indeed. I’m not sure how I feel about the ending with the two of them marrying other people except that I guess teenage love is fleeting and even though it sucks when it ends, we all move on at some point. And if we can’t move on, we get shipped to the mental asylum.

Final Review: 4/5. I’m still not a fan of melodrama but I loved the actors and was especially impressed by Pat Hingle, who played Bud’s father. He was so intense and real that I would watch the movie for his performance alone. Also, I had no idea Warren Beatty looked like this:

oh my.

Up next: The Host at Alamo Drafthouse. It’s going to be a good one!