Pump Up the Volume

High school students, stuck in a small town, bored and disillusioned.

Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) is a shy senior at Hubert Humphrey High School, was transported against his will from New York City to a small town in Arizona.

When his parents buy him a short-wave radio, Hard Harry, Mark’s pirate radio alter ego, is born.

Harry is everything that Mark is not — loud, opinionated and rude. Between the Beastie Boys and Leonard Cohen tunes that he cranks out and crude jokes about bodily fluids, Harry has a running commentary on HHH’s messed up school system and being misunderstood.

While this is a movie chock full of messages that we already knew — from free speech to alienation — it’s a great movie. Slater’s character strikes a chord in all of us — he’s the geek that we all sort of wish that we were.

Sixteen Candles

Samantha’s 16th birthday should be the best day of her life. It’s a coming of age, the day that she becomes an adult. It’s also the day that her parents forget.

In addition to her parents forgetting her birthday because of her sister’s wedding, Samantha (Molly Ringwald) also has all of the problems of an ‘80s teen, including the unrequited love she carries for Jake Ryan (Matt Dillon), the jock hunk-in-residence of the movie.

Jake has perfect friends, a perfect girlfriend … more or less a perfect life. Sam has fallen in love with him, but she’s afraid to tell him. In typical “teen dream” style, he finds out about this love when he finds a note that Sam wrote to her friend and lost.

Jake, amazingly, is interested, but afraid to tell Sam.

The happy ending and the laughs all along the way make this movie more than an ‘80s classic — it was the definition of romantic comedies.