'Say Anything ...'

Isn't it weird how timelines get mish mashed as you lose perspective.

I could have swore Say Anything ... was closer to the mid-1980s, related more to his earlier films. It was actually released in 1989, after John Cusack portrayed Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out. In one he's a 25-year-old scrappy third baseman and in another he's an 18-year-old kickboxer.

I have a bit of a man crush on Cusack. I latched on in high school when I watched his early work like The Sure Thing and Better Off Dead then The Road to Wellville and Grosse Point Blank, which had this rad soundtrack with The Clash and Violent Femmes on it. By college, he'd done A Thin Red Line, High Fidelity, Pushing Tin, The Cradle Will Rock and Being John Malkovich. Really, not a bad slate of films.

I would put his top 10 films against anybody elses. At least for me.

Say Anthing ... is a super odd film. It's not necessarily funny, something Cusack was known for. The characters are quite obnoxious. Lloyd Dobler and Lili Taylor should have just gotten married. The dad's crime situation is really weird. It distracts from the love story and yet I couldn't imagine the film without it. He's a passive-aggressive prick, who seems like the greatest father in the world for 40 minutes. However, it was a plot development that nobody in the 1980s making a teenage flick would ever try.

I still don't know why Ione Skye looked like a heroin addict at the end of the film.