Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a movie I’ve heard about for a while now, and it keeps popping up in video clips on my social media feed. I immediately recognized Judge Reinhold, who I mostly remember from the Santa Clause movies as the rather weak and ineffectual psychiatrist stepfather. This movie was actually a little overwhelming in terms of how many future stars it featured, either in prominent roles or smaller ones that most people probably wouldn’t remember, such as Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, Phoebe Cates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Sean Penn. I was finally able to watch it recently through Amazon Prime Video.
The film is definitely a great time capsule of its era. I was born six years after it came out, so this is a world I wasn’t really familiar with outside of the leftovers that remained in pop culture. This feels like a true, genuine 1980s experience. For example, there are cute girls working at the pizza place wearing memorable dresses and bow ties, a look that had already gone out of fashion long before the year 2000.
The movie doesn’t really have a single main character. Instead, it follows several different students at Ridgemont High School, and just like any public school, they all come from different backgrounds and have different goals and personalities.
At the same time, the film definitely shows the grimmer side of high school life. From the stress of part-time jobs to love, relationships, and everyday struggles, this movie covers a lot in a short amount of time. It’s definitely not the kind of film that could be shown in a high school classroom today.
The most iconic character in the movie is Jeff Spicoli, played surprisingly by Sean Penn in one of his earliest roles. This 420-loving surfer has some of the most memorable lines and moments in the entire film, and the performance feels completely different from most of Sean Penn’s later work. He wasn’t going to win an Oscar for this role, but it remains one of his most memorable performances, especially among Generation X fans. It’s hard to believe he was only a few years away from marrying Madonna when this movie came out.
I also didn’t realize until watching it that this was the movie featuring the iconic red bikini scene with Phoebe Cates. That scene probably would have impressed me a lot at age 15, but today it feels pretty mild and tame. While Phoebe Cates was definitely beautiful, she didn’t really have much of a figure in my opinion.
Overall, I wouldn’t call Fast Times at Ridgemont High one of my favorite films of all time, but I’m glad I watched it. I assume this was the stoner movie classic of the 1980s, much like Super Troopers was for the early 2000s. It was commercially successful when it was released and has since been preserved by the Library of Congress for being culturally significant. That said, I didn’t love the movie. I liked it, but I highly doubt I’ll ever watch it again.