#16 - For Keeps

Oh boy. Where to begin with this one? Well, if you are looking for a movie that addresses the subject of teenage pregnancy, you could watch this one. I wouldn't recommend it, but you could. You see, this movie is so unbelievably bad on so many levels that your time would be better spent trying to lick the shell off of a peanut. Seriously, the writing is bad, the acting is bad, the story progression is stupid at best, and the overall feeling of "Why was this movie approved to be made?" stays with you throughout. Shall I go on?

First of all, there's the basic premise of the movie. Boyfriend and girlfriend sneak out for a weekend together and while they are making out in the woods during the rain they have sex for the first time which leads to a pregnancy and against the wishes of their parents they decide to have the baby even though they are still in high school and have no jobs but they move out of their homes into a crappy place with barely four walls and try to keep things together on after school jobs and with no help from the parents but things get hard because things arent as easy as they thought it would be because they are broke, boyfriends parents want nothing to do with the child because they are stiff traditional people and the girlfriends mom doesnt support them because she is an overbearing bitch who doesnt want her daughter to make the same mistake she did when she had the girlfriend but they stick it out through family squabbles, alcoholism, post partum depression and every things turns out okay. WHY? Because they love each other. AWWWWWW. Thats so sweet. The power of love will ultimately overcome all of your hardships and crappy decision making, and everything will be all right. It warms the heart. No, wait. That would be the strain on the heart as a result of excessive vomiting.

If you think that this movie properly addresses any of the issues of teen pregnancy, then you seriously need to get your head checked. An after school special is more hard hitting and has more poignancy that this piece of crap. The main character is played by the golden child of the Brat Pack, Molly Ringwald. Let me just say that I have no problems with Molly Ringwald, until she tries to act. Then I want to take a meat tenderizer to my nuts to distract from the pain going on in my skull. Oh, and she was excessively winy and pouty in this one, which is want you want to see from a young mother anyway. Seriously, watching her trying to be dramatic is truly difficult to do. You can tolerate it in her other movies where there is something else going on that can distract you, but when she is the main character in a romantic comedy kind of movie about teenage pregnancy, you are trapped praying that you were like Darby O'Gill getting tricked out of your wishes so that you can get out of the Banshee's carriage.

This is hands down the worst movie I have seen out of my DVD rentals so far. I have said before that if they showed Requiem for a Dream in high schools, no kids would ever do drugs. If they showed this in high schools, we might have a population explosion that would make the parents of Baby Boomers look like Puritans. A waste of celluloid.