Jeanies Clique

Boy-crazy Deirdre, virgin Madge, Annie Mallick (Cherie Currie), and Jeanie (Jodie Foster) are best friends in the San Fernando Valley. Jeanie has problems with her single mom Mary (Sally Kellerman). Annie keeps running away from her troubled parents and her policeman father wants to institutionalize her. Brad (Scott Baio) is a guy friend. Madge starts dating older Jay Thompson (Randy Quaid).

In very broad strokes, this is Little Women thrown into the L. A. scene. The female friendships are unbreakable. It's very teenage angst, chaotic, and young girls searching for love. It has quite a few interesting young faces. I do wish for it to pick a story and stick with it. It meanders around. In a way, it's a teenage world. With such a scatter-shot plot, it sometimes does hit on something interesting. I also wonder if it needs a female voice with the writing. The girls do give it a good sense of reality. Cherie Currie and Jodie Foster have magnetic presences. It's an interesting early movie about 80's teen culture.

Four teenage girls in a suburb of Los Angeles get into all kinds of trouble: parties, drugs, cops, mixed-up parents, older boyfriends. Jodie Foster, the group's level-headed mother hen, tries keeping everyone together "like a family" (like the family unit she's never had), and the heartbreaking thing about the movie is that she can't. Slowly, everyone grows up and goes away. THAT precise plot point, though underscored throughout, is unfortunately tampered with. Did we really need a long sequence with Scott Baio outracing a car full of thugs on his skateboard? Or an even longer sequence--also with Baio--where Foster has a strange soliloquy about pain as an illusion. Some of the dialogue in fact is downright loopy, and I didn't much care for an edit in the third act which segues clumsily from a death to a wedding. But these are nitpicks in what is basically a very sensitive story about the loss of a tight bond. And Jodie's face at the ending speaks volumes. If viewers do get choked up, the movie has earned this. The film doesn't pander for tears or ask for sympathy--it shows us an example of friendship and hopes we understand. *** from ****

If you weren't there, then unfortunately this movie will be beyond compassion for you. Which as I say is a shame because although some of the acting is amateurish, it is meant to be for realism. Let's face it--in real life, we don't say things in an exacting or perfect way, even when we mean to. In this sense, it works. This, however, does not apply to our "known" actors in this film, notably Jodie Foster (born a natural). The fact that the other 3 girls are not accomplished only adds to the story--Jodie plays the glue that struggles to keep their friendship close, even with the obvious feeling of fatality. Meaning that no matter how close friends are, eventually there are some people that just fade away, no matter how you try.

And therein is the core of the movie. It's not about partying, it's not about sexuality, but about these 4 girls and their final time as still young girls before they have to go the world alone.

If you have ever had a friendship like that in your life, you will feel this movie--it will mean a lot to you, no matter what era it is set in, or what era you grew up in. We all knew these girls in school, or at the very least knew of them. We all knew the frustrated virgin, half wanting to hold onto childhood and half wanting desperately to grow up and thinking that will do it for her. We all knew the boy-crazy one, the fashion plate whose vanity hides her fear of the world, her fear of acceptance. We all knew the party girl, the one they whispered about, with tales of not only her sad home life but of her notorious exploits. And we all knew the "mother figure", the one a little more real, a little more grounded, a little more sad because she knew what would happen. Maybe you were one of those girls. Maybe, like me, you had been each one at one time or another...

This film really captures that fragile time in life when want, needs, pressures, womanhood, childhood, the world and loneliness are all embodied in each female's head, each factor on the precipice. Which aspect do you hang on to? What do you toss over the edge, no matter how you may want to hold on? And how painful is goodbye to everything you've known? That's what this movie is--steps into womanhood while clinging onto childhood, and how damn tough it is to keep walking. If you were there, you know...and love this film, as I do. Aching and tenderly done. A fine piece of captured femininity.

I adore this movie. It is one of the best teen movies ever! Jodie Foster, Cherie Currie, Marilyn Kagan, and Kandice Stroh were awesome! The whole movie seems realistic, and is very interesting and thoughtful. It concerns four teenage girls struggling with problems as they live their lives in the San Fernando Valley. Jeanie (Foster) is fighting with her divorced mother, Annie (Currie) is a teen runaway who drinks and pops pills, and runs away from her abusive father. Madge (Kagan) is a young girl who is overweight and mad that she is a virgin. Plus, her parents are overprotective and she has annoying younger siblings. Then there is Deirdre (Stroh) who is not as developed as the other characters, she is basically one of their friends who likes boys and has a lot of boy troubles. I like the music, the acting, and there were some scenes that were great...the party and the ending were standout scenes. The concert scenes were funny as well. The ending is a tearjerker, but I won't give it away. See for yourself and rent or buy this great film.

Privileged Valley girls discover that they are not immune to the consequences of their bad decisions.

I was not impressed by this movie on my first viewing, more than forty years ago, but a chance to see it on Turner Classic Movies after I had forgotten everything about it revealed a better movie and a more mature understanding of what the film makers were trying to say. The young women, led by Jodie Foster and Cherie Currie, don't understand the costs of what they are doing, between the drinking, the sex, and the hard partying that leaves the parents angry at the sheer destruction. Like the contemporaneous LITTLE DARLINGS, it failed because it didn't really understand who its audience was, and what they would enjoy seeing. The older segment of the audience was angry at the young women, and the younger portions didn't care for the unhappy ending with its inherent moralizing.

Having grown up with the East Coast bracket of privileged young people, I can say the attitudes were precisely on point. With Scott Baio, Sally Kellerman, Randy Quaid, and Laura Dern.