The Pick-up Artist

In New York, the wolf school gym teacher Jack Jericho (Robert Downey Jr.) flirts with every beautiful woman he stumbles upon on the streets with his red Camaro. When he meets the museum guide Randy Jensen (Molly Ringwald), he has an unrequited crush on her. Jack stalks Randy and soon he learns that she gambles to pay a debt of US$ 25,148.00 her alcoholic father Flash (Dennis Hopper) has with the mobster Alonzo Scolara (Harvey Keitel) and he decides to help her.

"The Pick-up Artist" is a nostalgic film in 2020. It is so good to see Molly Ringwald, Dennis Hopper, Danny Aiello, Vanessa Williams, Lorraine Bracco, Harvey Keitel, Robert Downey Jr. very young in 1987. The beginning is promising and funny, but the last part is not so good. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "O Rei da Paquera" ("The King of the Flirt")

Robert Downey Jr. is husky and young and wiry as a streetwise ladies' man who does more striking-out than scoring, but his attempts are colorful (you can sense he turns women on just by attempting); Molly Ringwald is a good screen-match for Downey playing sassy tour guide whose alcoholic father is in trouble with the mob. So far, so good--and early on director James Toback displays a sweet, screwball side that was never apparent in his works prior to this--but, unfortunately, the convoluted script gets all gummed-up by the second-half, and the leads go back and forth with each other so much that it all becomes fairly ridiculous. Some pre-release dubbing was obviously done to cover the saltier dialogue passages; it looks sloppy, but that's nothing compared to listening to Downey and Ringwald having sex (what was she in real-life, 17?). These two look good together but are far too young for this scenario, which is by turns cartoonishly sordid and melodramatically soapy. *1/2 from ****

One plot device that the movie turns on is absolutely unbelievable. I won't spoil it, but it stands out like a sore thumb. The opening twenty minutes or so are nicely done as the two leads get to know one another, sort of. After their lives are revealed to each other things get very dull and I can't get past the inanity of this plot point.

I thought Molly Ringwald was good in her role, what there was of it. The script is awful and that's a good deal of the problem, but there's no chemistry here, either.

What a lesson in film-making!

Let me report that among date movies, very few age well. This one has improved remarkably with age.

Part of the reason is the two main actors. Molly is her most striking here. She's absolutely at her peak in what she does, which is a sort of sassy, deliberately fostered innocent/wise cuteness. No one can do this today, and the attempts are depressing. Kate Hudson? We all die a little when she tries.

And then we have Downey. He's already heavy into drugs and he doesn't have the drugged discipline he had in "Chaplin." But he has an energy that is so appealing. Undisciplined, druggy energy would usually be just dispersed effort, but this is a date movie, something that depends on misregistration of self.

And look who surrounds them: Aiello doing his working class avuncular bit. Keitel being such a movie gangster they bleeped his every speech. And Dennis Hopper! That man who is a permanent token of intoxicated risktaking. Three solid marks in film characters, all portrayed by their inventors.

You can see that the filmmaker is a writer. The script is actually very good. Very good indeed for what it is and the assets that are available. The direction is so inadequate it hurts. But it hurts in exactly the right way. This is a film about stretching, about yearning without touching. Its all about inadequacy in love, a sort of reality-tinged inadequacy overlain on the romantic comedy template.

Because the camera is always in the wrong place, is always too tentative, is always unsure of itself, but still goes, still goes...

It puts us in the thing as one of these kids, clumsy, bold without cause.

I recommend this. I do. Its problems work for it.

Molly has faded as a presence now. But that's inevitable because of how we all exploited her youth. We shouldn't think that she is a flake, like say Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts. This very year she starred in one of the most intellectually ambitious movies of all time, Godards "King Lear." And more recently, she was in a Greenaway film. No stupid actor would do that.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Here's a kind of too blander film with not much ingredients, yet is steered by Downey's likable winning performance. He has such a charming magical persona, and it comes over so well here. If only he did a better film. I have a few qualms about the movie, but I don't hate it. I just don't think it was utilized property, just running at 78 minutes, with some stuff that seems to be desperately crammed into it. Downey plays a womanizer/kid's school teacher with a regular pick up line, which is the one memorable line of the film. Most of the good dialogue is given to Downey here. Then suddenly he spots her, Randy (Ringwald, not bad here, quite a maturing professional actress). She's a museum tour guide, who's washed up boozer of a father, with a heart, Flash (Hopper, the film's other top performance) is indebted to a mafia guy (Keitel, Ringwald's older boyfriend), that has her doing some implied whoring. Downey must come up with a heavy sum, to become her prince and save her, but also, manning up too. Really, so much more could of gone into the characters, especially Ringwald's, where I just thought the mafia tie felt wrong, where again, the film's story wasn't utilized properly, in it's attempt to take it's subject, seriously, where the whole thing seemed like a half ingredient film, despite it's great and good performances, some actors painfully wasted. But like I said, it Downey's charm and splendid performance that carries a kind of dull running comedy with edges of drama. It's his soliloquy scenes that are the best, one hot beauty in blue, he chats up, I'll never forget, pre Vanessa Williams.