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Making the Grade
Lazy preppie Palmer Woodrow hires street-smart Eddie Keaton to go to school for him while he lives it up in Europe. Eddie falls in love with preppie gal Tracey, upsetting Biff, the Hoover Academy bully. When his bookie from the old neighborhood, Dice, comes to collect on Eddie's gambling debts and Palmer returns early from Europe, the scheme slowly starts to unravel. Soon, Eddie can't even tell whose side he's really on.
Release : | 1984 |
Rating : | 5.6 |
Studio : | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, The Cannon Group, Golan-Globus Productions, |
Crew : | Cinematography, Director, |
Cast : | Judd Nelson Jonna Lee Gordon Jump Walter Olkewicz Ronald Lacey |
Genre : | Comedy |
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Sick Product of a Sick System
The acting in this movie is really good.
Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
For anyone who was alive and well in the 80's this movie is the funniest of all time. Of course you might need to remember the Preppy Handbook, putting pennies in your shoes (or coins from other countries if you wanted to be really cool), nicknames like Bif, Kiki and Buffy, and men wearing pink and yellow.The star of this movie is the REAL Palmer Woodrow, Dana Olsen. It is a shame it doesn't look like he is still in the business.The character of Rand is well played and is very, very funny.Andrew Dice Clay, Gordon Jump and Judd Nelson all put in solid performances.I have this on DVD...it is great.I really wish they made Tourista. That would have been excellent.
Making the Grade is not only an OK comedy, it gives a name to a person who once was a Sylvester Stallone look alike from Brooklyn. This man is Andrew Clay, who gets a role in this movie named Dice, who would later take Dice and make it his nick name. But enough about him, this film is also a good teen comedy (not the best by far) and I liked Judd Nelson as the lead (still a bad-ass). A-
Back in the mid-eighties the movie industry churned out teen comedies trying to capture some of the spark and success of Caddyshack and Animal House. Mostly, they failed. Class, Private School, all of the Revenge of the Nerd flicks, and even the high brow attempts like the John Hughes films, all ended up formulaic, inane, poorly plotted, and silly. Perhaps the only exception is Risky Business which rises above the genre. "Making the Grade", however, is not an exception. It has all the same problems as "Breakfast Club" or "Better Off Dead" or "Sixteen Candles". But if you're in the mood for this kind of movie, I'd pick this one up rather than any of the others. It captures some of the attitudes and styles of the time quite nicely, like when the preppy nerd is trying to teach urban kid Judd Nelson how to dress for prep school. And Dana Olsen is absolutely hysterical, easily stealing the movie, as the obnoxious rich kid hiring Nelson to complete school for him. The movie has some genuinely funny scenes mixed in with the snobs versus slobs formula. Don't expect much, but low expectations are the key to a good time with a movie like this.
I am a huge 80's buff. I love the classic comedies that have come from that era. This is by far and away the best of the bunch. It is quite possibly the best comedy ever. It plays on the stereotypes of Preppies and intercity kids. It is great. Palmer Woodrow, played wonderfully by Dana Olsen, is a scene stealer. This is also one of Judd Nelson's first films. It is Andrew Dice Clay's first film apperance. It is a classic piece of Americana. Buy it, rent it, steal it if you have to. It is that good.