Sunday, December 22, 2019

Choices - 1981

Knockin' em down, these 80s movies.  Next we have a football drama.  Or at least what starts as one.

Demi Moore had her first film role in this coming-of-age story about a young football player John Carluccio.  John is a young, talented high school kid who is on the football team, on the music group, and involved in a lot of school shit.  He begins to lose his focus however, when he gets cut from the football team due to his partial deafness.

What we have then is a film of relative convenience.  He quickly gets in with the wrong group, they accept him right in when he shows up wearing denim and takes a drag off a cigarette.  He tries cocaine and pot.  He's one day in the football team and the next a total deadbeat beatnik.

He continues to play violin and write music, because it seems only his football outlook is affected.  He also continues to love Demi Moore and she continues to date him, never saying word one about his character changes and his rampant drug abuse.  It doesn't matter, he kicks all of those without ever talking about it or having it be a scene in this movie.  John just decides he's fine and then his football friends accepts him back no worries, no harm, no foul.

This movie was emotionally affecting and well acted in parts, but incredibly bad.  The plot holes, as I've mentioned, were huge.  Really?  You're not going to have Demi Moore go with him for a joyride, almost get busted by the cops, go through hell, and not even mention it to John the next day?  She's just like, yeah bruh, I'm in for whatever.

Choices is a film that needed a bit longer, and it felt edited down.  It actually felt made for tv too, and I wonder if I saw a version which was played on TV.  I haven't mentioned that several of these prints on the 80s set were obviously taken from VHS, and I wonder if this was taken directly from a fucking TV recording.

Spoiler alert:  The movie has all these plots that appear and are dropped.  And the major story line is the whole drama around the football team and John being cut from it.  In the end, he's let back on the team without anything being mentioned, in a spur of the moment decision.  It's as if to say, "ah, fuck the plot.  Whatever.  Who cares."

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