Listen To Me (1989) This ridiculous, machine-tooled college romance arrived at the tail end of the reign of genial, addled, dementia-ridden President Ronald Reagan.......and the pretzel-twisting logic the film used to make its Reagan-ized politics palatable to moviegoers renders it doubly offensive 33 years later.
Wait a sec......politics in an 80's youth movie? Those breezy time wasters where everybody's greatest goal was to jump each other's bones and get into each other's pants?
Writer-director Douglas Day Stewart does indeed set up all the familiar tropes and characters.....two innocent rubes pitted against each other in competition, the playboy Big Man On Campus, the muscular jock, the chubby nerd, the pathetically shy sweet girl (in this case made especially vulnerable by giving her a crippled leg)
The film plops them all down at Kinmont, a sunny California college where public debating is pursued with the same rabid bloodlust as football or basketball. And the intense, driven debate coach (Roy Scheider, clenching his jaw like Jaws is still after him), needs a top team to to take on Harvard - where the competing teams will argue for and against Roe V. Wade in front of five Supreme Court justices.
As fate and Stewart's script would have it, the showdown has Kinmont, given the unenviable task of arguing against Roe while the Harvard boys, silver tongued, blonde and handsome, take the pro position, which a majority of Americans continue to support today......(despite malicious GOP legislators' efforts to take away women's rights make their own decision on abortion).
This makes things tough for our cutie-pie Kinmont team (Kirk Cameron, Jamie Gertz) two lower middle class strivers, hoping to prove themselves after winning debate scholarships to the school.
And even tougher for the movie itself, since Cameron, a painfully mediocre TV stitcom actor ("Growing Pains") makes embarrassing attempts to play a cornpone country boy with a gift of gab....complete with false, folksy patter as if he's Reagan-Lite. Cameron's heinous hillbilly, with coach Scheider's encouragement and advice, would even invent a fictitious backstory for himself to score debate points.
This brings us to the film's ludicrous finale, in which director Stewart takes an idiotic stab at pleasing everyone on both sides of the issue. Forced to debate against abortion, Cameron champions a woman's right to have one, while wailing utter gibberish about 'Roe V. Wade' destroying the moral fabric of America......(Douglas Day Stewart may well believe that right wing lunacy and Cameron's already abysmal performance of it sends the movie into pure crazytown.
This Grade D actor's supposed eloquence, which requires the same suspension of reality as Spiderman's web-slinging, tips the five Supreme Court justices into giving him the win......and the required hug 'n smooch from teammate Gertz, whom he's been unsuccessfully romancing throughout the film.
(We'll not even go into the eye-rolling, melodramatic backstories assigned to these cardboard characters. Besides, those lovebirds' troubles pale in comparison to the script's schizoid treatment of the entitled, BMOC played by Tim quill.....depending on what scene he's on, this guy goes from snarky egotist to sensitive, misunderstood soul, to misogynist abuser and back again.)
As a a video movie buyer back in the 80's, we viewed every grade of teen/college movie.....some ended up as timeless classics, some remain amusing, silly trifles, some just stank from the lack of time, money and talent put into them.....
"Listen To Me" stood by itself as the only one of these films that came across as rotten to its very core......filled with low-grade, minimal actors and truly wrapped around the most convoluted, corrupt and cynical script we've ever encountered.
A winner of the BQ's rarely given AFH - An Abomination From Hell. No debate.
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