Can't Buy Me Love

Can't Buy Me Love (1987) is a textbook eighties high school comedy, and for anyone who wants that, it delivers exactly. Ronny is invisible at school. He offers the most popular girl, Cindy, a deal: a thousand dollars of his savings if she pretends to date him for a month. Cindy has a problem that money would solve, so she takes it. The plan works and Ronny becomes popular. The second half is about the bill coming due, the friends he dropped and how hollow his new circle turns out to be. This was Patrick Dempsey's first substantial role, decades before Grey's Anatomy, and the energy is completely different. Every convention of the era is present: the makeover, the dance, the public confession. Those are not flaws, they are the recipe. Good for: eighties teen films, nostalgia, and light romantic comedy. It works as something easy at the end of a hard day. Less good for: anyone wanting realism or a story they cannot predict. Some of the humour has dated badly and lands uncomfortably now.