Jun 27 2012 07:38 AM
In a strange tour that I seem to be going through of eighties youth oriented movies that I missed the first time around (often with good reason, but you be the judge of you, and I'll be the judge of me), we stumbled into Hiding Out, in which Jon Cryer plays a tax-advising, investment counselor, or an investment-counseling tax adviser. It doesn't matter, because it's the eighties, and those suit wearing yuppies are all the same. The care about money. They're not keeping it real.
Anyhow, Cryer and some of his colleagues are star witnesses in some government probe of a Boston thug, and when one of his friends is killed and the mob is coming after him, he decides it's time to... hide out --- in high school!
So, you know, that's sort of a double fantasy there --- for high school loozas to pretend that they're really some big shot laying low and if only these assholes knew, HAH!, and also for young adult loozas who dream about going back to high school knowing what they now know, fully filled-out frames, and showing those assholes whatfor.
Of course, if you're still walking around with those hangups years later, who's the real asshole? How is that redemption? Flourish here in the now! So, of course, Cryer has to man up and return to the real world, and face his demons? But when? And how does he extract himself from this elaborate fiction he's created? And what will he learn along the way? And should the relationship he develops in the meantime with pert high schooler Annabeth Gish be termed as (a) sweet? (b) troubling? or (c) screamingly icky?
Hiding Out --- look for it in video stores today on the "They Actually Bothered Converting This to DVD" shelf.