What seems irrefutable is that Ringwald turning down this film ended both her collaboration and friendship with Hughes, who was certainly known to hold a grudge. If this is indeed the correct information on the provenance of Some Kind of Wonderful, it may help explain why Molly Ringwald took a pass on essentially making the same film twice. It seems true, it feels true – they share a main filmmaker, the timing makes sense – but it’s simply not so.) (e.g., the prevailing belief that Big Trouble In Little China was originally written as the planned sequel to Buckaroo Banzai but was re-purposed into a new story when Banzai flopped. It feels true, but there are many stories that seem too perfect not to be true but are nevertheless not borne out by the facts. (Maybe it should have been called Pretty In Pink 2: Duckie’s Revenge…) He simply swapped the genders in the love triangle and made sure it was the two kids from the wrong side of the tracks who got together this time. The anecdotal / apocryphal line on this film is that Hughes was forced into an ending he didn’t want for Pretty In Pink due to test audience reactions and studio pressure, so he made Some Kind of Wonderful to get the ending he wanted. Maybe it really is that advertising instinct of rushing a product to market. Featuring the same director, Howard Deutch, writer (Hughes) and some of the same production team, it was released only a year (almost to the day – actually only 364 days) after Pretty In Pink. I know John Hughes wrote astonishingly quickly, a product of his start in advertising and then magazine publication, and maybe those roots inform this picture more than anything. The whole film seems like a Reader’s Digest condensed book, as though someone took a better, nuanced film and severely edited it for TV run-time. No, the real problem is the pacing and execution of the narrative. Would it be petty and simplistic to say that the biggest issue I have with Some Kind of Wonderful is that it does not feature the fantastic Gerry Coffin/Carole King song of the same name? Not totally serious (not totally joking either)… I know lots of people love the movie, and it was fairly well received by critics at the time, with some suggesting it was an improvement on Pretty In Pink. Because I find it hard to be truly fair with Some Kind of Wonderful. Spoiler-free Movie Review of Some Kind of Wonderful:ĭefinitely a case of a film that, not having seen it after all these years, I probably should have just continued to not watch it. Not technically a remake of Pretty In Pink, it nevertheless sort of is.
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