{"id":18920,"date":"2022-04-14T06:00:31","date_gmt":"2022-04-14T10:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.itwaslikemagic.com\/?p=18920"},"modified":"2025-06-09T10:04:19","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T14:04:19","slug":"cant-buy-me-love-1987","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/cant-buy-me-love-1987\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ (1987) Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Can’t Buy Me Love<\/em> Synopsis<\/em><\/strong>: An outcast secretly pays the most popular girl in school one thousand dollars to pretend to be his girlfriend for a month.<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Nerdy Ronald Miller has spent all summer mowing lawns to purchase an expensive telescope. Cindy Mancini is the most popular girl in school, dating a college guy and wracking up debt on her mom\u2019s credit cards. When Cindy borrows one of her mother\u2019s expensive suede outfits for a party, she finds herself distressed after the outfit gets ruined, and the department store won\u2019t let her exchange it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ronald witnesses Cindy\u2019s desperation and suddenly offers his $1000 in mowing money to buy a new outfit for her mother\u2026 but there\u2019s a catch. Cindy has to pretend to date Ronald for a month to get him in with the popular crowd. At first, Cindy balks at the offer, but aware of how much trouble she would get in for destroying one of her mother\u2019s expensive outfits, she finally agrees. Ronald can finally see what it\u2019s like to be part of the popular crowd, but all the attention changes Ronald for the worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can\u2019t Buy Me Love<\/em> is dripping in 80s aesthetic. That makes sense because it was released in 1987, but it\u2019s so<\/em> 80s. The music! The clothes! The jokes!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know; I think Sixteen Candles<\/a><\/em> really put me on edge for watching these John Hughes-ish type films of this era. Honestly, though, Can\u2019t Buy Me Love<\/em> wasn\u2019t as horrible as I expected. I enjoyed both Patrick Dempsey<\/strong> and the late Amanda Peterson<\/a><\/strong> in this film. They had a decent amount of chemistry together, and I wish the movie had kept them together longer than they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Cindy and Ronald\u2019s one month is up, the rest of the movie is about Ronald being a total dick to just about everyone. Obnoxious and full of himself, it was difficult to like anything about him, and when he finally got his comeuppance, it was more satisfying than sad. I couldn\u2019t quite understand what was so appealing about the in-crowd either. They were vapid and borderline cruel, not to mention that the \u201cpopular crowd\u201d seemed to consist of six people. They fell victim to the one-dimensional \u201cmean kids\u201d trope that did absolutely nothing to add anything interesting to the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, a teeny Seth Green<\/strong> plays Ronald\u2019s younger brother Chuckie, and he\u2019s definitely one of the movie’s highlights. Amanda Peterson had the talent to become a big star, and what happened to her is a shame. We all know what became of Patrick Dempsey, and I can admit that despite hating his character, he was a cutie in this movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s nothing memorable to be taken from Can\u2019t Buy Me Love<\/em>. It\u2019s the same journey of teenage angst that you see in many 80s teen movies. Are there some cute moments? Absolutely! But I think the movie got derailed halfway through and never quite recovered. Also, I don\u2019t get the title \u2013 money can and did buy Ronald love\u2026 maybe not directly, but it\u2019s the money that pushed Cindy into his life. Am I reading too much into it? Probably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watched:<\/strong> 04\/07\/2022
Notable Song<\/strong>: Can’t Buy Me Love by The Beatles<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rating:<\/strong><\/div>
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Can’t Buy Me Love Synopsis: An outcast secretly pays the most popular girl in school one thousand dollars to pretend to be his girlfriend for a month. Nerdy Ronald Miller has spent all summer mowing lawns to purchase an expensive telescope. Cindy Mancini is the most popular girl in school, dating a college guy and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[392,1],"tags":[1242,2213,2214,2215,2216,2217,5199,808,3650,1316,2218,2219],"class_list":["post-18920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews-c","category-reviews","tag-1242","tag-amanda-peterson","tag-cant-buy-me-love","tag-courtney-gains","tag-darcy-demoss","tag-eric-bruskotter","tag-genre-young-adult","tag-patrick-dempsey","tag-2-5-stars","tag-seth-green","tag-steve-rash","tag-tina-caspary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18920"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59595,"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18920\/revisions\/59595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theromcomcatalog.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}