On Tubi, I watched Modern Girls, a 1986 comedy film directed by Jerry Kramer, and co-written by Laurie Craig and Anita Rosenberg. The film stars Daphne Zuniga, Cynthia Gibb, and Virginia Madsen as three young women in their early twenties, living together as roommates in L.A. and working menial jobs. Margo (Zuniga) works in telemarketing, a boring job where the manager repeats "keep dialing"; Cece (Gibb) gets fired from her makeup job in a department store, and Kelly (Madsen) does very well working in a pet store and selling pets and pet supplies, mainly due to her looks.
They all work crappy jobs, but the highlight of their life is going out to clubs at night, where, due to their "pretty privilege," they can work connections to skip lines and get into clubs for free, and never have to pay for their own drinks, always flirting with guys to get drinks out of them.
When Kelly takes Margo's car to see a DJ ex she's re-connected with, Margo and Cece are left stuck at home, until Kelly's blind date Clifford (Clayton Rohner) shows up. The girls are hesitant to tell him that Kelly went out with another guy, but take advantage of him to get him to drive them out to the club to "find Kelly," seeing him more as a dork and not their usual type.
At the club, Clifford quickly finds out that Kelly ditched him for the DJ, and only sticks around in the club because he's the other girls' ride home. Margo and Cece do their act to get free drinks, and dance around, while feeling bad about how they treated Clifford and including him more as part of their group, getting him a free drink too.
The story goes into a "one crazy night" plot, as the girls and Clifford chase Kelly around various clubs/bars in L.A. as she deals with rejection by the DJ by getting intoxicated, taking drugs, rolling around on a billiard table (in a fun display of physical comedic acting by Madsen), and twice having to be rescued from near-rape by her friends due to her carelessness and using her looks to charm random men.
Cece is enamored with a rock star, Bruno X (also played by Rohner), who she meets in a club and instantly falls for her, but says he's leaving for Rio in the morning, then they get separated and Cece is searching for him all over. In one scene that makes sense with the same actor in both roles, the group show up at an outdoor video shoot to look for Bruno, only for the director to see that Clifford resembles him and uses him as a body double in a scene with four women dressed in black leather dancing around him, and Clifford has to improvise and just go with it.
I really enjoyed this movie. It's very much set in a 1980s club culture with outlandish outfits, a killer pop/dance soundtrack, very bright with neon colors in nighttime scenes, and an apartment with a fantastic pop art look (including the movie poster with a comic, Roy Lichtenstein look to it).
I really liked how this film largely centered around the women, and even if they start out taking advantage of men to get free things and coast on their looks, they're not dumb bimbo stereotypes. They all work crappy day jobs, and this is their release to party at night and have fun. And even if they are chasing men through various clubs, they still value their friendships above any dates or boyfriends, and are always looking out for each other.
I liked that Clifford starts out being rightfully annoyed at being taken advantage of, but he's not a jerk. He never leaves the women to be stranded anywhere, he helps rescue Kelly from sexual assault, and he has fun being mistaken for Bruno X and being in the video for a second, switching from his more conservative appearance to having his hair mussed up and wearing a long black duster coat that looks great on him.
Virginia Madsen had this Marilyn Monroe-like pink dress on with a silk scarf around her neck that looked really pretty, and did make her stand out as the most "classically" pretty of the women, though Cynthia Gibb was really cute and Daphne Zuniga had a rugged sexiness to her. They're all a lot of fun to watch in this movie, especially early on in their careers.
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