I decided to see this because it had some of my favorite actors including Hopper, Keitel, and Downey. Big mistake. This is the worst movie I have ever seen in my life. It is beyond boring and contrived, it is actually painful to watch. If this had been made in the time of Orson Welles heyday, William Randolph Hearst would have left Citizen Kane alone and paid $800,000 to have all the prints of this movie destroyed. After seeing this in 1987, this may have heavily influenced Robert Downey Jr.'s legendary spiral into drug addiction. Sound like its too bad too be true? You be the judge, but be forewarned, I would not risk watching it alone. It is depressing me just to think about it long enough to write 10 lines. Bad, bad movie, bad!

This is hereby submitted for the 'Quotes' - In the scene where Jack is in Randi's apartment, they suddenly are paid an unexpected visit by two thugs Alonzo & Mike. Jack hides in the closet while the two men are pressuring Randi for a large sum of money. Hearing this, Jack falls out of the closet and makes a feeble attempt to help her by claiming he can come up with the dough. The ensuing conversation goes something like this...Alonzo: "You got the money, cupcake?"Jack: "What, you mean ON me?"Alonzo: "ON you, IN you, UP you..?" Harvey Keitel has always been among my favorites for this kind of exchange. Robert Downey does a superb job as well in this movie.

What a lesson in film-making!Let me report that among date movies, very few age well. This one has improved remarkably with age. Part of the reason is the two main actors. Molly is her most striking here. She's absolutely at her peak in what she does, which is a sort of sassy, deliberately fostered innocent/wise cuteness. No one can do this today, and the attempts are depressing. Kate Hudson? We all die a little when she tries.And then we have Downey. He's already heavy into drugs and he doesn't have the drugged discipline he had in "Chaplin." But he has an energy that is so appealing. Undisciplined, druggy energy would usually be just dispersed effort, but this is a date movie, something that depends on misregistration of self.And look who surrounds them: Aiello doing his working class avuncular bit. Keitel being such a movie gangster they bleeped his every speech. And Dennis Hopper! That man who is a permanent token of intoxicated risktaking. Three solid marks in film characters, all portrayed by their inventors.You can see that the filmmaker is a writer. The script is actually very good. Very good indeed for what it is and the assets that are available. The direction is so inadequate it hurts. But it hurts in exactly the right way. This is a film about stretching, about yearning without touching. Its all about inadequacy in love, a sort of reality-tinged inadequacy overlain on the romantic comedy template.Because the camera is always in the wrong place, is always too tentative, is always unsure of itself, but still goes, still goes...It puts us in the thing as one of these kids, clumsy, bold without cause.I recommend this. I do. Its problems work for it.Molly has faded as a presence now. But that's inevitable because of how we all exploited her youth. We shouldn't think that she is a flake, like say Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts. This very year she starred in one of the most intellectually ambitious movies of all time, Godards "King Lear." And more recently, she was in a Greenaway film. No stupid actor would do that.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

What's most amazing about this film is 5% of the IMDb voters gave it a "10"! I suspect they are all friends, relatives, or agents of members of the cast. Molly, who was only 18, and Robert are fine, however the story and script are pretty plain. Both of them are "gamblers", Downey is trying to pick up Molly, doesn't succeed until the very end, the day after she told him "we're not good for each other." Gangsters and Atlantic City gambling are involved. Some pretty high-powered actors, like Keitel, Aiello, Baranski, Hopper, Bracco, Gunton (Shawshank warden) are in it. This film is one of those in Ringwald's "hit void" between "Pretty in Pink" and "Betsy's Wedding", the latter a hit only because of the rest of the cast. Although she has been in many films, very few of us have seen her since 1990. I wonder what happened to her promising film career?