Can’t Buy Me Love

Released on: 14 Aug 1987 • Rated: PG-13 • Runtime: 94 min

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Director: Steve Rash
Writer: Michael Swerdlick
Actors: Patrick Dempsey, Amanda Peterson, Courtney Gains

Plot: An outcast secretly pays the most popular girl in school one thousand dollars to pretend to be his girlfriend for a month.

Box Office Gross: $31,623,833

Awards: 1 win & 3 nominations

Ratings

6.8/10

50%

72

70

3.3

36

Nerdy, ostracized, outcast, Ronald Miller (Dempsey) secretly convinces the most popular girl in school, Cindy (Peterson), to pretend to be his girlfriend in an effort to increase his popularity. It works, at least for awhile.

I loved this movie as a kid, probably because I was quite nerdy myself. It seems like there was almost an entire genre of movies in the 80’s and 90’s that used the vehicle of young person is nerdy, unliked, and considered ugly, but once they take off their glasses and have someone with fashion sense help them select a new wardrobe, everyone suddenly sees the error of their ways and the person gets to enjoy being popular until something, inevitably, goes wrong to spoil the whole thing. Yet somehow, they always seemed to come out on top in the end.

Patrick Dempsey was in a few movies in the 80’s that, as I recall, had him playing sort of a bumbling nerdy type looking for love. He played that part well, but no-one would have ever been able to foresee that he would later become a heartthrob in shows like Grey’s Anatomy and movies like Disenchanted.

Fun Fact: Seth Green played Ronald’s annoying little brother, Chuckie Miller.

This film is currently available from the following services.

Rent

Buy

Tell a friend about Can't Buy Me Love

Let us know what you thought of Can't Buy Me Love

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *