Seizing his moment to ask Amanda out while she’s still single, Keith foolishly takes Watts up on her offer to practice his kissing technique on her, inevitably making Watts all the more jealous when Amanda ends up accepting Keith’s advances. Caroline (Haviland Morris), who always seemed content not to question the motives behind their existence too heavily. This amount of layeredness in her character shows a strong evolution from Hughes’ popular girl antagonists of the past, e.g. In a rapport that would mirror the one between Amanda (apparently it’s the name for popular and malleable girls) Beckett and Mike Dexter in Can’t Hardly Wait, Amanda realizes that she’s only in the relationship to swim with the proverbial social sea. That, and that she’s just broken up with the requisite douchebag of the movie, Hardy Jenns (Craig Sheffer)–a really great name for an asshole. “Hot” and “normal” enough to blend in with the rich kid crowd, Amanda seems far out of Keith’s reaches–which, of course, only makes her more desirable. However, the girl that manages to “escape,” so to speak, from her blue collar background is Amanda Jones (Lea Thompson, who could only have managed to be a dream girl figure in the 80s). His best friend, Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), suffers from the same socioeconomic standing that makes her equally as persona non grata at San Paolo High School (really, San Pedro High School). means there aren’t too many tracks to speak of) high school student who works as a mechanic. Never one to shy away from his usual themes of class division, Hughes’ protagonist, Keith Nelson (Eric Stoltz), is a “wrong side of the tracks” (even though, in this case, its setting in L.A.

Once again putting Howard Deutch in the director’s chair (as Hughes also did for Pretty in Pink, which celebrated its own thirtieth anniversary last year), Hughes blazed the trail of a highly modern topic: the often unwanted friend zone that occurs between men and women. Coinciding somewhat unfortunately with another John Hughes-related milestone–the death of Bill Paxton, legendary douchebag perfecter in the form of Chet from Weird Science–the thirtieth anniversary of Some Kind of Wonderful is upon us, with its original theatrical release date being February 27, 1987.

Watts some kind of wonderful