Theme Song: There are a slew of original soft rock and Nashville songs you won’t be interested in hearing because they don’t have a synth. I just spent hours trying to identify the songwriters and performers, but the text in the screen credits is so small it’s indecipherable and nobody cares about this movie enough to have uploaded the information. Regardless, here we go …
“Is it All an Illusion” by Jimmy (Indecipherable) and Ricky (Indecipherable)
“Where’d You Come From” by Jimmy (Indecipherable) and Ricky (Indecipherable)
“Elizabeth” by Greg (Indecipherable)
“My Heart is Set on Loving You” by Jimmy (Indecipherable) and Ricky (Indecipherable)
“Two of a Kind” by Michael P. (Indecipherable) and David (Indecipherable)
Some of these are really good, breezy songs deserving of more than my half-assed attempts at identification.
Interesting Dated References: An election in which a third-party candidate can win.
Best Line: None
Social Context: Two star-crossed lovers whose parents are on opposite ends of the political spectrum meet and fall in love. It’s a low-rent adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, minus the suicide, filmed in Nashville, with a romantic Lifetime Movie vibe.
Summary: Snotty rich girl Elizabeth and her friend skip school to slum it at one of the many open jam sessions littering Nashville’s downtown, where she exchanges glances with and instantly falls for Tommy, who has a perm.
As luck would have it, their fathers are running against each other in the mayoral election and forbid each other from dating or dry humping. Tommy’s dad, Jimmy Dee, represents the working-class side while Elizabeth’s dad, Don, is a super-classist conservative asshole.
There are like four political debates, each intercut with dating montages of Liz and Tommy doing things such as: Holding a conversation while lovingly stroking a horse; helping each other onto a horse like it’s the easiest thing in the world to do; riding together on a horse like it’s super comfortable; playing songs on guitar with top-of-the-dome freestyle lyrics; French-style kissing while a horse watches and urinates.
Then there’s a scandal and a third-party candidate wins the election, which unites the parents, and they all decide to go watch Tommy perform his original music at an open mic. Remember that time you tried to support your friend and went to see his band play an open mic? It was a fate worse than suicide.
Worth Mentioning:
– Some great exterior shots of pre-revitalized downtown Nashville, namely bars like Rhinestone Cowboy and Dusty Road. If you’re really interested in the history of the Nashville bar scene, there’s footage shot inside of Dusty Road. Here are some photos and an article about Dusty Road.
– Largely a Nashville production as most actors and writer/director Thomas Neff were Nashville based.
– This is a good effort. The acting and camerawork are acceptable, but unfortunately the subject matter isn’t very engaging, and any hope the movie had for standing out was buried by Running Mates (1992), Running Mates (2000), and Running Mates (2011).
Poster and Box Art: The New World Video Betamax cover makes this look like an erotic/political thriller/drama on a national scale. The cover says to the potential renter: “Some guy is going to push papers and shit off his desk as he rips the shoulder-padded blazer off a woman in a short skirt.”
Unfortunately that’s totally wrong, and much more accurate is this color-pencil rendering, which looks like the cover from a book you found in your sister’s bedroom.
For a movie so unremarkable, I also found evidence of four different foreign language VHS releases. New World Video must have really been pushing this release in the foreign markets.
Availability: Out of print and largely forgotten as a result of subsequently more popular movies being released with the exact same title.