Foxes
Director: Adrian Lyne

United Artists 1980

By Brianna Shore

If you are one of the embarrassing manchildren who hold Gleaming the Cube dear to your heart, stay away from Foxes. (Girls: Gleaming the Cube was a 1989 murder-mystery that was totally unexceptional except for some badly-aged icing that was Christian Slater on a skateboard. Pipe down, boys. It also starred a teenage Tony Hawk equipped with a Pizza Hut pick-up, a trash-can hideout, and Rodney Mullen skate stunts in order of huh-what-silence.) Cut to: that scene where Christian is skating on an expressway and effortlessly glides underneath a moving transfer truck. Well, it turns out Chachi himself accomplished that feat nine years earlier in Foxes, this chick movie starring an eerily precocious Jodie Foster.

Too bad Scott Baio isn’t a fag, because my APB would send enough loser 25-year-old guys to VH-1’s offices to permanently solve Scott Baio…45 and Single.

Foxes is directed by Adrian Lyne, who is best known for good movies like Fatal Attraction, 9 ½ Weeks and, oddly, Jacob’s Ladder. I guess if I had to choose, I’d leave my hypothetical daughter with Lyne over Larry Clark, as Foxes realistically documents-slash-glorifies cherry-popped jailbait with more sincerity and a far less creepy agenda.

Or maybe I’d just rather have Foster as a daughter than Bijou, Chloe or Rosario, Out cover or no. Or maybe this movie has been tamed by time. Compare the original tagline with the DVD’s “The City Had It Coming.” There’s also this ‘80s tagline, which is too sentimental for today’s theatres unless the girls are on a step team in Atlanta threewaying TI (or is he Tip the Black Harvey Dent?*).

It’s sad how much I see my middle school girlfriends in this. There’s the chubby virgin, the Joan Jett slut who meets her poetic demise, the eldest with the big snoz, the biggest mouth and the biggest vag, and Jodie, who represents all of us. But most of all, Sally Kellerman, as Jodie’s educated-but-schooled-in-desperate mom, hits closest to home. Or maybe it’s Laura Dern, in her first screen role. Such a dork, but such a star in those two seconds. This is like the female Rumblefish, which is a chick movie by default.

After finally seeing this, Ronald Reagan you had it coming.

*Billy Dee Williams is the original Black Harvey Dent.

This discourse of Foxes is written by Brianna Shore for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.