Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Directed by Amy Heckerling after David Lynch (!) turned it down, this adaptation of Cameron Crowe's novel is famously a ground zero for subsequently successful careers, starring then little-knowns Sean Penn, Phoebe Cates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Vincent Schiavelli, Forest Whitaker and Eric Stoltz. Blink and you'll miss rare early onscreen appearances by Scent of a Woman director Martin Brest, Anthony Edwards and an as-yet un-Caged Nicolas Coppola. Sadly, costars Brian Backer and Robert Romanus never attained the same heights, but the already-established Ray Walston will go down in history as the most lovable hardass history teacher ever committed to film. Perfectly capturing the zeitgeist of American high school life in the '80s, complete with a Rubik's cube reference, the funny and occasionally harsh Fast Times, with all due apologies to John Hughes and Mickey Rooney, may be the greatest teen movie ever made (even though Cates was the only real teen). It took two individual and disparate films by Crowe and Heckerling -- Singles and Clueless, respectively -- to sum up the '90s so succinctly, and both directors have since fallen way short: Heckerling's Loser was truly clueless, and Crowe's Almost Famous wallowed in the nostalgia he was once sharp enough to avoid. See this and remember their greatness.