The Wedding Singer;The Breakfast Club;The Sure Thing;Girls Just Want to Have Fun

Why would anyone in his or her right mind be nostalgic for the 1980s? The '60s had passion and groundbreaking music; the '70s had good filmmaking and mesmerizingly awful clothes. I'm even looking forward to '90s nostalgia -- the movies haven't been bad, the beer is interesting. But the '80s? They were a deadly combination of arrogance and cluelessness, in which -- to take just one example -- the fresh outrage of punk rock got co-opted into the mindless synth chords of new wave. The clothes managed to be both ugly and boring. And, if I remember correctly, wasn't thinking banned in favor of partying on?

And don't get me started on the movies. This, recall, was the decade of the stu-com -- short for stupid comedy -- in which everything Hollywood had learned about narrative, character, and dialogue over the course of the century was thrown over for a few good fart jokes. Porky's was as professional as film farces got; the rest was an endless parade of teen T&A, kitschy musical numbers, and really bad hair.

The Wedding Singer wants you to look back on this decade and laugh, both at it and with it. Set in 1985, in a New Jersey-esque suburbia of red leather jackets and Kajagoogoo singles, it unloads its truckful of pop-cult mockery onto the very slight, extremely sweet story of a schnooky wedding singer (Adam Sandler) who falls for a waitress (Drew Barrymore) who's engaged to (boo! hiss!) a bond trader (Matthew Glave). There's only one problem: For all its emotional winsomeness, the movie is pretty awful, a cartoonishly written, naively predictable bit of spandex fluff. In other words, it plays exactly like a movie made in 1985. Don't take my word for it; now that Singer's on video, rent it alongside a few of the teen-oriented romantic comedies that came out that same year.

For instance, The Breakfast Club: a heartfelt, surprisingly experimental film -- c'mon, it's five kids in a room talking -- from John Hughes, made before he discovered the golden-swill formula with Home Alone. From the neon-sign opening titles to the derivative angst of the dialogue, it's a touchstone of '80s pop culture, and a schizophrenic one, too: A long, realistic rap session between the five detention-bound teens is followed by an MTV-style dance number. And dig the ''happy'' ending when proto-Goth Ally Sheedy gets made over into the very model of a 1985 preppette (even more ironic given her recent comeback as High Art's junkie photographer).

Or how about The Sure Thing, Rob Reiner's near-remake of It Happened One Night? Here's a smart script and a fine John Cusack performance (if you overlook the shag haircut) fighting upstream against such hoary youth-flick tropes as the free-spirit writing professor (Viveca Lindfors) who exhorts her class to ''make love in a hammock'' or the horny-dude best friend (yes, that is ER's Anthony Edwards in that Hawaiian shirt). The scene where repressed beauty Daphne Zuniga impulsively strips off her shirt and flashes a passing car is a perfect '80s-movie moment: out of character and completely unconcerned about it.

The one that goes in the time capsule, though, has to be Girls Just Want to Have Fun: Concerning the efforts of a mousy Catholic school girl (Sarah Jessica Parker!) to win a spot on a local dance-pop show with the aid of her punky pal (Helen Hunt!!), it owes far more to Dick Clark than to Cyndi Lauper, and nothing whatsoever to reality. What Girls has, instead, is a touchingly clumsy stu-com innocence, from the cardboard characters to the crummy music to the way the camera cuts to long-shot every time Parker starts to dance.

The Wedding Singer has some of that innocence, too, as if wallowing in the Ike-meets-Reagan simplicities of the '80s had rubbed off on the script itself. That gentleness almost makes a viewer overlook the film's general ineptness: lame jokes, flabby pacing, Barrymore's dazed nonperformance. Even Sandler's disarming slacker twinkle grows mighty monotonous after a while. By the climax (in an airplane that's an obvious set and involving a cadaverous Billy Idol), you're both resigned to Singer's airheaded romanticism and suckered in by it. It's certainly not what the filmmakers intended, but maybe this is what all nostalgia should look like: rosy enough to make you smile at the past, and lousy enough to make you glad you live in the present. Singer: C+; Breakfast: B; Sure Thing: B; Girls: C

The Breakfast Club 1985 UNIVERSAL $14.98 RATED R

The Sure Thing 1985 EMBASSY FOR RENTAL ONLY RATED PG-13

Girls Just Want to Have Fun 1985 STARMAKER $14.99 RATED PG