Paramount Classic Film Series Double Feature-The Breakfast Club and 10 Things I Hate About You

 

We are heading into the final week of then Summer Series and the Double features are piling up. Friday featured two teen films from different decades. "The Breakfast Club" is a Gen X staple from 1985 and "10 Things I Hate About You" is catnip for millennial girls. The show was well attended and the audience stuck around for the second movie.

The Breakfast Club (1985) 

I must have seen this movie a couple dozen times over the years. That is largely because I used a section of it in my Small Group Communication Classes and my Interpersonal Communication classes. Regardless of how credible the personalities in the film are, the process by which they interact is a good illustration of several communication concepts I was trying to teach my classes. Most of the students I taught were not too distant from the high school experience in the film, so some of the instigating events would likely feel relevant to them.

How do you see yourself as a person? Are you capable, a clown, superior, a leader or a toady? Why do you think of yourself that way? In the film, the strongest influence that writer/director John Hughes came up with is the power of the family and parents to shape who you see when you look in the mirror. Emilio Estevez as Andy, sees a jock, who must live up to the experience of his father. Anthony Michael Hall as Brian, is the smart kid, who has never failed a class, is an A student, and who has a family that expects him to excel. Molly Ringwald is Claire, a princess, who has been pampered by her parents and coddled through life,, with unhappy role models. John Bender played by Judd Nelson is an anti-social misanthrope, who has been formed by an abusive set of parents, and Allison, the introverted outsider is ignored by her family and craves the love she doesn't get at home. True, they are all stereotypes, but they clearly illustrate some of the principles that our self concept derives from.

When they finally break down some barriers, the subject of self-disclosure becomes the focus of the film. You can see each of the kids testing the safety of the group when thinking about honestly sharing something about themselves. Bender is slower to share because he fears a loss of power in the relationships, Claire on the other hand is concerned with status. Brian and Andy disclose to the group as a form of catharsis, trying to lessen the burden they carry on themselves. Allison shares false information to manipulate the others and then reciprocates with some truth when she knows that others have made themselves vulnerable. I would run these scenes in class and usually, someone would pick out something connected to what we had talked about and for a few minutes, there would be some actual conversation.

The movie is also filled with entertaining moments, sometimes the kids dance, sometimes they obfuscate with the vice principal monitoring them during their detention. Paul Gleason was maybe tied with William Atherton as the go to actor for the asshole character in a film. Mr. Vernon is mostly an adult, who resents the kids for putting him in the position he is in. Although in the closing essay that Brian wrote for the group, where they mock his assignment and assumptions about them, it is in fact the assignment that they have been completing in the whole film. Maybe they will never use algebra, but they will use these lessons in life. There are some very funny moments and some painful ones. They may not always be credible, but they work for the most part.

10 Things I Hate About You

One of the many films that updates stories from William Shakespeare in the 1990s, "!0 Things I Hate About You" would be a film I saw multiple times twenty four years ago, because I had teen and tween daughters who loved it, and we had a DVD player. This movie was a go to for gatherings with their friends, rainy Saturday afternoons or days spent home when they were sick. Heath Ledger planted the seeds of his future fandom and legacy in the hearts of girls everywhere with this movie. Julia Styles may very well have turned one of my daughters into the heinous bitch version of her character simply by presenting that attitude as being so cool.

If you are familiar with "The Taming of the Shrew", you will recognize how closely this hewed to the original plot structure. There are occasional names, and lines that will connect the film to the play as well. While this is still a teen romantic comedy, it is one that goes much deeper than usual in those types of films. The nature of popularity is not just treated as a joke, but as an actual dilemma that teens must confront in some way or another. The two male leads find that truth is a better path to happiness than pretention, and of course the pretentious one gets a comic comeuppance.

Larry Miller plays the father of the two female leads, and he has had a prolific career in film and television as a character actor. This role may be his most memorable because of the way he plays his scenes with star Julia Stiles. He goes from comic foil to supportive father in one really memorable scene. Allison Janney is about to start her time on "The West Wing" but the goofy, wannabe romance writer as vice principal was a fun role in just a couple of brief scenes.  

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz are a terrific comic duo with great timing in their scenes together. Krumholtz probably steals more scenes than he should, but he does pay for it when he has a penis drawn on his face, and Andrew Keegan may have typecast himself perfectly with his performance as the self centered antagonist in the film. If you are a fan of indie's rock music of the 90s, you will find it in abundance on the soundtrack of this film.

In the packed audience last Friday, it was clear there were a number of women reliving their youth. Every time Heath Ledger did something in the film that was charming or cute, you could hear sighs and cheers throughout the auditorium. If I was thirty years younger, I might have considered it a prime situation for hitting on women who liked the film and wanted to experience the exuberance of young love once again. I'm not that young or stupid, but I smiled every time some woman let out a small moan of pleasure during the film. 

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series- The Man who Knew Too Much (1956) Hitchcock Week

 

Jimmy Stewart returns to the Paramount with another Hitchcock thriller, a very rare remake of his own work "The Man Who Knew Too Much". This is an international intrigue with a political assassination as the MacGuffin. The settings include  London and Marrakesh, and there are authentic location shots mixed with rear screen projection. Most of the interior shots were done in Hollywood on sound stages, but the film has an international flavor to it because of all the extras and the supporting roles.

The title gives away just enough to let us know that it is information which drives the plot. Stewart and Doris Day play the married couple, Doctor and Mrs. McKenna. He worked in the army Mash unit in North Africa during the war, and she was a well known pop singer when they met in London. They are returning to those haunts on a medical junket/vacation, with their little boy. They get connected to a man, Lois Bernard, who speaks Arabic as well as French and English, when he helps them with a cultural misunderstanding on a bus ride to Marrakesh from Casablanca. Bernard turns out to have been some sort of spy, who for is not clear, the local French authorities are suspicious of the Americans having any contact with him. It turns out there is a conspiracy, and the son of the nice American couple is used as a tool to keep them from sharing what they know.

Maybe the idea of an Indiana Doctor and his pop singer wife, turning into spies who travel to London, seems far fetched. The real strength that drives them is their love for their little boy and the animosity they feel toward those who betrayed them and threaten their son. Stewart gets tense in some scenes, clutching his fingers in anger below the surface of a table, struggling to contain his frustration. Day is more openly desperate and the scene where her husband has to sedate her before he can reveal their son's abduction is frightening and sad. 

The British security authority who wants them to trust his agency, is incapable of following up on their promise. The bureaucratic mind of the police officers who could potentially have stopped the plot by taking an active crime as enough justification to enter a building is almost as infuriating as the assassination plot. Of course, social niceties are also why Jo McKenna and the Doctor, don't disrupt a concert performance where the murder is supposed to take place. The final scream of warning comes at the last minute, which is thrilling for a drama, but makes little logical sense.

Having seen "Notorious" just two nights earlier, it is striking how much the descending staircase image dominates the climax of both movies. It seems to be a Hitchcock trope so when you watch "Psycho" remember, he has done this before. I think this is one of the few Academy Award winning songs that is actually relevant to the plot. Doris Day was a crossover star of the era, a singer and actress, and she took a simple little sing along tune and turned it into a moment of tension during the final act. She was famously uncertain about how she was doing in the role, but when you watch the screen, it is clear, she has command of her part.

This is another mystery thriller that mixes murder, espionage and ordinary people together in a well written script. The execution of the drama and suspense cannot be faulted, and the performances are top notch. If you ever get a chance to see this on the big screen, take it, you will be in the hands of a master.

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series Double Feature-Dial M for Murder and Rope (Hitchcock Week)

 

Dial M for Murder

A double dose of Hitchcock last Friday night, with two films based on plays that take place in a limited setting. First up, the star studded "Dial M for Murder" from 1954. Ray Milland, the Academy Award winning actor from a decade earlier in "The Lost Weekend", plays a retired English tennis player, married to a socialite American played by Grace Kelly, who would win the Academy Award this same year for another film. There is however a love triangle going on as she is still emotionally involved with a former paramour, played by Bob Cummings.

The plot involves an elaborate murder plot that goes awry and deepens the sinister nature of the crime. Tony is a conniving dilettante, who is unsatisfied with his life as a married man who has retired from his sport.  He maneuvers an old school acquaintance into his plot through a blackmail threat. His goal is to do away with his wife, inherit her money and be safely alibied by his wife's former lover. Things don't go according to plan but Tony is a clever man if not an ethical one, he improvises a scenario that results in an even more solid cover for his crime.   

The Paramount Program Director, Steven Jannise, correctly lauds Grace Kelly as the victimized woman in the story, but I am not sure you can say she steals the picture because Milland as the villain, is unctuous, quick footed, and capable of making the most seemingly innocent things look bad, while also explaining away his own bad actions in a reasonable manner. The part is very cleverly written and Milland handles it with aplomb. Kelly does the distraught wife and victim role well, but there needs to be a little more to her indignance at what transpires.

There are two supporting performances that deserve some attention away from the shade of the stars. John Williams portrays the suspicious Chief Inspector Hubbard, who follows a false trail at first and then doggedly pursues the truth on a last minute bit of subterfuge. Williams is brilliant in the part, side eying everyone and  smiling at his own suspicions. It is exactly the kind of performance that makes a movie special. Also deserving some kudos is Anthony Dawson, who plays the shady schoolmate recruited by Tony to be his weapon. I hadn't recognized him immediately, and I should have, perhaps the moustache was in fact a perfect disguise. Dawson is the actor that plays Professor Dent in Dr. No. He is on the receiving end of James Bonds Walther, when his Smith and Wesson runs out of ammo. As 

Charles Alexander Swann/Captain Lesgate, Dawson is sinister and charming as he loses a battle of wits with the well prepared Tony. 

The film is set largely on the apartment of Tony and Margo, with brief exteriors in front of their building and a couple of scenes set in the police headquarters of Chief Inspector Hubbard. The part with the key switch was a memorable moment in "The West Wing" one of my favorite TV series. The President is screening "Dial M for Murder" and trying to connect with his middle daughter Elle, who is resisting his fatherly sense of humor. The resolution of the scene with the Hitchcock film in the background is one of the warm moments from the series.

Rope

The second feature was another movie based on a play, and it is a grand experiment for the master of suspense. Set entirely in the apartment of the two killers, "Rope" is a psychological tug of war between the killers and their former mentor, the head of their house at prep school. Jimmy Stewart was a frequent star in Hitchcock films, and this was his first foray into the thriller territory that Hitch was the ultimate authority in. 

Pseudo intellectual entitled miscreants Brandon Hall and Phillip Morgan, murder a former classmate and friend as an intellectual exercise in power and superiority. They have taken the late night bull sessions with their teacher, way too seriously. Swallowing whole the philosophy of Nietzsche's "Superman", they kill as a way of affirming their own superiority.  Brandon, a narcissist with a sadistic streak, secures the body of their victim in a  wooden chest that he turns into a center piece at a party he is hosting with Phillip in their apartment. The dead man's father, Aunt and fiancé, as well as his former best friend are all in attendance.  When Rupert Cadell, their school house head and mentor, comes to the party, the intellectual cat and mouse games begin. Jimmy Stewart as Cadell, starts to suspect his former students are guilty of something as the snarky Brandon drops hints of his intellectual pretensions while the unnerved Phillip, drinks himself into a morose shell of himself and practically confesses to the crime repeatedly.

The movie is shot in continuity, as if it is all one take. The transitions between the film cuts, necessitated by the limit of ten minutes worth of film at a time, are covered by fades into someone's back or shots cast into a shadow. The movie also plays out in real time, a brief eighty minutes of tense talk and camera movements limited by the setting. The conclusion is a little melodramatic but the film is a fascinating experiment and it features an interesting set of performances from the two villains. The idea that they are superior to a character like the decent Mr. Kentley , played by Cedric Hardwicke, is ultimately laughable. Their twisted self rationalizations are thin and not even convincing to the man they think they are taking inspiration from.

I've seen the film a couple of times, including a theatrical experience at a revival house back in the 1980s. I can't quite remember if it was at the Rialto in South Pasadena or at the New Beverly in West Hollywood. Regardless, it is a great way to see the film, but it may be one Hitchcock that is not diminished by viewing on a TV. 

Alien Romulus (2024)

 

Ever since James Cameron's "Aliens" I have been excited about a new entry into the franchise, and then disappointed with the product. The second film was the last time I walked out of an Alien movie, completely satisfied. That pattern is not entirely eliminated by the new entry "Alien Romulus", but I can say that the level of disappointment was much lower than the previous two films produced. "Romulus" is basically a remake of the original premise, but after a strong first half, it falls into rapid action sequences that don't satisfy the tension levels the way I would like. People, study your Spielberg/Hitchcock films a little more, you are imitating but not replicating the suspense.

Director Fede Alvarez has tread this territory before. In 2013, he took the original "Evil Dead" movies and remade them as a smashing example of horror and practical effects. That film not only stuck to the formula, it upped the ante on suspense. With "Romulus", he has basically replayed the same plot in a slightly different location, with a slightly modified crew, but ultimately, you can pick out the beats of the film that follow exactly from the original. We get six characters (plus one) in search of a death by Aliens.  

One of the reasons that I like the slow burn first hour, is that it contains the biggest difference in the plotline from the original. Instead of going down to a planet to investigate a derelict ship , our crew is going up from the planet surface to ransack a derelict space station. The artificial person starts of as benign, and has a surprising story arc. The Weyland/Yutani Corporation continues to be the enemy in the story, but in the initial launch of the plot, they do so in a completely different way. Somehow, indentured servitude has become a legitimate employment practice.  Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner" could easily be a companion piece to what is going on here. If someone wanted to make a political thriller out of these two film conceits, it would be a great story.

That slow build structure is a lot like the original movie, with an opportunity to meet and start to care about the characters we are doing to watch be massacred. None is given a complete backstory, but we get a good sense of who they are during act one. The young colonists are determined to obtain the material on the station, to facilitate their exit from the mining world they are trapped on. It is not essential to know some things, but I would like to understand why Rain, our lead character and Tyler, her ex-boyfriend broke up. What is Tyler's job on the planet and why does he have a spacecraft? Bjorn is the designated ass, and we get a little about his resentment of synthetics, but nothing about why he and Navarro are together. Kay is Tyler's sister, and she just seems to be along for the ride as non-essential personnel. The most interesting character is the artificial person, Andy. When so much energy is put into making the robot the sympathetic character at the start of the film, you know there are going to be some manipulative moments later on.

I liked that the film tried to use practical effects as much as possible. Including, up to a point, a second artificial person. When we finally get a closer examination of that character, who is named Rook, we know that A.I. has crept into bed with the puppets and models that have been the mainstay of the film up to that point. There are lots of Aliens as the story goes along, many of them in the form of face-huggers that add the earliest creep elements to the movie. When we get to the climax, there is a big shift in the imagery and our suspension of disbelief is sorely tested.

If I were ranking all of the Alien Films, this one would come in behind "Alien" and "Aliens", but quite a ways behind them, although in front of all the others.  I don't think there was a jump scare that got me, and only a couple of the fx moments were gruesome enough to make this feel like a horror film. Go see it, you will probably have a good time, but keep your expectations in check.

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series- Notorious (Hitchcock Week)

 

It's Hitchcock Week at the Paramount Theater and last night was a chance to see one of the best from the master of suspense, "Notorious", the 1946 spy thriller starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Raines. Set mostly in Rio after the war, "Notorious" is about an attempt to penetrate a Nazi spy ring, operating in South America. Grant plays Devlin, an equivocating intelligence agent, who recruits the daughter of a German Spy, convicted of treason in Florida. For the romance element of the story to work, we have to believe that he is in the dark over exactly what his superiors want from Alicia Huberman. 

The world of espionage is particularly dark in Hitchcock's films. Although we want the American agencies that he vaguely refers to to succeed, they do so through one of the most unpleasant means available. In both "Notorious" and "North by Northwest", party girls with emotional vulnerabilities are asked to seduce the targets in order to gain intelligence. With Eva Marie-Saint we don't get a lot of backstory, but Ingrid Bergman's character is all backstory, especially for the first act of the film. Alicia has rebelled against her Nazi father and in drowning herself in booze, she has become a loose woman, who is taken advantage of by a variety of men. At the depth of her humiliation, Devlin, the character played by Grant, insinuates himself in her circle of friends and begins the process of luring her into an assignment in South America. I find it interesting, that Grant is the man who falls for the loose women turned spies in both films. In "North by Northwest" he is an innocent, caught up in plans beyond his ken. Here, he is a calculating cad, who learns the dangers of his own callousness. 

"Notorious" is at heart a love triangle, the third party being the erudite Alexander Sebastian,  a key member of the Nazi group. It seems that years earlier, when Sebastian was friends with Alicia's father, he had a massive crush on her, and the U.S. and Brazilin intelligence group wants to take advantage of that by inserting her into his life. In essence, pimping her out for Uncle Sam.  The fact that Devlin has fallen for Alicia and she for him, is a big complication. Devlin is cold to Alicia, as a way of distancing himself and her from the unpleasantness of her activities. Regardless of what Devlin says to her however, he is defensive on her behalf with the intelligence group in private. In an excellent illustration of true movie dialogue here is an example:

Paul Prescott: [about Alicia] I don't like this, I don't like her coming here.

Walter Beardsley: She's had me worried for some time. A woman of that sort.

Devlin: What sort is that, Mr. Beardsley?

Walter Beardsley: Oh, I don't think any of us have any illusions about her character. Have we, Devlin?

Devlin: Not at all, not in the slightest. Miss Huberman is first, last, and always not a lady. She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn't hold a candle to your wife, sitting in Washington, playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.

Devlin gives himself away to his superior Paul Prescott, played by veteran actor Louis Calhern, with a dash of charm and a bureaucratic mind. Prescott has a clever scene revealing a little of his humanity when Devlin comes to him worried about Alicia, and the discussion takes place while he is prone in bed, eating cheese and crackers. Not the tightly controlled mission boss, but a man who has to kick his shoes off an dine alone in bed sometimes. He knows what he is doing with Alicia, but he is not the monster that he could be. A decade later, Leo G. Carroll will fill a similar role in the other spy film I mentioned.

My admiration for Claude Rains as an actor has been expressed before. In "Casablanca", "The Adventures of Robin Hood", and "The Invisible Man", Rains has been one of the consistent lights of the golden age of Hollywood. He is the sweetest and most vulnerable Nazi in films, as a besotted member of this cabal, he is both murderously awful and sympathetic. That is a piece of cognitive complexity that only an expert performer like Rains could pull off. The defeated resignation of his denouncement is perfect for the character and the film.

There are several moments of tension in the movie. Bergman's acquisition of a key without her husband discovering it is one of those sequences. Of course the search for the secret in the wine cellar is gripping as well. You could hear the audience last night, collectively inhaling and holding their breath, as a wine bottle teeters on the edge of a shelf. Finally, the elegant bluff and turning of the tide with Grant rescuing Bergman from the clutches of Rains, and his loathsome Mother. The mother, played by actress Leopoldine Konstantin, is one of the Mother's that Hitchcock used as a tool for manipulating his male leads in the movies. While not as famous as Norman Bates mother, Mme. Sebastian, would certainly belong in a rogue's gallery of villains. 

As usual with a Hitchcock film, the production design is impressive. Although the scenes set in Rio rely on rear projection, they still look convincing. Alicia's house in Florida, and her apartment in Rio, swim in the deco elegance of the era and her outfits do the same thing. The camera work is impeccable, I liked the trick with the coffee cup in the foreground as Alicia is in the background, both in focus. There are a number of moments shot from above that also establish the pecking order of power in the household, but allowing us to track the activities of the characters as well. The final descent on the staircase is an excellent visual complement to the plot tension in the script. 

From 1945 to his death in 1980, Alfred Hitchcock made 24 films and in that thirty five year period, a dozen of them are essential and another half dozen are excellent. "Notorious" deservedly belongs on the top shelf with a cast of stars that were at the height of their powers. A big screen visit is always called for when a Hitchcock film is involved. Tonight, two more of the top tier films. 

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series Double Feature-Romancing the Stone/Three Amigos

 

Robert Rodriguez is a local Austin hero. As a film maker, he has worked extensively in the Austin area and used local crafts people and locations for his films. He has been able to select a group of movies for the Summer Classic Film Series, and present them to the audience with a live introduction for a few years now. This last Sunday, he had three films that he wanted to talk about that featured Mexican Actor/Director Alfonso Arau. Rodriguez was inspired by Arau when he was just starting out and he got a break, which allowed him to spend a week or so as a young man, assisting and hanging out with Arau. They have since become friends and it is fitting that Rodriguez selected his friend to feature in this summer's presentations.

There were actually three features on Sunday that concerned Arau, unfortunately, we could not stay for the film he directed "Like Water for Chocolate". I have it in my collection and we will catch up with it soon. The two films we were able to see were movies that Alfonso Arau had an acting role in. He is not the star of the films but he is an important featured player in both of them

Romancing the Stone

"Romancing the Stone" was 20th Century Fox's entry into the Indiana Jones clone films. Everyone was looking for an adventure film with comedy, romance and stunts, to pull in audiences the way the Steven Spielberg films had done. The movie was a big success and it cemented the stardom of Kathleen Turner and created a partnership with Michael Douglas that would continue up to today. If you are interested in a more detailed look at the film, let me direct you to my post on the 30 Years On Project. This movie is a delightful summer entertainment, and holds up pretty well.

First lets talk about Alfonso Arau's part in the film. He plays the role of a drug smuggler, who controls the local area that Romance Writer, Joan Wilder (Turner) and her guide/partner, Jack Colton (Douglas) find themselves stuck in. Through one of those wonderful movie coincidences, he knows her work and becomes a quick ally in her goal of escaping from the evil pursuers that are hot on their trail. The vast majority of his role involves him grinning as he drives them in his off road truck through the fields and jungles as they are chased by jeeps with machine guns.  Arau is probably not in the movie for more than seven or eight minutes, but like most good character actors, he makes those minutes count. 

I also have to say that Kathleen Turner was the draw in the film. Douglas was the producer and first listed star on the film, but Turner is the character that we spend the most time with. She starts off as a mousy pawn in the story, but as her successes in confronting complications grow, so does her self confidence and natural beauty. By the end of the film, she has truly become the heroine of her own romance novels. It's pretty obvious that Michael Douglas also worked in the film as adventurer Colton. This movie set him up as a romantic lead for the next twenty years, in thrillers and dramas as well as comedies. 

The cast also included Danny DeVito, who was a buddy of Michael Douglas after appearing in the Academy Award winning "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" which Douglas produced. He later directed both of the stars in the excellent but sometimes forgotten "War of the Roses". So it was a fortuitous collaboration for all involved. Director Robert Zemeckis had had a hand in three films that had bombed for Steven Spielberg and his production company. He took this job to try and get a hit outside of the Spielberg umbrella, so his career did not dissipate. Robert Rodriguez told us as part of his introduction to the film that Zemeckis had said this was the hardest location shoot he had ever done, and that he instructed his agent that if ever he was given a script that started "Exterior:   A vast Jungle", the agent should just automatically pass. 

The Three Amigos !  

The second of our Double Features includes a much bigger role for Alfonso Arau. He is the antagonist in the story, a bandit named El Guapo, modelled after the character played by Eli Wallach in "The Magnificent Seven". Of course this is a comedy, so the character will have a number of features that would not likely appear in a real bandit of this ilk, including a love of sweaters. John Landis directed this film and it is a loose adaption of "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Seven Samurai". A village, terrorized by a gang of bandits, seeks outsiders as defenders. The conceit in this film is that the woman who contacts the supposed heroes, has misunderstood what a movie is (the film is set in 1916). The three actors who star in a series of Westerns set in Mexico during the silent film era, are playing landowners who are heroically on the side of peasants in many of their films. When the actors lose their jobs at the studio, they take up an ambiguous offer from the woman in the village, a heavily edited telegram leads them to think they are putting on a show, not that they are confronting real criminals.

Of course the film is pretty silly at times. There is a singing bush, a singing tortoise and singing horses in the film. There is also an invisible swordsman, and the actors skills as action stars in the movies, turn out to be useful. The cross cultural jokes are not offensive, and it's hard to be put off by anything the three leads do. Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short  are the three actors who get in over their heads. The sequence where they realize the reality of their situation is quite amusing, and they do a nice cowardly retreat that will provoke a smile or two. The consistent smile generator however is the Amigos salute, you can probably do it yourself if you have seen the movie. 

Alfonzo Arau gets to ham it up as the leader of the bandit gang, and he gets a lot of mileage out of his broad smile and subdued line readings. If you have seen this movie before, you will probably remember the dialogue that features a "plethora" of jokes about the meaning of the word. Actor Tony Plana plays "Jefe" the second in command to "El Guapo" and he and Arau have some nice timing in their scenes together. 

This is a lightweight movie, that has nothing on it's mind other than making us laugh at some absurdities, and it does that just fine. It is the only screenwriting credit that composer/songwriter Randy Newman has, that may be in large part because of the songs he contributed to the story, although he is also credited as contributing to the payoff joke of the birthday presents for El Guapo, so I won't say he was not writing outside of the songs. 

It was a minor hit at Christmas time in the year of it's release, but it has never been a critical favorite. It is probably fair to say, that like a lot of other 1980s movies, it achieved a reputation because of repeated cable showings and now has a cult following. It's nonsensical and sweet, with enough energy for it's running time. 

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series- The Goonies

I never thought of myself as the biggest fan of "The Goonies", in spite of the fact that it came out in the mid 80s, and was directed by Richard Donner from a script by Chris Columbus, and produced by Steven Spielberg. Those would all be things that would be going in its favor, and seem to make me the target audience for the film. The big exception being that I was probably 10 years too old to experience the movie the way it was meant to be consumed. This is a movie for kids and teens, and although my adult self often feels nostalgia for adventure stories like this I've always been a little detached from it. After today's screening, I'd say that's a little less true, I liked it a lot but it still seems slightly off base to me.

The biggest problem for me is that the kids who star in the film are made to be overly loud, and talking over each other constantly. This was a choice that was done I'm sure to create energy for young people, but it had the opposite effect on me. I have the same problem with Steven Spielberg's "Hook", too many Lost Boys yelling over one another. However when we do get to moments where Sean Astin's character is trying to figure out a clue, or young Josh Brolin is engaging in some physical activity designed to show his alpha male status to a bunch of kids, the film works pretty well.

Corey Feldman and the other two kids who form the core of the Goonies are the most fun characters, but they are also the ones that do the most shouting and that's really what puts me off a bit from the movie. Chunk, the pudgy kid who makes friends with the giant member of the bad guys family, is pretty sympathetic as the conduit between "Sloth" and the rest of the characters. The late John Matuszak manages to give a sympathetic reading to the misshapen Fratelli brother. The make up overwhelmed his face but the small movements combined with some animatronics made it work anyway. 

A lot of the cast went on to solid careers in film. Astin starred in the "Lord of the Rings" films as everyone's favorite Hobbit,  Josh Brolin has been nominated for an Academy Award and played the ultimate antagonist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Martha Plimpton continues to work and had her own TV series. The great surprise in the group is Ke Huy Quan who plays the 007 inspired "Data". He was largely absent from the screen after his child roles in this and the "Indiana Jones" film, but made a big screen appearance and won an Academy Award for "Everything, Everywhere All at Once".  So whoever was the casting director for the film, seems to have done a good job in assembling child actors.

The treasure map, pirate ship and the booby traps are the things that make this movie worthwhile. Kids on a treasure hunt is a fun idea, the traps are all Rube Goldberg style setups that give the movie some visual excitement. The production design for the caves and the pirate ship in a hidden cove look great. The backsrory about the homes of the kids is a little clunky, and the performances of the adult parents was weak. Robert Davi, Joe Pantoliano and Anne Ramsey are a bit over the top, but the tone they set is right. It's a solid and fun film. Maybe not the classic some of it's fans think it is, but definitely worth a watch. Oh, and I got to wear my shirt.