PG-13, 1 hr. 40 min. Directed by: David Seltzer. Release Date: March 28, 1986. DVD Release Date: March 11, 2003.
I don’t know when I saw this for the first time, but I know that it was one of those 80s movies that started showing up at my house a lot once I was old enough to rent my own movies, say in 1989 or something close to that year. We had a couple of video places within easy walking distance, and I was no stranger to any of them. I bet if we could look back on my Blockbuster and Warehouse accounts back in those days, this would appear a lot, probably in equal numbers with The Breakfast Club, Adventures in Babysitting, and Sixteen Candles. Those four movies pretty much made up the cornerstone of my late childhood, and because of that, I have a lot of favorable things to say about Lucas.
No, it’s not just because of there seem to be so many cast members from The Goonies, another childhood favorite. I watch a lot of movies, and it’s hard to find a film that has an almost total lack of negativity but still manages to have conflict. At this point in my life, being picked on by jocks and not getting the girl don’t really seem like the life-killing events they seemed like in back then, but I can still empathize with poor Lucas’ plight. In my first year of sixth grade, I was in a Montessori school, where they let you progress (or stagnate) to the best of your abilities. I found myself graduating out of my little school in three years, a path that should have taken me four. When I was up for graduation, my classmates were waiting for their thirteenth birthday and I had just turned eleven. It was the total suck. A second year of sixth grade at a public school helped me fall back in line with students my own age, but I still remember what it was like to be so obviously younger than the people I was taking classes with.
I love watching these 80s movies to see what the cast used to look like. To remember a time before Winona Ryder had crows’ feet, a time before Charlie Sheen was certifiably insane. If you’ve been paying to Charlie Sheen’s frantic efforts to prove this is what his brain looks like on drugs, you might have noticed his claim to have named Winona Ryder. I haven't paid a lot of attention to his recent antics, although I did notice that particular claim, and I’m thinking this might have been the movie where they met, although she looks like a boy, and they only share like four minutes of screen time, they might have actually socialized during the filming this movie. It made me smile to think about that this time around.
While I like that the conflict in the movie is a bit on the soft side, too much gets solved and too much ends with just that “aw” amount of sweetness for me to be really satisfied with the way things happen here. In real life, someone would have gotten beaten up or left school to have a baby or something. It wouldn’t have worked out like this, but this kind of ending makes people happy. Even me, on occasion.
If you haven’t seen this movie and you like 80s movies in that John Hughes milieu, you could do worse than to check this out. Ditto if you’re looking for something light and easy to kill some time.
