[It’s back—the
very popular annual
post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, in which I AmericanStudy some of
those things that just don’t quite do it for me. Leading up to what is always
my most full and fun crowd-sourced
weekend post, so share your own non-favorites in comments, please!]
On what’s
annoying about the 80s action-adventure film, and what’s more frustrating still.
Like any other
child of the 1980s, I loved the Richard Donner-directed/Steven Spielberg-produced
(and perhaps co-directed, if you believe
Sean Astin’s memories) blockbuster summer film The Goonies
(1985). For this little 8 year old AmericanStudier, what was not to love? There
was a map to pirate treasure and a lost pirate ship and booby traps and puzzles
to solve, resourceful young heroes (especially Jonathan Ke Huy Quan’s
inventive wizard Data), silly humor aplenty, villains
who were scary enough but also sufficiently incompetent to lose to our heroes
(and played by three of
the great character actors of their generation, Anne Ramsey, Joe
Pantoliano, and Robert Davi), just enough teenage romance, a truly unique
monster-toward-hero in the
character of Sloth (John Matuszak), and much more besides. It was Indiana Jones crossed with E.T., with a healthy dose of Saturday
morning cartoons mixed in, and I can assure you that 8 year old me would have
never for a second contemplated putting it on a non-favorites list (he also
wouldn’t have been able to comprehend the concept of an internet blog, of
course).
Then I grew up.
And maybe this reflects as much on my incipient grumpy-old-man status as it
does on the film itself, but when I’ve stumbled on showings of The Goonies on TV in recent years, I’ve
found it almost unbearably loud and obnoxious. I mean that partly literally:
all of the sound in the film (even just the conversations, or should I say screaming
matches, between the kids) seems to have been turned up to 11,
and after just a few seconds of watching I tend to feel as if I’ve been beaten
about the head by an insistent troop of naughty gremlins (the mischievious mechanical
kind, not the ones from that other 80s film). But it’s not just the sound
effects—compared for example to Elliot
and his siblings and friends in E.T., the youthful protagonists of The Goonies are to this viewer consistently
and thoroughly annoying, an off-putting, grating quality that makes it very
hard to watch their adventures without starting to root for one of the booby
traps to achieve its fatal purpose. I know how a group of young boys can act
when thrown together (my sons and their friends are currently in a phase when
almost every conversation turns into a game of “roasting” each other with
insults), and I suppose The Goonies
is mining that vein—but who wants to watch a film about, much less root for the
triumph of, a group of kids at their most annoying? Just makes me want to quote
Jack Nicholson’s Melvin Udall from As
Good As It Gets (1997): “Shut up, kids!”
I know that the
Goonies are on a quest for a more noble purpose than just finding pirate loot
(or finding occasions to scream more at each other): their family homes (they
are neighbors in the same Astoria,
Oregon community) are facing foreclosure from a greedy developer looking to
build a country club, and they hope that the lost treasure will help stave off
the crisis. But even that, to be honest, is more silly and frustrating than
ennobling. All these families are under water on their mortgages at the same
time and to the same bank (I know that 80s prosperity didn’t reach all American
families by any means, but this still feels like a very clumsy premise)? What
about other houses and families in the neighborhood that would presumably likewise
have to be foreclosed upon for the development to go forward? And what do we
make of Rosalita (Lupe Ontiveros), the Latina housekeeper who ultimately finds
the treasure that saves the day? How can the Walsh family afford to employ her,
if they can’t pay their mortgage? Why is she pretty much literally only in the
movie as a source of
racist comic relief before providing this sudden, final plot twist? Does
she get to benefit from any of that treasure, since clearly her situation is
even more dire than that of the Walsh family (not least because she has to work
around these kids all the time—the health insurance for migraines alone will be
astronomical)? So, so many questions—and while a full viewing of the film might
provide some answers, I’m not at all willing to find out.
Last
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on this non-favorite or others you’d share?
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