One Torch (Out of Five)
I still remember how much I wanted to see The Goonies, the 1985 Richard Donner movie about a group of misfits who call themselves The Goonies and who, when their families are faced with eviction, try to save the day by finding a long-hidden pirate’s fortune.
Who wouldn’t want to see that movie, especially as a kid?
Then I actually saw it, and I couldn’t believe how stupid it was.
To my surprise, the movie ended up being one of the year’s top-grossers. But whatever. Every year, there are plenty of stupid movies that end up being box-office hits — usually through some combination of hype and gimmickry. There’s also usually that sense among those who actually saw the movie in a theater that they’re thinking, “Oh, Lord, why the hell did I fall for it?”
That’s what I assumed most people thought about The Goonies: “We both made a big mistake last night, so let’s just pretend it never happened, okay?”
Then over the years, I watched in horror as the reputation of The Goonies as a “cult” movie began to grow — and not in a so-bad-it’s-good-Showgirls kind of way. In a I-love-that-movie! kind of way.
Sure, some of The Goonies current cult status can be attributed to nostalgia — adults having fond feelings because the movie reminds them of their youth.
But younger generations have since discovered the movie. And many of them seem to love it too. There’s even talk of a sequel.
The first time I heard this, I thought, “WTF? How could today’s ironic, sophisticated, seen-it-all kids fall for such a contrived, treacly, poorly made piece of crap?”
It was me, I finally decided. I’d been in a bad mood the day I’d seen The Goonies all those years ago. Surely, it couldn’t be as bad I remembered.
A few weeks ago, I decided to watch it again.
And it was so much worse than I remembered!
The central story is admittedly a good one, and many of the young actors (including future stars Josh Brolin, Sean Astin, and Martha Plimpton) are charming.
But there are so many plot contrivances!
One-Eyed Willy, a pirate who has hidden his ship inside a massive sea cave, guards it with a series of traps. One of them is a massive organ that must be played with just the right notes or pieces of the floor collapses.
Seriously? One-Eyed Willy has the time, technology, and energy to build such a massive, complicated, and wildly inefficient trap?
Then they find One-Eyed Willy’s body: literally sitting next to the treasure, waiting for them. So … what? Willy built all those elaborate traps, somehow got the treasure map out into the world, then returned to their ship, arranged himself in front of the treasure and … just died?
At the end of the movie when the kids are reunited with their parents, they’re literally signing the eviction papers on the beach.
And don’t get me started on Data’s “brilliant” inventions that are mostly just stupid sight-gags.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “Lighten up, dude! It’s just a kids’ movie!”
Maybe so. But I can’t think of another kids’ movie that’s half this contrived.
And what pushes this movie into the ranks of the truly horrible for me is its treatment of “Chunk,” the fat kid. Not only do the other kids tease him — giving him the moniker “Chunk” and making him do the completely humiliating “Truffle Shuffle” — the movie clearly hates him too, making him a cowardly compulsive liar and showing him as the butt of cruel fat jokes again and again.
This is really ironic in a movie that’s supposed to be about misunderstood misfits, and that tries to elicit sympathy for One-Eyed Willy who is deemed “the first Goonie,” because he had only one eye.
But perhaps these appalling fat jokes aren’t too surprising given that Stephen Spielberg produced, co-wrote, and co-directed (uncredited) the movie; the Shindler’s List director is notorious for including in his movies mean-spirited jokes directed at fat people.
Then there’s the Sloth, the mentally challenged Fratelli brother that his family has literally chained away, reducing him to virtually the level of an unspeaking animal. I know sensibilities have changed a lot since the movie came out, but even when I first saw it, I found the character and his situation, as exaggerated as he is, to be horrifying, not funny.
Do I like anything about The Goonies? Well, it happens to have a pretty good movie theme song: Cyndi Lauper’s “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.”
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American fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books may well be delighted by The Color of Magic, a four-hour adaptation of two books in the series that previously aired on British television, debuting this Sunday on ION Television.
But a Ymper Trymon (Curry), a power-hungry wizard at the academy, has his own designs on the spell inside Rincewind’s head.
But much of the humor falls flat — or perhaps doesn’t translate to American audiences. Twoflower’s luggage, for example, walks on legs of its owns — a detail that might be charming on the page, but which just seems inexplicably weird on screen. At one point, an old man is discussing a younger girl. “If I was 20 years younger…” he says, then adds, “I’d be 67.”