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Lately I've been catching up on all those 'coming of age' films from the 1980s. Tonight I watched St. Elmo's Fire. The only thing I'm going to remember about it, apart from the various apartment decorating styles, is that they couldn't get an actual Korean to play the Korean ambassador. They got some guy who looked like maybe he lived down the street from Ricardo Montalban in Monaco. Aggressively non-Korean or non-Asian generally... very weird and jarring. Even Sixteen Candles found a Japanese guy to play the Chinese guy. It's no Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany's, granted, but still. Oh, and they somehow repossessed a wall mural of Billy Idol from that girl's apartment... I somehow find the image of repo men scraping the paint off with putty knives less convincing than the idea that the director shot the 'after' shots first.
The basic premise of the film is interesting, but, as they say, 'insufficiently realized'... we know that these seven people were all friends in college and recently graduated, but the movie doesn't really put us in that state of mind, in that location in life. The cardinal rule of storytelling is 'don't tell it when you can show it,' but the codicil is you should do at least one of these things. The setting might have benefited from some minimal foreshadowing or flashbacks, other than showing the seven of them in graduation gowns at the beginning; the idea that they're still clinging to the lives they led in college might have been strengthened. If you've never gone through college, I'm not sure how comprehensible the situation is going to be...
Maybe I wanted to see more of the 'bitter' part of 'bittersweet;' like the idea that in four years, this town you had so many good times in will forget you were ever there; that hangout you thought was yours will be full of new people, and it's time for you to make room for them and get lost; the hangout itself will go away, and soon nobody at school will ever know it existed, except for those few grads who become postgrads or faculty or some other perpetual student, and cling to that bright, magical past when they were young and full of promise, as it erodes from beneath them and becomes something different for someone else; and that all of this is a microcosm of life itself... in your mind, you're the star, and what you do and what you experience seems to be of the utmost importance, but all the while, it's going away; it's waiting to go away. Everything you knew slowly crumbles, everyone you knew goes away, and no one who comes along will know what you had, and you have no way to show it to them; decontextualized photographs of alien faces, and other fragmentary souvenirs inscribed with antique dates, dead names. Well, happy holidays! Keep warm.
I wonder if anyone's ever written a version of The Big Chill featuring members of the Manson Family...
The basic premise of the film is interesting, but, as they say, 'insufficiently realized'... we know that these seven people were all friends in college and recently graduated, but the movie doesn't really put us in that state of mind, in that location in life. The cardinal rule of storytelling is 'don't tell it when you can show it,' but the codicil is you should do at least one of these things. The setting might have benefited from some minimal foreshadowing or flashbacks, other than showing the seven of them in graduation gowns at the beginning; the idea that they're still clinging to the lives they led in college might have been strengthened. If you've never gone through college, I'm not sure how comprehensible the situation is going to be...
Maybe I wanted to see more of the 'bitter' part of 'bittersweet;' like the idea that in four years, this town you had so many good times in will forget you were ever there; that hangout you thought was yours will be full of new people, and it's time for you to make room for them and get lost; the hangout itself will go away, and soon nobody at school will ever know it existed, except for those few grads who become postgrads or faculty or some other perpetual student, and cling to that bright, magical past when they were young and full of promise, as it erodes from beneath them and becomes something different for someone else; and that all of this is a microcosm of life itself... in your mind, you're the star, and what you do and what you experience seems to be of the utmost importance, but all the while, it's going away; it's waiting to go away. Everything you knew slowly crumbles, everyone you knew goes away, and no one who comes along will know what you had, and you have no way to show it to them; decontextualized photographs of alien faces, and other fragmentary souvenirs inscribed with antique dates, dead names. Well, happy holidays! Keep warm.
I wonder if anyone's ever written a version of The Big Chill featuring members of the Manson Family...
