I am the exact age of the Brat Pack, so I'm just the audience for Andrew McCarthy's rambly and touching documentary Brats, which is about the '80s and vanity and youth and careers and hopes and injuries and, most relatably for me, about the choice to look back, or to let it go, in late middle age.
I think a more analytical film-history-centric approach could have dug deep into St. Elmo's Fire and how that movie in particular was engineered to make young people want to be (or to know) those actors and also to make us hate them. But I like the more personal way McCarthy approached it all.
I see a lot of people on social media posting about Brats and basically taking the opportunity to say, 40 years later, "Fuck these people, why should I care"...which, fine, but that discussion was actually also being had in 1986 and is one of the points of the film.
I liked the New York cover story that coined the label "Brat Pack." It was a jolting, shrewd, let-them-hang-themselves piece of journalism that crystallized a moment. Real '80s magazine writing. But I don't think writers should ever object to a reminder that what we write can hurt people's feelings.
I tried to revisit ST. ELMO last year but Hulu was showing it pan-and-scanned. Which seemed like the final indignity: “These characters don’t merit widescreen.”
Keep in mind;
“About Last night” is based on a 1970’s play, the lead in the debut of the play was William H Macy.
While I love the play and love the film too, I’ve never thought of it as a Brat Pack film “because Mamet”
There’s no wrong answer
Watching About Last Night thru the knowledge of the Mamet play, Brat Pack aspects are overshadowed by Belushi/Perkins and the writing, for me
:)
I missed ST. ELMO’S FIRE at the time of release, and only caught up with it a few months ago. What an awful experience. Not even a good nostalgia trip. And I’m pretty sure I would have felt this way had I seen it in the 80s. In fact, I could see myself skipping a lot of their films that came after.
What I love about St. Elmo's is that Lowe spends most of the movie drunk/high, basically tries to rape Demi Moore in her car while his girlfriend and child wait inside his house, and really never stops being a self-involved asshole - and EVERYBODY just continues to adore him.
Ahh, the 80s.
Thx for this mini-review. I want to see the film.
St Elmo’s made me want to go hang out in Georgetown! It seemed so glamorous in that film. I guess because it looked so different from my small, west coast town.
it is *not* good (although IIRC Judd's performance as a weasel is next-level convincing); nor (to me) does it seem to be engineered along the lines Mark suggests. It does include one of my favorite 80s tropes: the over-the-top sax player.
That movie... okay, fine, whatever... but every time I get a new apartment to myself I still have one of those "best peanut butter and jelly sandwich I ever had" moments, FWIW
You make a great point... OG article was sooo of a time, very alt.weekly in tone. We need a piece on Boomer resentment of GenX, the root cause.
The doc was fine, sweet... like when a book coulda been an article, but didn't take long to read.
We all look great.
That's our GenX revenge. 🤭
Is St. Elmo’s Fire worth a first watch now? I was JUST enough of a Gen X Cusper that it didn’t appeal to me when I was growing up the way John Hughes films did, and then by the time I would have been interested in the story it just seemed passé.
Debating watching it.
Speaking of 80s flicks there was always a split for those of us who graduated HS in ‘85 — we liked St Elmo’s Fire because it held the promise of college etc. but Ferris Beuller’s Day Off (a year later in ‘86) was kids’ stuff because at that point we were done with HS hijinks
