Sunday, September 5, 2010

The Goonies Is A Film Worth Watching

By Christie Boyle

Goonies for life! If you were a child of the eighties, you certainly remember this classic. If you haven't seen it yet, think Stand By Me meets Indiana Jones meets Pirates of the Caribbean. The end result is a thrilling, funny, exciting, and really fun adventure flick that entertains everybody of every age no matter who you are. If it's been awhile, put it on your movie downloads queue and relive the eighties with one of the all time great family adventure films.

The movie follows, who else, The Goonies. This gang of misfits, led by Mikey Walsh, is known around the city of Astoria, Oregon for always getting into some sort of trouble. The story really kicks off when the rich folks in town decide to buy up the neighborhood to convert it into a golf course. The city of Astoria is really gorgeous, and it's too bad that it only features prominently in the first act of the film before it gets into the cave-dwelling adventure stuff.

So, the Goonies have to go get some buried treasure to save their neighborhood. They find a treasure map in dad's attic, they go to a restaurant on the edge of town where it turns out there are some Italian gangsters known as the Fratellis hiding out, and keeping their little brother, Sloth, a gigantic, deformed monster with a heart of gold chained up to a chair watching black and white TV all day. So the kids have to somehow get into the caves under the restaurant and find the treasure without getting the Fratellis' attention and...

With the pirates, the foreclosure subplot, the gangsters, the treasure, the coming of age thread, it... Sounds kind of complicated, right? Well, it really isn't. Remember, the only reason all these other factors are there is to keep the movie moving. It's all about adventure, and the gangsters and rich kids and all that, that's just something for the Goonies to always be running away from as they go from booby trap to booby trap and develop deeper bonds of friendship.

It's really just a whole lot of fun. It inspires you with a sense of adventure, like this stuff can happen in real life. While it's not likely that it WILL happen, the movie is at least rooted enough in reality that it doesn't get into the supernatural or anything like that, so it could, technically, happen in real life, no matter how implausible and unlikely that might be.

The film was thought to be incredibly fast paced, a little too break-neck, when it was released, but times have changed. Today, you won't get out of a kid's movie without seeing seven manic chase scenes, and at least one character getting dragged along an assembly line conveyor belt. The Goonies is relatively laid back in comparison to the madcap CGI films out today.

But in any event, it's one of the all time great eighties flicks, as it well should be, having been produced by Spielberg and directed by Richard Donner. The style, the fashion, the music, it all adds up to a movie that couldn't have been made in any other decade.

But it really is a classic in its own right. If you haven't seen it in awhile, watch it again. Any child of the eighties should have a copy on their hard drive ready to watch at the drop of a hat. You'll need it for when you have kids of your own and you want them to know how good movies used to be back when you were a kid! - 40725

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