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Reviews:
Goonies
Are (Still) Good Enough
by Michael Flanagan
Super
When I first saw Richard
Donner’s The Goonies, I was young.
Very young.
So young, in fact, that when the bats
flew out of the cave and Martha Plimpton
started screaming “Rabies!
Rabies!” I thought that bats were
rabies, an idea that stayed with me until I
got an answer wrong on a science test and they
tested me for special classes.
But even at that young age, I
understood Goonies, I liked Goonies, I was
a Goonie.
Rewatching the film so
many years later, I realized one main thing
about myself as a child: damn I had
good taste!
What a great movie.
It’s got everything: it opens with a
jailbreak, goes into a car chase, moves into a
funny kid movie that twists into a treasure
hunt, the treasure hunt turns into a romance
adventure chase movie shootout that flows into
a great water ride and concludes as a pirate
movie, on one of the greatest sets ever built
(not computer generated) in a movie.
If more movies today had these
qualities, they’d…they’d be ripping off The
Goonies and wouldn’t be nearly as good.
Even the central idea of
the film, an idea that I understood on a
recent watching, but may have missed as a
child, this idea is tantamount.
“This is our time,” a young Sean
Astin declares at one point, “Up there
it’s their time.”
The children, on an adventure like no
other, stop and realize that you’ll only be
kids once. They turn from escape and embrace the adventure of the film,
and of their youth.
The Goonies doesn’t give kids
ideas to go off on pirate ships, but it
reminds them to enjoy who they are, what they
see, and most importantly, live “their
time.”
DVD Update
Richard Donner knows a
commentary track better than anyone in the
business.
He knows how to produce one hell of a
DVD, too, as he showed us with Superman,
and now, The Goonies.
Donner brought back every single one of
the Goonie kids, lined them up in front of the
camera, and let them loose on a commentary
track like no other. From Corey Feldman calling himself Corey Haim, “I made
Lucas,” to Sean Astin’s disappearance, to
Martha Plimpton’s explanation of why she
didn’t like Feldman, this commentary is just as
hysterical as the movie, and sometimes more
so. The
funniest of the bunch, then and now, is Jeff
Cohen, who played Chunk in the movie.
A great tidbit of his was the way he
won his high school student presidency
race—“Vote Chunk for President.”
Someone that funny would be bound to
end up exactly where Cohen did: he’s an
attorney.
Even more good came from the
get-together. Each “Goonie kid” is in discussions to return for The
Goonies II, a project currently in
development and to be produced by Donner
himself.
Other Goonies goodies
include deleted scenes (watch the commentary
before you watch these), the trailer, a list
of the cast and crew, the original Goonie
documentary, and the Cyndi Lauper 1985 music
video “Goonies R Good Enough.”
It’s so awful it hurts, but it’s
great for so many other reasons.
The DVD, and its bridging of my
childhood time to my up here time, easily
earns a HUGE.
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