The Goonies

1985, US, directed by Richard Donner

The Goonies seemed to be on television every other week for a while when I was growing up, and my brothers and I watched it more times than is entirely healthy through our teenage years. The rest of the Friday night audience at the Brattle Theatre had clearly done much the same thing as the screening had very much the feeling of a reunion with an old, perhaps slightly timeworn, friend. Of course, by 2010 standards The Goonies is positively quaint, with no CGI effects and camerawork that actually allows the viewer's eye to focus for a few seconds on each shot.

The ending is even more saccharine than I recalled, and a betrayal, in a sense, of all that has come before, as a group of youngsters navigate the world in the absence of their harried parents, but the young actors are generally charming (for a couple of them, this was a career highpoint), and the film is nicely paced, quickly establishing the coastal setting and getting down to business (the credits efficiently introduce us to the villains of the piece). It's interesting to note in passing that the film is exceptionally cynical about the kind of boosterish development associated with the Reagan years: the youngsters spring into action to prevent their blue collar hometown from being overrun by that worst of business insults, a golf course, and one of their (inadvertent) triumphs involves the creation of chaos at the tennis club.