talking film at marco's bash

Marco celebrated his birthday early, and the gang drove over to his house for Mom-cooked spaghetti and chicken. Conversation turned to film, and we reminisced about all those little fun films we liked in our feckless youth, trying to track whatever became of people like the cast of The Breakfast Club, Young Guns, and Flash Gordon. We recalled Heathers and Pump Up the Volume, Mighty Ducks, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, Warlock and Krull, St. Elmo’s Fire and Beauty & the Beast, Alive, Brazil, Oscar, and Clue, and all the lines of dialogue that made an impact on our impressionable creative minds. After the long conversation punctuated by spontaneous reenactments of key scenes, we watched a bit of David Lynch’s leather clad Dune extravaganza, a quaint film ahead of its time, and laughed at Sting’s fight scene (even the pathetic Jedi fight better than the Harkonnen, it seems).

We decided to spend one night in the near future watching old films, not the best ones or the ones that we liked critically, but those silly guilty pleasures that for the life of me I can barely admit to actually liking (perhaps for the soundtrack, or because they seemed to be so contextually relevant – you know how young people can be, assigning significance to the most inane of things, but doing it with such a potent belief and sincerity that it assumes a rather monstrous meaning).

Part of me is uneasy though. Some things are better left unvisited a second time around. Even the best films in my memory tend to falter upon a new viewing, as if part of me can never reclaim the wonder they once provoked. It has happened to me with E.T., Clash of the Titans, Gandhi, Merchant-Ivory movies, and a whole gamut of films from before.

Memory is like that.