Some Drivel On...The Goonies

Not long after the four misfit kids, billing themselves The Goonies, have set off in search of One Eyed Willie’s mystical riches, they enter the Lighthouse Lounge, a run down restaurant on the Oregon coast their treasure map indicates might provide access to the pirate’s booby-trapped cavern below. Of course, the Lighthouse Lounge has become temporary hideout for the Fratelli Family, a notorious band of criminals seen breaking one of their own out of prison as the movie starts, and so when the kids enter the establishment, the Fratellis have to act as if this is all normal, as if they are proprietors and the kids are customers. Needless to say, this doesn’t go so well, not just because hardened lawbreakers cannot really tamp down their malevolence but because a bunch of adolescents can’t really tamp down their inner impulse to be loud and over-inquisitive. Indeed, director Richard Donner mines great, if not truly cacophonous, comedy from this scene, transforming the dilapidated eatery into something more like a day care center, where low angled shots of the kids truly evince that frightening youthful sensation of unexpectedly being on your own and in over your head while high angled shots of the Fratellis, in particular Ma, brought to delightful life in Anne Ramsey’s aggravated air, suggests a substitute teacher who has had it up to here. The sequence ends with her leaning against the closed doors after she has chased out all the kids and saying, in a voice that Ramsey strips of any affect, like she’s about to collapse from exhaustion, “Kids suck.” 

That might have been the critical consensus too. “The Goonies” is frequently derided by grown-up critics as noisy. Leonard Maltin deemed it “exceptionally noisy” while Janet Maslin lamented for The New York Times how the Goonies traveled in “a noisy pack.” “The screenplay,” wrote Roger Ebert, “has all the kids talking all at once, all the time.” This is true and one of my most prominent takeaways in rewatching “The Goonies” for the first time in eons was how even when one character in the foreground was talking, often saying something important, another one, or two, or three, or four characters would be in the background chattering too. It has a cumulative effect of wearing you down. Donner himself cops to the noisiness. In a 2015 interview at Empire with Donner and the main cast for the film's 30th anniversary, when Josh Brolin notes how “The Goonies” sort of comes across like a movie kids might have made, Donner quips “A very loud one.“ No wonder I loved it so much as a kid: it was broadcasting on my frequency!

“’The Goonies,’” Maslin wrote, “doesn’t even pretend to court the grown-up set.” That’s true, if not something I was aware of back when I was younger and tended to catch bits and pieces of it here and there, again and again, at my best friend’s house on HBO. The movie was directed by Donner and written by Chris Columbus, but executive produced by Steven Spielberg who also gets A Story By credit. He was fresh off “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”, darker than its predecessor, which caused a hubbub with the Motion Picture Association of America and the proper rating for its graphic content, not as kid-friendly as its original PG rating might have made it seem. And though “The Goonies” has some bad language, as Ebert notes, it is nevertheless more kid-friendly in so much as it is kid-centric, making the youngins the star of the show, all little Indiana Jones’ in their own way, each one getting to save a portion of the day along the way. Even their reason for seeking out the treasure, to save the home of Mikey (Sean Astin) from demolition to make way for a golf course, is tinged with a childlike fear of having your whole life just suddenly implode.

This is why adults are the villains. The Fratellis, of course, certainly, but also Mr. Perkins (Curt Hanson), millionaire owner of the country club who wants to buy Mikey’s home to tear it down. Seeking Mikey’s parents to tie up some paperwork ends in an early scene, he condescendingly deems The Goonies “little guys” before asking “Is your mommy here?” You don’t even need to here the satiric response of Mikey’s brother, Brand (Josh Brolin), who might be older but revealingly without a driver’s license, like he still hasn’t graduated to true young adulthood, about his mom having gone out to buy them Pampers to glean the smug baby talk spin Hanson puts on his character’s words. That’s how The Goonies are viewed, of course, as nothing more than children, unimportant and always in the way. And yet, they are the only ones who take initiative, more than their mother, who has already mentally checked out, and more than their father, hardly glimpsed and talked about in such a way to suggest he has already surrendered to life’s cruelty. That initiative might be framed in storybook terms but fables have kernels of truth and I kept seeing parallels to modern child activists seeking to clean up the messes made by patronizing adults. Kids suck, but they’re our only hope. 

5 Favorite Movie Houses

On Saturday I found myself passing for roughly the ninetieth-dozen time this particular house in my Chicago neighborhood that I have affectionately come to call The Meet Me In St. Louis House. Admittedly the two homes are not precise comparisons. The house in my neighborhood is classified as Colonial architecture whereas the Smith household in the 1904-set “Meet Me In St. Louis” is Victorian, and yet I compare them because they both evoke such an old-timey feel. Whenever I jog past the house in my neighborhood, with its wraparound porch, white picket fence and illustriously turreted window, I imagine a horse and buggy pulling up to drop off its family. I imagine them entertaining guests at the grand piano in the parlor room. I imagine someone sitting on the porch in the warm afternoon sun, sipping iced tea and reading The Saturday Evening Post. I imagine Jean Harlow seeing me from an upstairs window seeing the house and sassing me for gawking. “What do ya staring at, funny boy? Haven’t ya ever seen a dame in a three story home before?” All together now…… Sigh.

This house is right down the block from me.

Where was I? Right. The house in my neighborhood. Passing it yet again on Saturday finally, as it inevitably had to at some point or another, got me to thinking. What are my favorite houses in the movies? And before we get to the requisite list, let me make one thing clear – this is Cinema Romantico. When it comes to movie houses, we are not going to be interested in, shall we say, futuristic houses. In Des Moines, where I grew up, there was a house in the countryside referred to by the locals as The Spaceship House – as in, a colossal raised home that looked like a spaceship. It would have been right at home in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”. But The Spaceship House compared to the house in my neighborhood isn’t the same ballpark. It isn’t the same league. It isn’t even the same sport. So you won’t find The Vandamm place in “North by Northwest” or or Tony Stark’s semi-bachelor pad in “Iron Man” or The Lake House in “The Lake House” or some such thing. No, these houses are more of the, shall we say, classical variety. These are the houses that hold court in the strange imagination of Cinema Romantico.

My 5 Favorite Movie Houses

5. The Goonies 

Despite barely being in the movie, the "Goonies" house drives the plot - they need the money to save it - and perhaps for that reason retains a popular place in pop culture imagination. But the house. Take "The Goonies" themselves out of the equation and just take the house at face value and, heck, it's not really that different from the Meet Me In St. Louis House in my neighborhood, is it? You can hear the whimsical creak in the floorboards, can't you? You can imagine looking out a second-story window and gazing at the ocean, can't you? You can hear the pitter-patter of rain on that porch awning, can't you, and smile?

4. Atonement 

Yes. I get it. I understand. I know what happens in this house in the movie, and that so much of it is awful and depressing and Debbie Downer Masterpiece Theater, etc., and I don’t care. You know why? BECAUSE IT’S THE TALLIS HOUSE, YOU AUTOMATONS!!!

3. Top Gun

To be sure, any house could probably look like The Greatest House On Earth with a little Tony Scott-ization. You know, he serves the orange sunset and the billowing drapes in the soft focus with the Berlin on the soundtrack but that's only half the battle. I mean, the house is parked under the palm trees and the Pacific Ocean is right over there and, well, heck this is the house on the list that I don't simply love but want to live in. Mansions really aren't my style. All I want is a seaside bungalow in California with my little front porch to drink my morning coffee while I gaze romantically at the water. (One great regret I have in life is the fact that my friend Jed and I on our infamous California road trip that found us in Miramar also found us in Oceanside, the location of this house. I had no idea. This was 14 years ago. You couldn’t just Google “Charlie’s House Filming Location” on your iPhone. C'est la vie.)

2. The Myth of Fingerprints

Originally erected all the way back in 1791, the Merrill-Poor House of Andover, Maine that served as the foremost location of my third favorite film of all time is a luxurious rental property with twenty-five rooms. Which, of course, is why the film never feels as if it runs out of space, why every room feels new and different, even as the film cleverly obscures the fact that the house is actually so freaking huge. And even if the characters and their feelings can often come across as cold, the house onscreen comes across so genuinely lived in, so astonishingly tangible, just like a childhood home, not simply a place but a thing ingrained in your psyche.

1. Meet Me In St. Louis

Well, if this wasn't the most obvious # 1 in the long history of Cinema Romantico's blatantly obvious # 1's. What can I blather about to summarize it? Just look.