![]() He needs to quit dealing drugs and stop burying his problems with quaaludes, cocaine, and pot. William Hurt’s Nick, for instance, a character who seems to have strolled in from The Sun Also Rises (a Vietnam War wound left him impotent), had a perfectly good gig as a talk-radio shrink but left that in a crisis of meaning. These Boomers’ parents could have straightened them out in about five minutes, but Boomers are famously the generation that thought it could learn nothing from previous ones. The characters analyze themselves ceaselessly (to the point of videotaping interviews of themselves and one another) yet miss the most obvious things: Drug abuse, infidelity, and unrealistic expectations about life are poisoning them. When everyone announces they intend to stay at the house for the weekend, Close’s Sarah Cooper whines, “Where are we gonna put everybody?” (It’s a real house: five bedrooms, five baths, 7,300 square feet, not counting the guest house.)Īs funny, deeply felt, and expressive of its characters’ pain as the film is - and I’ve always loved it, since watching it many times on HBO at age 18 - today it’s fascinating for its obtuseness. They are a physician (Close) and her husband (Kline), the sneaker-store tycoon a TV star (Tom Berenger) a People-magazine writer (Jeff Goldblum) a rich attorney (Mary Kay Place) a drug dealer (William Hurt) and a housewife (JoBeth Williams) whose husband is a well-off ad executive. So his old college friends from the University of Michigan (class of approximately 1971) gather at the same house to mourn him for the weekend. To recap the action: A handsome n’er-do-well staying in his friends’ gigantic Southern plantation-style summer house with his hot younger girlfriend kills himself by slitting his wrists. (It’s available on TCM’s app through April 10.) Today, though, it’s centrally and conspicuously about one thing: the sound of entitled Boomers whining. When it appeared, The Big Chill seemed to be about many things: love, sex, friendship, drugs, nostalgia, and leftover Sixties ideals. It’s amusing to note that this movie about how yippies turned yuppies (Kevin Kline’s Harold, the host of the gathering, has gotten rich by opening a chain of “Running Dog” sneaker stores) was itself an element in a synergistic corporate-branding strategy. Boomer audiences absolutely adored it and made the soundtrack a huge hit as well. The Big Chill was a major cinematic event in 1983, earning $56 million at the box office (about $150 million today) and getting Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, plus Best Supporting Actress (Glenn Close). Here we pause for a moment of silent reflection that a movie about people gathering to talk after a friend commits suicide was 1983’s idea of a breezy night out. So what were the big crowd-pleasers at the multiplex then? One of the two biggest box-office hits of the season was a James Bond picture ( Never Say Never Again). “Tonight,” they’d say, “we just want to be entertained.” 9.W hen the movie version of The Right Stuff flopped in the fall of 1983, Tom Wolfe, who wrote the book upon which it was based, noted that audience research indicated moviegoers intended to see the film because they knew it was important, but they said they didn’t want to see it right now. But she refused painkillers because they’d affect her singing voice. When Ann Wilson of Heart was prepping to duet for the song “Almost Paradise” for Footloose, she broke her wrist. "Nants ingonyama" apparently translates to “Here comes a lion.” And if you've seen this Disney classic-which is about to get a live-action remake-you certainly know what "Hakuna Matata" means. Titanic (1997)Ĭéline Dion told Billboard that when she was recording "My Heart Will Go On," her thoughts were: “Sing the song, then get the heck out of there." 7. We took out most of the synthesized stuff and replaced it with organs in the film version.” 6. For example, the guitars were dropped way down for the film because guitars weren’t a dominant instrument back then saxophones were. Maybe don’t rush to get the album if you love the film’s songs: According to executive producer Jimmy Ienner, “We needed different mixes for the film and record. ![]()
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