Posts Tagged ‘Lea Thompson’

BRATS: 2 ½ STARS. “Andrew McCarthy’s hidden treasure of self-discovery.”

LOGLNE: The documentary “Brats” skims across the surface of 1980s popular culture to present a breezy portrait of a group of very famous young actors who came-of-age while appearing in coming-of-age films. Labelled “The Brat Pack” in a 1985 New York Magazine cover story, they appeared, in various combinations, in decade defining films like “Pretty in Pink,” “16 Candles” and “St. Elmo’s Fire.” In firsthand interviews with fellow Brat Pack members, director Andrew McCarthy looks back at the effects of youthful stardom, and being labelled a brat in the press.

CAST: Andrew McCarthy, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Timothy Hutton, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Lea Thompson, Jon Cryer, Lauren Shuler Donner, Howard Deutch, David Blum, and in archival footage, Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson.

REVIEW: There’s an old saying that sums up McCarthy’s approach to “Brats”: “Within every challenge lies the hidden treasure of self-discovery.”

As director and host, he spends a great deal of the film, pushing the idea that being labeled, at a young age, the Brat Pack, has been limiting to the careers of all the actors involved. Directors, producers and studios, he asserts, didn’t take them seriously and wouldn’t hire them to appear in anything other than films aimed at teenagers.

For McCarthy, at the film’s onset at least, the premise appears to be an existential crisis. The subsequent interviews, with various pop culture experts like Malcolm Gladwell, and McCarthy’s fellow Brat Packers, feel like therapy for the actor; a way to understand his complicated relationship with a cultural moment that had a profound personal impact on his life.

For the most part, the interviews are interesting. Rob Lowe (who reminds McCarthy that they had a pretty good time at the height of Brat Mania) and Demi Moore (who uses words like “againstness” in her passionate replies of McCarthy’s questions) are the stand-outs, but all the conversations have a warmth born out of old friends reminiscing about a shared experience. There’s also a heaping helping of nostalgia—loads of great 80s hair, fashions and film clips—but the strongest whiff of wistfulness comes from McCarthy himself and his conflicted feelings regarding how his career intersected with the public and professional opinion of the Brat Pack.

“Brats” does become repetitive as McCarthy rehashes the same point over-and-over again but beyond the film’s self-indulgence comes a hidden treasure of self-discovery. I don’t know if McCarthy will ever truly accept how his life was shaped by his Brat Pack association, but by the time the end credits roll, he at least seems to realize that the advantages of being a Brat Packer far outshone the burden.

LEFT BEHIND: 2 STARS. “much of the action is on board a plane, but this isn’t ‘Con Air.’”

“Left Behind” stars Nicolas Cage and sets much of the action on board a plane, but make no mistake, this isn’t “Con Air.” Instead of raising hell, Cage is playing it pious in a remake of a Kirk Cameron movie about the rapture.

Cage is Rayford Steele, husband, father, pilot and sinner. The day his daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson) comes to visit he leaves on a cross-country flight to be with his mistress, flight attendant Hattie (Nicky Whelan). On board are investigative reporter Buck Williams (Chad Michael Murray) and a group of passengers who get the shock of their lives when some of their seatmates seemingly disappear, leaving behind only their clothes. The phenomenon has caused turmoil on ground level as well. Millions of people have vaporized; cars crash randomly, their drivers suddenly gone and chaos reigns. “If this is a weapon, it’s not from this planet!” Chloe struggles to comprehend what has happened, find her brother and mother (Lea Thompson) and try and help her father land his plane. Meanwhile in air Steele tries to calm his hysterical passengers and Buck tries to figure what the hell is going on. Or maybe that should be what in God’s name is going on.

Based on a popular book series about the rapture by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, “Left Behind” is a mainstream reboot of a successful string of Christian movies. Directed by Vic Armstrong, the legendary stunt man best known for the “Indiana Jones” movies, the new “Left Behind” has a distinct b-movie feel, with flimsy sets and bad dialogue (“Either I’m going crazy or the whole world is insane!”) but it does feature something rather remarkable—a subdued performance from Cage. Lately he’s been a practitioner of something he calls Nouveau Shamanic school of acting but here he has dialed it way down perhaps out of respect to the religious nature of the material, or perhaps he’s saving the wild stuff for “Con Air 2: This Time it’s Biblical.”