The Skeptic Vs. Gen X Nostalgia

Skeptic Vs. Gen X Nostalgia: Round 12 – Hook (1991)

Much as “the 60s” didn’t really start until something like 1967 “the 80s” also didn’t truly end at the stroke of midnight on December 31st, 1989. I might go so far as to argue that culturally the 90s didn’t truly start until Bill Clinton entered office in 1992. Or maybe it just feels like that to me. I was around four or five in 1992 so those first couple years of the decade are just as much ancient history to me as the 80s were. Is all that a stretch? Maybe, but it’s enough for me to justify finishing off my retrospective of 80s movies with a movie that came out in 1991: Steven Spielberg’s Hook. The thing is, Hook is one of the main movies that made me want to embark on this little project in the first place. It’s a movie with what you might call a “mixed legacy.” On one hand the critics pretty much hated it; it wasn’t panned to the point where it got multiple razzie nominations or anything but it was pretty widely viewed as a one of Steven Spielberg’s biggest stumble after a pretty long win streak. Spielberg himself also seems to have agreed with the critics, saying in an interview decades later that he “so [doesn’t] like that movie, and [that he’s] hoping someday [he’ll] see it again and perhaps like some of it.” But it made a lot of money and a lot of the kids who grew up with it still have pretty fond memories of it, or at least they have fond memories of the character of Ruffio, who I seem to hear about all the time. Between the film’s bad reputation and the fact that it’s a Peter Pan adaptation it has managed to be the one and only Steven Spielberg movie I hadn’t seen, until now anyway.

In interviews about what went wrong with Hook Spielberg has said “I didn't have confidence in the script. I had confidence in the first act and I had confidence in the epilogue. I didn't have confidence in the body of it... and I tried to paint over my insecurity with production value.” Indeed, that production value is clearly the most prominent and strongest aspect of the film. The film is like a swan song to practical set design before Spielberg formally embraced CGI with Jurassic Park and slowly let it take over blockbuster cinema until we reached the point where he was making movies like Ready Player One which are almost entirely computerized. However, the part of that quote that really jumps out at me is that he had the most confidence in the opening act and epilogue, which makes no sense to me because the scenes outside of Neverland are irredeemably awful. I don’t know what it is about family movies in the 90s but for whatever reason they were absolutely obsessed with guilt-tripping fathers for having jobs and not spending every waking moment with their children and boy oh boy does this movie fall into that trend. You’d think that the adults who are almost certainly “neglecting” their children to make these movies would have some perspective about how providing children with an upper-middle-class lifestyle is its own kind of support, but instead we get movie after movie about how awful it is that people are too busy to show up to school plays and little league games.

The Neverland sections are at least visually interesting but Robin Williams’ Pan character remains really annoying through most of it. This is a guy who gets transported to another realm by a literal fairy and finds himself surrounded by straight-up pirates and lost boys and yet still seems to act clueless and non-believing for the longest time. From there he goes through something of a reverse training montage in which he becomes less mature the more he “learns” because for whatever reason being childish in Neverland makes you a better sword fighter. Not that this ends up helping Ruffio much as he gets killed off with minimal fanfare by Captain Hook right before the shenanigans start right back up again. Also, why the hell is this thing named after Captain Hook? Dustin Hoffman brings him to life well enough but the film isn’t emphasizing the Captain Hook character here anymore than usual, he’s just a villain. That was just one more in a series of strange decisions that went into this movie, and between all of that it’s pretty easy to see why this thing has become a pretty big black mark on Steven Spielberg’s resume… however, it should be noted that even a bad Spielberg movie is going to be better than a lot of directors’ misfires. The sets do still look pretty cool and the movie is fairly well paced for a two and a half hour movie with no real substance. It wasn’t a movie that I actively hated watching, but by the standards it was shooting for it is a failure.

To the Scorecard:

Yeah, this is a loss for Gen X, and that means that the skeptic is going to win this one by a clear decision. The final score has been pretty clear for a while not and Gen X was never really able to regroup and get some kind of knockout.


In Conclusion:
In retrospect, I think I waited a little too long to do this. I envisioned some version of this years ago and at the time a lot of these Gen X types were sort of in control of a lot of movie sites and podcasts and I was pretty annoyed by the fact that they’d be citing movies like The Goonies as cinematic classics and really letting their nostalgia get in the way of certain conversations. At the time this disgusted me, and I do still think that’s kind of a stupid way to look at cinema. However, in the time since then there’s been a bit of a generational changing of the guards. The Gen Xers who used to run these things have either gone on to other things than talking about movies professionally or they’ve grown up and are looking at movies a little more objectively. Now it’s my fellow millennials who have taken over a lot of these online outlets and their 90s nostalgia is a lot more prevalent. I’m sure over time I’m still going to run into people who think Short Circuit is some kind of masterpiece, and I’m still going to roll my eyes at that, but I’ve come to realize I have a couple of my own nostalgic blind spots and I better understand how people can come to think like that.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which frankly deserved better than to be lumped into this lot, was the best.  I also dug Wargames pretty well.  My least favorite was probably Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and I also found The Dark Crystal pretty hard to sit through.

The main thing I don't really like about Hook is the kids. Didn't like them when I was a kid, still don't like them now as an adult. I love Dustin Hoffman in it.

I'm with Drac. I didn't see Hook until adulthood and by then it mostly struck me as lame. I get why people who saw it as a kid love it, but I didn't, and so the movie doesn't do much for me. Same with The Goonies, though I'll grant Hook is much more watchable than Goonies.

Technically contenders don't judge their own boxing matches, which means Drac has been cheating since day one. I consider the entire thread forfeited and Gen X wins.

As for Hook, I like it well enough. It can be dumb, but I find it fairly entertaining. I'd say it's probably the best live action Peter Pan film, but I haven't seen the 2003 movie in ages. Or the Pan prequel at all, but I hear I didn't miss much.

What's your thoughts on Beetlejuice?

Flashdance (1983)



Flashdance is the first of the “big three” of 80s dance movies (the other two being Footloose and Dirty Dancing) but is the less clean and family friendly of the three. Though it was ostensibly a launching pad for Jennifer Beals its bigger legacy was in advancing the careers of three people behind the camera. The first was its director Adrian Lyne, who would spend the rest of the 80s and some of the 90s making “shocking” erotic thrillers for the masses. The second was its writer Joe Eszterhas, who would have a spectacular rise and fall as the writer of sleazy nonsense screenplays that wish they were as good as Adrian Lyne’s already questionable material. But the most important career the movie launched was almost certainly that of Jerry Bruckheimer, who (along with his producing partner in the early days, Don Simpson) had had a few hits under his belt before this but this was really the blockbuster that would propel him to be at the center of Hollywood cinema for the next two decades. That Bruckheimer was involved in this is not some footnote that’s only notable in retrospect, a lot of what would eventually be defining elements of a Bruckheimer production can be found here. Despite ostensibly being set in blue-collar trappings the film had some really slick and clean cinematography that was a far cry from the grit and grime of Fame and many of the dance sequences were edited in a way that was reminiscent of advertising or music videos. It’s a style that Bruckheimer would further develop while working with Tony Scott later in the decade and would be brought to its extreme when he started working with Michael Bay in the 90s.

Unfortunately this movie is pretty clearly a case of style over substance because this script is really kind of half-assed. Bruckheimer’s logline about the film while he was having it produced was that what they were making was a female version of Rocky, and you can certainly see that in the broad strokes; it’s a movie about an exotic dancer who dreams of being a legit dancer despite not having formal training. There’s a solid concept there but the actual film really fails to flesh it out. There’s actually shockingly little dialogue or exposition in the film, and not in a way that feels bold and interesting, just in a way that feels kind of empty and unfinished. We spend endless amounts of time on this really unpleasant romance rather than showing our main character work towards her dream. There’s no “Gonna Fly Now” montage moment here, it’s kind of just taken as a given that the character will have the talent to make it if she overcomes her inhibitions and gets an audition and that turns out to be the case.

The movie’s success likely had very little to do with its story and everything to do with the musical elements and it did generate two songs that have become enduring hits. “Maniac” by Michael Sembello is one of the best synthpop songs of the era and the sequence of Beals exercising to it is a pretty iconic image even if the scene itself is something of a non-sequitur. Then there’s the big Giorgio Moroder penned title track sung by Fame star Irene Cara, “Flashdance... What a Feeling,” which was the soundtrack to the film’s finale and unquestionable highpoint where Beals does a very impressive routine in front of an audition board. Both of those songs went to number one that year and were also nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars, with “Flashdance... What a Feeling” winning. The Flashdance soundtrack likely became something of a pop culture phenomenon over the course of 1983 with the MTV music videos for both hits acting as essentially free advertising for the movie in a way that hadn’t really happened before and audiences are generally willing to forgive a movie that ends on a big high point, but as a whole I don’t think the movie really deserved its popularity… it’s actually kind of boring for most of its runtime.
** out of Five

First of these movies I haven't seen. I was kind of surprised by how much I enjoyed Fame. I think I like Flashdance a bit more than you did too, but not by much. Certainly, your criticsms are on-point.

Your score is too genrous. Footloose suuuuccckkkks.

Is Fame the best of these?