St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

As Good As It Gets

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

I enjoyed this movie when it was released I enjoy it even more now for different reasons. In my teens it was fascinating and focused on decisions I would be making in a few years. In my 40s there's a poignant melancholy as I remember very similar situations faced by my own group of hometown friends. All of the individual components of the film are solid with my only negative criticism being the slightly overblown intensity of some of the relationships. It's all very much a 6 out of 10 experience, but what elevates to a 7 for me is one particular scene that still resonates powerfully... In the film the characters have a regular table at their favourite bar. The last scene of the movie sees them standing outside the bar looking at a younger crowd at 'their' table. The characters linger for only a moment as they explain they each have various reasons for not going for a beer. I had exactly this experience the week before I left home to work overseas and start my career. This scene punches me hard, I miss those days and 'our' table in that bar

....that this was a silly film with dated jokes. But there were a few moral principles in this flick that the '80's generation needed to listen to and view as acted out. They should've filmed the x rated adventures of the '80's brat pack out on the streets of L.A. during this time period and made an unrated documentary for today's youth 30 plus years later, and we could've gotten more value out of that. Too much short sighted planning in the '80's,. so an opportunity lost. Assuming the brat pack wasn't all media hype, which I suspect. It's interesting which careers took off and lasted a lifetime. What happened to Demi's career? What a drag it is growing old, as Mick said. Mare's career held up. Other than Demi, everyone else became less than legendary for a film that some people had way too much fondness for. Was it....the idea of having seven close friends with mixed gender secret romance attraction that people liked? Or is this a chick flick with complicated relationships that women liked. I don't see men defending it. If the jokes had been better, it could've held up like 16 candles. I thought Demi looked very soft and fluffy in this film. Way too much Breakfast Club influence here. But Andie getting a wet kiss at the end, after all that mindless teasing, was justice.

Seven friends have just finished university and are starting out in their careers. They are having to come to terms with careers, having to be more responsible, to fend for themselves and with all the decisions and issues life throws at them. Some are coping better than others and some aren't coping at all.The central plot alone should make this an interesting movie. The whole student-to-responsible adult transition genre is always a sure hit with people going through that phase and people wanting to relive that phase. However, St. Elmo's Fire doesn't examine this very well - quite dull at times and quite superficial.This isn't helped by the characters. Most of them are quite stereotypical and aren't that likable or are, at best, dull. Ally Sheedy and Mare Winningham's characters would be the exceptions but even they are hardly people you can really get behind. On the upside, some of the sub-plots are reasonably interesting and the chemistry between the main stars is good. There is a decent feeling of camaraderie, which helps the nostalgia vibe the movie was setting out to achieve.The casting helps too. This was the movie that coined the term "The Brat Pack", referring to the host of young up-and-coming actors and actresses that were taking Hollywood by storm. Many of them had worked together in The Breakfast Club, helping the chemistry. Not that the performances are necessarily great, individually, but together they work well.Not great, but it'll do.

Unfortunately this was a movie made for my generation, and unlike a fine wine which may get better with age, this was more like an old can of "New Coke" that has only degraded even further with time. After having sat through the torturous experience in 1985 and paying for the original privilege of watching this abomination back in the good old days, I thought I would revisit it in the year of our lord 2014 to see if time and experience had sharpened my insight and appreciation of this pretentious stink bomb. Sorry but the answer is now as it was then "no". It was painfully, self-absorbed tripe then and is even more difficult to watch now. Kind of like your friend reminding you years later about how you made a schmuck of yourself at a party years ago. Forget about explaining the plot, it's virtually non-existent and more or less just contrived motifs to showcase forced bad acting and interactions that are supposed to be meaningful and poignant but are really just forced shallow overacting. Previous generations had Bogart, Brando, Dean, Newman, and McQueen. Sadly my generation had...these people. In all fairness the blame can't be laid entirely at the feet of this group of too much stardom, too soon brat packers; most of them were still in their early twenties and to give them the benefit of the doubt, may have still been learning their craft even though they were being paid handsomely for the lessons. Much of the blame should probably also go to the two writers and the director; two of whom were Joel Schumacher. The intention here appears to mostly have been about exploiting these seven young rising stars in a bad forced combination similar to watching a terrible 80's musical super group. Bad musical synth pop overlays, also very 80's, filling the scenes out also didn't help. Do real people really behave in such shallow, self-indulgent, and boring histrionics? No, not really. If you've ever gone to Times Square NYC and stood next to a cardboard cutout of a celebrity, then you get the gist of this ensemble of predictable now very dated 80's stereotypes; the hypocritical career climber politico (Judd Nelson), the self-destructive, emotionally vacant, druggie (both Lowe and Moore), the overage, good girl, virgin (something out of the '40's), and on and on. If buckets of forced crying, laughing, pathos, yelling, etc., but nothing emotionally substantial for the viewer to identify with in any real way is your cup of tea then this may be your type of film. Believe it or not at the time I worked with a guy who loved this movie. I couldn't even muster a comeback to that statement beyond "Really?!!". Whenever I may get nostalgic for the 80's I need only channel this movie to cure myself of that. Hard to watch in the original, almost painfully masochistic to watch now. Glad to see that many of these people, including Joel Schumacher, went on to do much better work than this, but hey, the studio was paying and the rest was on the house.