Buried Treasure
Jun. 13th, 2004 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyspriteThis may come as a surprise to some of my devoted fans and readers, but... I'm a geek. I always have been, and I always will be, and this bothers me a lot less than it used to. I've come to embrace my geekiness, mostly by surrounding myself with other embraceable geeks, but for a long time I was a lonely, nerdy kid.
It would have been easier to survive if I could have surrounded myself with other lonely nerdy kids, but I didn't quite know where to find any, so I made do with lonely nerdy fictional kids. Books were my escape of choice, but every once in a while I would discover a movie that resonated with my little geeky Mary-Sue heart - usually, a movie in which some lonely nerdy kid or kids would triumph over the powers of darkness and trendiness by virtue of their wits, pluck, and special inner powers. There weren't many of them, but the few I found I watched until I had them memorized - and of the ones I found, 'The Goonies' was probably my favorite. By the time I reached junior high, I knew the characters better than my own family, and I daydreamed constantly about joining up and fitting in with the gang of loser kids, hunting pirate treasure and outsmarting villainous adults and solving riddles with my spectacular Gifted Kid brain. And somewhere shortly after that, I found my own gang of loser kids to fit in with, and my copy of the movie was taped over, and I can't remember the last time I saw it.
So when I noticed it was on tonight I figured it was worth watching, just for nostalgia value if nothing else. Headbands, shag haircuts, Cyndi Lauper music, and a bare scraping of plot may be less than I need now to amuse me, but it would be nice to wallow in my nerdy childhood without having to actually relive any of it. Usually, this is a bad idea. Books are never as good as they used to be, stories are never as entertaining, acting is never as talented.... but somehow, this was still fun. The plot holes are bigger than I remembered, and the characters just don't seem quite as real now that I can recognize the stereotypes, but it was still extraordinarily fun. I couldn't help but wonder where the actors had vanished to, though, with the exception of Corey Feldman. There was the Cute Kid, and the Chubby Kid, and the Asian Kid, none of whom I recognized, and the one main character with big sad eyes and an earnest round face.... it wasn't until he started making one of the movie's token Inspirational Pleas that I was clobbered over the head with the sudden realization that I was watching a much younger version of my favorite hobbit.
Sean Astin, the living embodiment of painful earnestness since 1985. Yeesh.
So. Pirates, plucky nerd kids, wacky villains, and proto-hobbits. I can definitely think of worse ways to have spent my evening.....
It would have been easier to survive if I could have surrounded myself with other lonely nerdy kids, but I didn't quite know where to find any, so I made do with lonely nerdy fictional kids. Books were my escape of choice, but every once in a while I would discover a movie that resonated with my little geeky Mary-Sue heart - usually, a movie in which some lonely nerdy kid or kids would triumph over the powers of darkness and trendiness by virtue of their wits, pluck, and special inner powers. There weren't many of them, but the few I found I watched until I had them memorized - and of the ones I found, 'The Goonies' was probably my favorite. By the time I reached junior high, I knew the characters better than my own family, and I daydreamed constantly about joining up and fitting in with the gang of loser kids, hunting pirate treasure and outsmarting villainous adults and solving riddles with my spectacular Gifted Kid brain. And somewhere shortly after that, I found my own gang of loser kids to fit in with, and my copy of the movie was taped over, and I can't remember the last time I saw it.
So when I noticed it was on tonight I figured it was worth watching, just for nostalgia value if nothing else. Headbands, shag haircuts, Cyndi Lauper music, and a bare scraping of plot may be less than I need now to amuse me, but it would be nice to wallow in my nerdy childhood without having to actually relive any of it. Usually, this is a bad idea. Books are never as good as they used to be, stories are never as entertaining, acting is never as talented.... but somehow, this was still fun. The plot holes are bigger than I remembered, and the characters just don't seem quite as real now that I can recognize the stereotypes, but it was still extraordinarily fun. I couldn't help but wonder where the actors had vanished to, though, with the exception of Corey Feldman. There was the Cute Kid, and the Chubby Kid, and the Asian Kid, none of whom I recognized, and the one main character with big sad eyes and an earnest round face.... it wasn't until he started making one of the movie's token Inspirational Pleas that I was clobbered over the head with the sudden realization that I was watching a much younger version of my favorite hobbit.
Sean Astin, the living embodiment of painful earnestness since 1985. Yeesh.
So. Pirates, plucky nerd kids, wacky villains, and proto-hobbits. I can definitely think of worse ways to have spent my evening.....
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Re: Another alumnus.
Date: 2004-06-13 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 07:38 pm (UTC)::sigh:: ::happy sigh:: That was great movie.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-14 03:27 am (UTC)Oh, you don't know how happy this line made me. (Well, ok, you do, because you love The Goonies, which I loved so much when I was 10 I'm afraid to re-watch it now for the reasons you described.)
Second Generation
Date: 2004-06-15 07:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 03:12 pm (UTC)