Well I can’t believe I just teared up while a Classic Eighties Movie Slow Clap^TM was going on in the background

It somehow felt like it was finally time for me to watch this – a recent Channel 4 thing about the best family films brought it to the surface, and I’ve been noticing a lot of people on Facebook listing it as a fave – but within minutes I was questioning if that was a good idea. There’s an old me that would have been far from impressed with this movie for the exact same reason the me of now ultimately fell for it today. This is guilty of just about every cliché in the book of late-80s and early-90s cinema. It pulls every faux-pas that practically threatened to destroy the artform during that period. But, somehow, it works.

It didn’t make me laugh at loud much at all compared to some. But there’s just something else under it all – perhaps highlighted by the Dark Moment (let’s use the proper template terms here, it couldn’t be more by the book I swear) … which is actually really dark, I mean for a movie that seems so silly and light from the outside that crash is nasty – it’s perhaps the fact that it does follow the old screenplay paradigms and wot-not so to the letter. I don’t know. All I know is, I wasn’t bored, I laughed a little, and I was embarrassingly moved by those final moments.

Tags: Nineties, race, snow, sport

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 6:17 am and is filed under 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.