Last night, my wife and I watched two films. Hmmm…can’t seem to get the word “Last” to get in-line with the others.
Man, Netflix Instant Queue is the bomb. Queue just seems to be one of those words I always have to look up to see how it is spelled. I’d be screwed if I got this word in a spelling bee.
The Blockbuster down the street is having a fire sale…everything goes including the DVD stands. The Blockbusterosauras–a dinosaur decimated by the digital, both DVD and streaming. Beware that the fruits of success are not also the next seasons’ seeds of failure. Companies, like people, must change and adapt, but not lose what originally made them a success. A lesson also true about relationships.
The films we watched were both bittersweet tales of friendships and romances forged in the crucible of college of a group of friends, which are now fragmented in the realities of adult life. The first, St. Elmo’s Fire, had enough of the cast from the Breakfast Club in it to seem it was the Breakfast Club after college. Maybe the Lunch Club? The friendships fray and ultimately are reaffirmed with new realities and expectations and understandings.
The second film was The Big Chill, which is the story of 1960/early 1970 college friends, who have a somber yet sweet reunion of sorts after the suicide and funeral of one of their classmates who was in their close-knit circle. I liked this film a lot in that it gave more time between college and adult life, allowing a more substantial trajectory of time to be developed character-wise. St. Elmo’s Fire just seemed to be too soon to reflect on new realities.
Both films shared the theme of how do you change in maturity and circumstance, without losing who you were and what you once had? What do you hold onto, and by holding onto it too lightly or too heavily, do you risk either losing it or suffocating it. Sexual encounters, many of them secretive, play a role in bringing forth the emotional longings of the people in the group. Love is mingled with Lust, in varying alchemies, in the experiences.
The New York Times hosted an essay contest in 2008 called Modern Love, which was a confessional of sorts where college students wrote and reflected on what they thought love was in the 21st century. Poignant, painful, funny, and perhaps a tad too personal in some cases. Worth the read.