I didn’t watch The Goonies as a kid and agree it has not aged well and is often annoying. But I found myself falling in love with the town (Astoria Oregon?) and wanting to live there.
Paddington 2 (2017). It’s not often the critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes gives a movie a score of 99%, but this one did. A very sweet and charming movie that isn’t just for kids, but also for anyone looking for a light-hearted change of pace. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s live-action, except for Paddington Bear himself who was created with fantastic modern computer animation. On-screen performers include Hugh Grant, Hugh Bonneville, and Brendan Gleeson.
The Return of the Pink Panther (1975). I’ve always loved Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau, and this one is worth mentioning because IMHO it’s the best of the lot by far. It was also just the second Panther film for Peter Sellers, after A Shot in the Dark. Sadly, because of some issue regarding distribution rights, this gem is omitted from many box-set collections.
And The Pink Panther.
Right, I keep forgetting about that early one. Sellers declined to be in the immediate sequel to Shot in the Dark, Inspector Clouseau, so they got Alan Arkin instead, but Sellers was back 7 years later in The Return of, in his best Clouseau ever.
Oppenheimer We saw it in iMax in July … except that the theater lost power about halfway through and we had to bail. So we just re-watched, on Amazon Prime.
I have to say that I liked it but didn’t love it. I liked how the 3 story lines, at 3 different points in time, were braided together in the climax. (And thank you, Christopher Nolan, for doing 1 in b&w to help us keep it straight).
But even though he will undoubtedly get a Best Actor nom and could very well win, I thought Cillian Murphy’s performance was annoyingly one-note. Just kind of slack-jawed and monotone.
But as a Berkeley grad it was fun seeing my alma mater on screen, and the eponyms for some of its buildings.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Wasn’t gonna mention this because I’m sure it’s been reviewed here countless times, but I just felt a hankering to see it again so I just did earlier today. It just reinforced my opinion that it’s Wes Anderson’s best film to date. It doesn’t lack for idiosyncrasies and inexplicable little quirks – it is, after all, Wes Anderson – but it tells a coherent and emotionally moving story. Unlike Asteroid City, which, as much as I hate to say it, is too much quirk and too little story.
We watched Annie, the 1982 musical with Carol Burnett and Tim Curry.
I have childhood feelings about this movie and while watching it I did feel those old nostalgia stirrings. It held up pretty well minus some unfortunate stereotyping of Indian people (or Middle Eastern people, hard to say because the film clearly didn’t care about the distinction.) I feel like with old movies you can’t swing a cat without running into some horrible racial stereotype.
FDR is in it, for some reason. I guess we owe the New Deal to an orphan.
I enjoyed a lot of the songs. My kid was into it until he fell asleep.
Oh yeah, I’d love to see it again too.
It’s even more interesting than that. It was 100% on Rotten Tomatoes for a while. They break ties in terms of what’s the best by counting the number of votes. Citizen Kane was the only movie with more votes that was 100%. So for a while they said that Paddington 2 was the second best movie of all time by their standards. Then someone dug through reviews that Citizen Kane got when it was released and found one where the reviewer didn’t like it much. So then they said that Paddington 2 was the best movie of all time by their standards. Then someone wrote a review of Paddington 2 in which they disliked it, so it went back to being the second best of all times by their standards. So, in any case, Paddington 2 is now considered by some standards one of the best movies of all time.
Baby Boom, 1987, Diane Keaton. From a feminist point of view, poisonous. My husband thought it was “sweet”.
It was the very first review in this thread, indeed. Nearly ten years ago.
Is that the one with the (unscripted) fart in lift/elevator?
This came out when my son was the target age. He loved it! I enjoyed watching it also. A while back, I watched it with two of my grandkids who were around 4 and 5 at the time. They were enthralled with the whole movie. Towards the end of the movie when the kids make the “discovery”, my grandson turned to me and said, “I think I just peed a little”. 
Did anyone watch Finding Ohana, a sort of “in the same spirit” movie as Goonies? Came out in 2021 and actually even had Ke Huy Quan in it, kind of his return to movies just before Everything, Everywhere.
The directors were talking to him before the movie was in production about the movie and they said to him that their movie was somewhat similar to Goonies. He had to tell them, “Well, uh, I’m actually in that movie,” and when they realized who he was, they invited him to be in theirs.
My family watched Finding 'Ohana. It’s a good, but not great, family movie with a basic kids’ adventure where they each learn something and grow up a little. ('Ohana is Hawaiian for extended family. The movie title is apt.) I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it, but if you’ve got kids 10-15 years old, it’s worth its time.
I’ve never seen Goonies nor know anything about it, so I can’t compare.
Reasonably entertaining HK Martial Arts period fantasy produced and written by Tsui Hark, directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, starring no one I’ve ever heard of and slathered with wild, if never very convincing CG. Derivative in terms of story (the hunt for a mystical super weapon), but well-paced, packed with action, featuring a strong female lead and a trio of psychedelic aliens battling amongst themselves at the climax. Amazingly, the usual “comic” doofus character that often taints films like this was absent. Probably not so easy to follow for those unversed in the genre/style.
I also watched the 2020 follow-up which has the exact same title. An entirely different cast and crew is involved, though the story is loosely linked to the first film. Heavy-handed, clumsily told and not as good overall except for the battle with the giant snake and maybe a couple other bits.
Take Care of Maya (2023). This is a documentary, but it’s as deeply moving as any drama – a well crafted, intensely personal story of one family’s struggle against medical and legal bureaucracies that threaten to permanently take their child away. The completeness of the material they gathered for this film is incredible, and is at least partly due to the family’s careful documentation and recording of events as they happened.
Maya is 9 years old at the start of the story, and suffers from a rare neurological disorder called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). Unable to get relief from conventional treatments, the family took her to a clinic in Mexico which gave her massive doses of ketamine that resulted in a considerable improvement.
The nightmare begins some time later when Maya is taken to the ER at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. One suspicious admitting doctor in particular, assisted by a representative of the privatized child protection agency spun off from Florida’s Department of Children and Families, deems that Maya has been abused, that she doesn’t have CRPS, and that her mother is mentally ill.
Maya is kept in the hospital for more than three months, against her will and against the wishes of her parents, with strict rules governing parental contact. When Maya’s mother begs the judge in court to let her visit her daughter and at least give her a hug, the judge denies the request. Devastated by months of despair and this latest setback, the mother returns home and takes her own life.
A significant element of the story is that when a reporter published an account of the events, hundreds of other families came forward with their own stories of government and medical bureaucracies separating them from their children.
Near the end of the film, dad, now struggling as a single father with two children, decides he has enough evidence to sue the hospital. Faced with overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing and malpractice, the hospital hires the biggest legal guns they can find and successfully prevents the case from coming to trial, year after year for something like five years. As the film ends, we’re informed that an appeals court has finally ruled that the trial can go ahead, but as the film wrapped the trial was still in the future.
But this is a true story, and the trial concluded last fall. You can see excerpts from the jury’s verdict at the link below (click on the speaker icon near the bottom to enable audio). Contrary to the incorrect text in the one-box, the family was awarded $261 million in damages, including $50 million in punitive damages. The hospital says they will appeal.
I also saw The Holdovers (2023) just a few days ago, and it was very good. Even my son, who is a teenage Marvel/Star Wars fanboy genuinely enjoyed it. It’s well acted, realistic, with moments of anger, sadness, and humor, with characters that you can feel connected to.
The only quibble I had was regarding the Cherries Jubilee. No way a restaurant in 1970 refuses to sell Cherries Jubilee to a teenager, or sell it to a table of 3 because there’s a teenager who will share it. On the plus side, the Mrs. remembered that we had vanilla ice cream AND frozen cherries, so we all had Jubilee after the movie. It’s really quite a nice treat.
Ugh. I hate that movie.
Thanks, I was wondering if I was overreacting. I hated it too!