Movie Review: The Big Chill
Movie Review: The Big Chill
25 years ago a movie came out that was pretty pivotal for a generation. “The Big Chill” showed a gathering of former University of Michigan sudents 12 years later after they’d gone and been grown ups for a while, and grown apart. One of their number committed suicide, and for a weekend they had a little love-in to talk about how the world wasn’t like it was when they were in college, or maybe they weren’t the same people, or .. well.. maybe we’re all the same. Not gonna give a detailed summation of the plot, but will point out some interesting things about the time in which this movie emerged: - in 1983, we didn’t really have AIDS. There’s one place where one character is complaining about the dearth of good men to turn off her ticking clocks, and the fact that many of them are gay is just about that - nothing about disease, except another woman knows her husband will be faithful because “he is afraid of herpes” - in 1983, music was still all on records or tapes. There were no CDs yet. - I’d forgotten how chock full of Michigan references this movie was. UofM hats, t shirts, they watched Bo Schembechler messing up a game, talked about buying some land up in Saginaw, saw a show at Cobo. - In some ways I realized that I related to William Hurt’s character of a drug dealer who drove a beat up black porsche. But the part about this movie that I remember most was after this movie we had a new distinction called “yuppies”. Maybe this wasn’t the first yuppie movie that there was, but it is the earliest one i can think of without thinking really hard. These may not have been the quintessential yuppies, but they were more the prototypical yuppies. It’s arguable that the tv series “thirtysomething” was the sequel to this. Oh and the soundtrack still rocks.