First time I watched it I loved it. But I don't think it - or me - has aged so well.
Of course, Meg Tilly was always easy to watch.
First time I watched it I loved it. But I don't think it - or me - has aged so well.
Of course, Meg Tilly was always easy to watch.
When it was first released, I thought the movie was embarrassing, though I did envy the wealthy lifestyle of the characters. At this point, though, it’s full on THE BIG CRINGE.
I always considered The Big Chill as simply another ugly art.
My spouse loves that movie. But she is one who loves the Beverly Hill Housewives too, so there you go. I still love her though 🙂.
A long article about a movie I don’t give two hoots about not or then. Why?
If you are really following a generation and not just a close survey then the oldest Gen Z in 24 and the youngest boomer is 60. So I think the boomers are about the same. in size. Boomers certainly are making far more money. And they are far more likely to be running things. The wealth available to Millennials (Gen Y) and Gen Z is so large that many of them simply don’t work and don’t save. So they don’t have the same affect. Other than that there is a profound shortage of workers. And there seems to be a lack of direction, ethics, and understanding about the real human condition. Boomers have all the money but they are giving it to their kids as they die off. Which does not help their kids any. A few generations from now there will be a group sifting through the artifacts left behind by the boomers. And they will wonder why our generation was not able to pass along the wealth.
More like the “Big Bore”. Whining Yuppies - yechh.
They’ll never know the leverage and utility of the three-martini lunch.
scrtatchin my head over the point of this story...I kept thinking as I read, is this going somewhere ?
Boomers have retired and are now burning thru their Millennial & Gen Z kids’s inheritance.
Too bad, so sad.
“Boomers, Fortune tells us, dominated the workplace until 2011.”
Coincidently 2011/2012 was also approximately the time period when this country really started going to hell.
Reminds me of the TV show “Friends”. Couldn’t stand that crap.
“At first Nick’s rebuke to his friends seemed needlessly cruel, but I had to put it in the context of a group of adults on the first sunlit uplands of middle age using a friend’s suicide as an opportunity to act like they were twenty again, empowered by the Pill and college draft exemptions to imagine that they were going to remake the world and not the other way around.”
What great writing by Mark! And what profound observation is the phrase “empowered by the Pill and college draft exemptions”!
I remember those days.
wasn’t a big fan of the movie...there was a sense of intellectual snobbery and elitism in all the characters.
I know I've seen this film once, probably as a teenager shortly after it hit the video rental market. I don't remember much about it other than my parents and their Boomer friends absolutely loved it. And of course the soundtrack was a massive hit.
This line from the film near the end of the article stuck with me: "A long time ago we knew each other for a short period..."
How true this is. Looking back on high school, or college, I only knew those people for four years. It seemed like an eternity but it was only four years. And I don't know anything about them today, nor they me (other than the occasional Facebook post).
This was around the time that the term "yuppie" was coined (young urban professional) and this smarmy, self-important little group personified exactly what yuppies were.
Spending the weekend in a huge mansion together, driving around in Porsches, and fretting about the "changes" in their lives, it was at times insufferable. Even the movie soundtrack sounded like a curated playlist of the most overwrought and overplayed 1960s era tunes.
However, the movie did help define a turning point of our culture back then. By the mid 1980s, the young generation of the 1960s had fully transformed from the anti-establishment hippies we once thought they were to the more materialistic and wealth-accumulating generation we saw during the "go-go 80s".
It was also a time when the Democrat party began abandoning their base of lunchpail blue-collar working men and started becoming the party of the educated "professional" class, who look down on everybody else. Yuppies.
Decades later, the transition is complete. The "liberals" of the 1960s are now the establishment. With total control of academia, entertainment, and the media, they will happily put their jackboots on the necks of those who question authority or dare espouse any kind of traditional values.
Another Hollywood fever dream about Boomers. Not one Boomer I know has a life even remotely connected to anything in this movie. But great soundtrack.
The movie “The Big Chill” served as an indirect inspiration for my college housemates and me. It motivated us to embark on a class project aimed at writing a 501(c)(3) business plan. Our goal was to purchase our rented house, secure a low-interest loan, and establish a student housing organization.
Three and a half decades later, we have grown apart, some relationships even at the point of disdain, but the organization we started still exists, and has added a half dozen houses.