Brats (2024)
June 20, 2024 7:15 PM - Subscribe
Centers on 1980s films starring the 'Brat Pack' and their profound impact on the young stars' lives.
Written and directed by Andrew McCarthy (Class, St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink, etc.) about the group of actors that were all about the same age who were in a number of films together in the eighties and formed a sort of clique. Features interviews with Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and others. Much of the film centers around an old New York Magazine article about the group.
Written and directed by Andrew McCarthy (Class, St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink, etc.) about the group of actors that were all about the same age who were in a number of films together in the eighties and formed a sort of clique. Features interviews with Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and others. Much of the film centers around an old New York Magazine article about the group.
Yeah, honestly, I got about 15-20 minutes in and then just skipped ahead to see what some of the main interviewees looked like these days. Someone on Bluesky said that McCarthy treated that New York article like his personal 9/11, which is about right.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:17 AM on June 21 [2 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:17 AM on June 21 [2 favorites]
I think the weirdness of this is how bitter McCarthy is when ... he's still steadily worked for the past 40 years as both an actor and a director. I'm sorry he didn't have the career he may have wanted, but it's not like the "Brat Pack" moniker doomed him to a lifetime of failure.
Contrast that to Ally Sheedy seemed relatively chill and reflective about the whole period. I wish she had made this documentary.
posted by edencosmic at 11:35 AM on June 21 [3 favorites]
Contrast that to Ally Sheedy seemed relatively chill and reflective about the whole period. I wish she had made this documentary.
posted by edencosmic at 11:35 AM on June 21 [3 favorites]
Um I read the linked original magazine article and there is ... one line about Andrew McCarthy. Sure its not a flattering line, but he plate of beansed that line into a whole documentary? Yikes.
posted by joelhunt at 1:53 PM on June 21 [4 favorites]
posted by joelhunt at 1:53 PM on June 21 [4 favorites]
So is there a better documentary about the Brat Pack?
I, too, am a creature of this time and would happily watch hours about them. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 8:06 PM on June 21
I, too, am a creature of this time and would happily watch hours about them. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 8:06 PM on June 21
I don't know if there is or not, wenestvedt. The beginning of this showed McCarthy literally just picking up his phone and setting up the interviews; probably no one else would have that easy access.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:43 AM on June 22 [1 favorite]
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:43 AM on June 22 [1 favorite]
But he had to get the numbers from other people and admits he hasn't talked to most of them in +30 years.
posted by archimago at 4:26 AM on June 24
posted by archimago at 4:26 AM on June 24
It's funny to me that people are watching Brats and only now realizing that McCarthy is annoying. I read his memoirs for work; the first half is fun in a dollar-store F Scott Fitzgerald, upper class WASP family capers in Long Island way, but somewhere between the publication of this article and his coke habit, it gets insufferable. He goes on about the article at such length that I looked it up at the library, and the most out-of-pocket things in it--like describing Nicolas Cage as "ethnic" or the employees of a pizzeria as "greasy"--have nothing to do with McCarthy. The fact that I was compelled to seek out this article makes McCarthy's longstanding grudge against the writer seem like another byproduct of the Streisand effect.
What also bothers me about McCarthy's attitude at this point is that he could have aged out of being the sad, floppy-haired love interest in teen movies and established a career as a character actor. I just rewatched Mrs Parker & the Vicious Circle and he holds his own opposite Jennifer Jason Leigh at the height of her career, and he's credible as a supporting actor in other 1990s indie movies. If ever there was a poster boy for keeping your head down, doing your work, and saving these kinds of petty conflicts for your therapist, it would be Andrew McCarthy.
posted by pxe2000 at 7:04 AM on June 27 [2 favorites]
What also bothers me about McCarthy's attitude at this point is that he could have aged out of being the sad, floppy-haired love interest in teen movies and established a career as a character actor. I just rewatched Mrs Parker & the Vicious Circle and he holds his own opposite Jennifer Jason Leigh at the height of her career, and he's credible as a supporting actor in other 1990s indie movies. If ever there was a poster boy for keeping your head down, doing your work, and saving these kinds of petty conflicts for your therapist, it would be Andrew McCarthy.
posted by pxe2000 at 7:04 AM on June 27 [2 favorites]
I, too, would've liked McCarthy to at least wonder aloud on camera whether it might've been his career choices — Mannequin was the movie he did immediately after Pretty in Pink and before Less Than Zero.
Still, there's something there; I think that he could’ve made a better case if he'd tried to look beyond his bitterness. After about four or five consecutive archive interview clips where these actors were asked the same inane “brat pack” question, I got annoyed on their behalf at the laziness of it all.
Couldn't that have been what the documentary was about? Nobody’s going to shed tears for young, good-looking actors; but wouldn't you be annoyed if you got the same question every time you went on a show to promote a movie?
It's probably true that it caught on as a dismissive handle for people who felt like movies in the 80s were suddenly mainly about young people. But, as several of the interviewees point out, its vagueness as a descriptor — which actors are “core” members, and which are on the periphery? — blunts the effectiveness of the critique.
Because they really weren’t in each others’ movies very much, unless you put so many people in the club that its membership is meaningless. So either it's a group defined by participation in exactly two movies — making Estevez, Sheedy, and Nelson the only true members — or it's a group defined by the vibes of whoever is making the argument. Neither of those is interesting. If St. Elmo’s Fire had been a good movie, maybe I'd feel differently.
For these reasons, I was certainly on board with having this story told, and was happy to have the interviews and see what folks looked like these days and hear a few stories I hadn't heard before. Wasn't crossing my fingers hoping for Malcolm Gladwell to show up on screen, but he probably had the wisest remarks of anyone.
And, honestly, I was looking for a bit more perspective from the author of the New York article. He was certainly trying to be wry and detached when he wrote it, probably because that's what got you paid as an 80s freelance feature writer. It was a dumb article. But if you were thumbing through a New York issue from the 80s and you saw a feature on Emilio Estevez, you'd think to yourself, “this is going to be dumb, isn’t it?”
Honestly, the fact that people are still taking about the Brat Pack after 40 years? So little of it falls at his feet.
posted by savetheclocktower at 10:38 PM on June 28 [3 favorites]
Still, there's something there; I think that he could’ve made a better case if he'd tried to look beyond his bitterness. After about four or five consecutive archive interview clips where these actors were asked the same inane “brat pack” question, I got annoyed on their behalf at the laziness of it all.
Couldn't that have been what the documentary was about? Nobody’s going to shed tears for young, good-looking actors; but wouldn't you be annoyed if you got the same question every time you went on a show to promote a movie?
It's probably true that it caught on as a dismissive handle for people who felt like movies in the 80s were suddenly mainly about young people. But, as several of the interviewees point out, its vagueness as a descriptor — which actors are “core” members, and which are on the periphery? — blunts the effectiveness of the critique.
Because they really weren’t in each others’ movies very much, unless you put so many people in the club that its membership is meaningless. So either it's a group defined by participation in exactly two movies — making Estevez, Sheedy, and Nelson the only true members — or it's a group defined by the vibes of whoever is making the argument. Neither of those is interesting. If St. Elmo’s Fire had been a good movie, maybe I'd feel differently.
For these reasons, I was certainly on board with having this story told, and was happy to have the interviews and see what folks looked like these days and hear a few stories I hadn't heard before. Wasn't crossing my fingers hoping for Malcolm Gladwell to show up on screen, but he probably had the wisest remarks of anyone.
And, honestly, I was looking for a bit more perspective from the author of the New York article. He was certainly trying to be wry and detached when he wrote it, probably because that's what got you paid as an 80s freelance feature writer. It was a dumb article. But if you were thumbing through a New York issue from the 80s and you saw a feature on Emilio Estevez, you'd think to yourself, “this is going to be dumb, isn’t it?”
Honestly, the fact that people are still taking about the Brat Pack after 40 years? So little of it falls at his feet.
posted by savetheclocktower at 10:38 PM on June 28 [3 favorites]
It's not as if New York magazine has a particular reputation for journalistic excellence or biting criticism, either. The article that the movie Saturday Night Fever was based on was made up by its author. They did an article on Saturday Night Live in the mid-nineties that was purely pro-forma in its criticism of the series being in a creative slump; they even quoted Lorne Michaels as saying that they were overdue for the periodic "Saturday Night Dead" article. I remember one about how one of NYC's classier areas was being touristized; that may have been true, but in the middle of it the author dropped the dumbfounding statement that he'd never worn any article of clothing with writing on it. (Think about that for a moment.) And, of course, they published the supremely toxic critic John Simon for decades, until he became too obviously racist for them to excuse any longer. So, McCarthy is in not-bad company.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:47 PM on July 2
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:47 PM on July 2
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posted by archimago at 9:12 AM on June 21 [4 favorites]