Worth Mentioning - Don't You Forget About Me

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

'80s stars and '00s deaths.

BRATS (2024)

In the 1980s, youth-oriented films became a dominant force at the box office, and these movies about young adults featured some really good actors, many of whom are still working steadily to this day. Some of these young actors came to be known as the Brat Pack... and while I never knew the source of this nickname, it’s one I have been aware of for as long as I can remember, because I was only a year and a half old when the term “the Brat Pack” was first used. I was never quite sure which actors this nickname referred to, but I assumed it was basically a mixture of the cast of The Breakfast Club and the cast of St. Elmo’s Fire (which featured a few Breakfast Clubbers). Of course, the nickname is a reference to the Rat Pack, and since Frank Sinatra and his pals didn’t seem mind being called a bunch of rats, I never would have guessed that the actors of the ‘80s minded being called brats. But, as it turns out, they minded it very much.

One of the prominent young actors of the ‘80s was Andrew McCarthy, and it turns out he has harbored hurt feelings about this Brat Pack label for nearly forty years, feeling that it did damage to his career. And it certainly did damage to his psyche. McCarthy is so bothered by the whole Brat Pack thing that he decided to make the documentary Brats, where he connects with other actors from the ‘80s to talk about how they felt about the Brat Pack name. Most of them were quite annoyed by it, but most of them seem to have moved on from that annoyance (unlike McCarthy), and some even embrace it to a degree.

Over the course of this movie, McCarthy talks to the likes of Ally Sheedy, Jon Cryer, Lea Thompson, Timothy Hutton, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Pretty in Pink director Howard Deutch, and many others about ‘80s youth movies and the Brat Pack label. In a surprising turn of events, he wasn’t able to get Molly Ringwald or Judd Nelson to participate... but he did manage to get Emilio Estevez to participate, which is shocking, because Estevez is not into being retrospective about any of his past work. During his conversation with McCarthy, Estevez reveals that one reason he agreed to be part of Brats is because he wanted to clear the air about a project called Young Men with Unlimited Capital, which was set to star Estevez and McCarthy – but fell apart when, spooked by the article that named himself and his friends members of the Brat Pack – Estevez refused to work with McCarthy or any fellow Brat Packers on the film. It’s a shame, because it probably would have been a great movie, as Estevez said it had a good script and it would have been about the two twenty-somethings who funded the Woodstock music festival in 1969. An event that turned out to be much larger than they expected.

Most of the conversations McCarthy has in this documentary play like McCarthy is using these interactions with fellow actors as therapy sessions. That Brat Pack label really, really got to him to a ridiculous degree. So it’s good that he also talks to the journalist who wrote the original Brat Pack article late in the running time.

Throughout, the actors wonder who exactly was considered to be in this Brat Pack... and it’s clear that McCarthy did not go back and read the original article before making the documentary, because the article lists who the journalist was naming the Brat Pack. And McCarthy wasn’t even on the list! The real, official Brat Packers (in the mind of journalist David Blum) were Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, Nicolas Cage, and Sean Penn, with Matthew Broderick, Matthew Modine, and Kevin Bacon sitting on the outside. (As Blum wrote, “The Brat Pack likes them but doesn’t know them.”) Blum didn’t consider any of the female actors to be part of the Brat Pack, even though Molly Ringwald has long been thought of as the Queen of the Brat Pack. McCarthy is only mentioned in passing in the article: “And of Andrew McCarthy, one of the New York–based actors in St. Elmo’s Fire, a co-star says, ‘He plays all his roles with too much of the same intensity. I don’t think he’ll make it.’ The Brat Packers save their praise for themselves.” This article that has caused McCarthy so much grief over the decades, as he didn’t like being called part of a Brat Pack, directly states that he was not part of the Brat Pack!

It’s mind-boggling. But really, what I feel is the craziest thing about all of this is the fact that Anthony Michael Hall is never named in the article and also has no part in the documentary (aside from clips from The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles). There are official Brat Packers that I never would have considered part of the Brat Pack, but I would have said with certainty that Anthony Michael Hall was a Brat Packer. Apparently he wasn’t, and this was all quite strange.

SIX FEET UNDER (2001 – 2005)

Before streaming (and, going further back, before we had DVR in my household), I was notoriously bad at keeping up with TV shows. If something was considered appointment television, I usually missed the appointment. So even though I’ve spent the last twenty-plus years thinking I had watched the first season of the HBO series Six Feet Under, having probably been drawn to it by good word-of-mouth online, when it was decided that I would be circling back to the show nineteen years after it went off the air, I wasn’t surprised to find that I had actually only watched the first four episodes. Four episodes, then I drifted away. It’s more surprising that I was actually able to catch four episodes in a row.

Created by Alan Ball, the show centers on the Fisher family, owners of a funeral home in Los Angeles. The premiere episode begins with family patriarch Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins) being killed in a traffic accident – but don’t be discouraged by seeing Jenkins getting taken out so early, because the characters in this show regularly have ghostly visions of the dearly departed, so Jenkins appears in plenty of episodes as the five seasons play out. Nathaniel is mourned by his damaged, shrill wife Ruth (Frances Conroy), who was having an affair; his oldest son Nate (Peter Krause), who was enjoying a life in Seattle until his father’s death brought him back to Los Angeles, where he’s talking to taking control of the funeral home alongside his younger brother; middle child David (Michael C. Hall), who starts out being severely uptight and repressed, but opens up as the show goes on and he accepts his homosexuality; youngest child Claire (Lauren Ambrose), who dabbles in drugs and bad boyfriends; and employee Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez).

As the Fishers carry on with their lives, we see their interactions with several other characters. Ruth has a few different significant others, including geologist George Sibley (James Cromwell). Nate strikes up a tumultuous relationship with Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths), a stranger he had sex with after they met on a plane, and the Nate / Brenda saga makes up a lot of the show. Nate also has a friend from Seattle named Lisa (Lili Taylor), who gets romantically involved with him... and then things go in unexpected directions. David pursues a relationship with police officer Keith (Matthew St. Patrick). Lauren discovers a passion for art and photography. Rachel has a mentally ill brother named Billy (Jeremy Sisto) who sees her boyfriends as competition. Freddy has relationship problems with his wife Vanessa (Justina Machado) and becomes a partner at the funeral home with a strong vision for the future... a vision that often clashes with Nate and David’s. Ruth has a hippie sister named Sarah (Patricia Clarkson) who brings a friend named Bettina (Kathy Bates) into her life... For a while, Rainn Wilson is even hanging around as an oddball mortuary intern named Arthur.

There’s a lot going on in Six Feet Under, and it’s all well-written and fascinating. It’s so engaging that it doesn’t even matter that nearly every single person on the show is, at their core, a crappy person to some degree. And they’re all so emotionally and mentally damaged that they should be getting a lot more therapy than they ever do. Most, if not all, of the characters cheat on their significant others at some point. Their relationship dynamics are often appalling. And yet we feel compelled to keep watching because the writing is so good and the actors are turning in great performances.

The characters shift, they evolve, they devolve, some get redemption, some disappoint. And for sixty-three episodes, I was very invested in seeing where they would all go.