I went to see The Goonies at the age of twelve because I was a Cyndi Lauper fan. As co-star Ke Huy-Quan (now ’’’’Jonathan Ke Quan’’’’) hammed it up, I glimpsed the torments of my upcoming sixth grade year. See, Quan in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom doomed me to being called ’’’’Short Round’’’’ for several months, accompanied by Pidgin English recreations of choice line readings (’’’’You caw heem Meesta Jones, Doll!’’’’)--which was admittedly better than the ’’’’Wassa’’ happenin’’ hot stuff?’’’’ jibes inspired by Gedde Wattanabe’’s legendary act of race betrayal as Long Duck Dong in John Hughes’’ execrable Sixteen Candles. For a Chinese boy in the United States of the mid-1980s, the choices for a cinematic role model were between the ’’’’ah, so’’’’/Fu Manchu archetype of Mr. Miyagi, Quan’’s gibberish (’’’’Thas’’ whad I say! Booty-twaps!’’’’), and Wattanabe’’s sex-crazed, boggle-eyed capering. They became my crucible and a vehicle for some classmates’’ easy hatred and casual racism--trends that took a different form in the cinema of the nineties, but perhaps not so curiously, pervade nearly every aspect of our collective national consciousness to this day.
The Goonies is my generation’’s Gunga Din: ugly, patronizing, loud, slapstick, and predictably popular, with a cheap redemption theme tacked on at the end to sweeten the fetid stew. Often thought of as the Reagan era’’s quintessential film (put my vote in for Wall Street), Richard Donner’’s The Goonies is an unbearable collection of hateful racial stereotypes, cheap shots at fat kids and asthmatics, horrendous performances, gratuitous leg warmers, and recycled bits from dinosaur sitcoms that weren’’t really that funny the first time around. If you’’re dying to see Corey Feldman recreate the Chuy episode of ’’’’Leave It To Beaver’’’’, your prayers will be answered within the first ten minutes of the film. The Goonies is so hamstrung by the fashion, venality, and closet racism of its time that the only possible appeal it could hold for a self-aware viewer is that of an uneasy nostalgia. It’’s never a pleasant thing to remember exactly what kind of bullshit was fed to us as children, and worse to recall how willingly we gulped it down and called it honey. A weird social caste/treasure flick that amalgamates The Dirty Dozen, The Outsiders, and Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, The Goonies follows the exploits of a group of kid-adventurers best described with individual adjectives followed by ’’’’one.’’’’ There’’s the fat one (Chunk: Jeff Cohen), the geeky one (Data: Quan), the Eddie Haskell one (Mouth: Corey Feldman), the older one (Brand: Josh Brolin), the tart one of questionable beauty (Andy: Kerri Green), and the sickly inhaler one (Mikey: Sean Astin). Calling themselves ’’’’Goonies’’’’ because they live in the ’’’’Goondocks’’’’ (uh huh), these irrepressible youngsters discover a pirate’’s map, the found gold of which could save their slum from evil developers looking to revitalize their area. You know you’’re in trouble if Chris Columbus is associated with a film in any way, much less as screenwriter, and you’’re also right to fear bad things when Steven Spielberg produces.
If The Goonies succeeds at one thing, it’’s in charting the steady artistic decline of not only its chief ’’’’brain’’’’ trust, but also Cyndi Lauper and every single member of its cast save the suddenly popular Josh Brolin. Forgetting for a moment that a character is shot off a cliff at over fifty miles an hour for giggles and that the fat kid spends the majority of his screentime begging for a Twinkie, the most disturbing aspect of The Goonies is naming the pirate ’’’’One-Eyed Willy.’’’’ The arguments for The Goonies as some sort of Freudian puberty drama have validity, though that does little to aid in the enjoyment of this high-decibel gripe-fest. Discontent with staying an incoherent screaming contest, there are actually sequences designed to incorporate banging pipes and ear-splitting monologues from Chunk and the bimbo tart. The film is inconceivably bad--every minute of it save, perhaps, for a sly reference to Donner’’s own Superman. There’’s a scene towards the blissful end of The Goonies wherein the cheap freak uplift device Sloth (John Matuszak) is seen chained to a wall watching Errol Flynn’’s swashbuckling Captain Blood. Retarded at the least and emotionally devastated at the best, even Sloth has the good sense not to watch the movie that he’’s in--would that the same could be said for me.