Best movie of this year hands down!

Touches You

Best movie ever!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Late night at the IFC. The Return of the Secaucus 7 pioneered the "get together" movement of eighties cinema. This movie should be misplaced or evaporated from any film restoration. I'm afraid this movie would be the only piece of life from a nuclear disaster of mass proportions. Future generations would be lead to believe that past generations had no interest but to socialize about nothing. Imagine this..........lotion, yes Johnson and Johnson hand lotion was never created or thought of. Our hands, of course would be dry and chalky sort of like this dry trip. Was this movie perhaps countering the movements of the sixties or seventies? Perphaps the filmmakers were hoping of a return to simpler times. WASP playing a game of volleyball and discussing how much they've learned from their misfortunes. Ron, the outcast of the bunch works at the local gas station! Let him be! The basketball montage is great. Not to mention, the out of breath voice-over. Nude diving at a eleven. "Oh June I'm home."

The first time I saw this movie was at a John Sayles movie festival. He's so interesting that I always give his movies a look, even if I don't always find them without flaws. I had been hearing so much about this one that I was really looking forward to it. Well, I was so bored that I ended up sleeping through almost all of it. But it was on IFC the other night, and even though it was on at 3AM, I managed to stay awake through it all, and I can see its merits. It IS talky, like what happens when a stageplay hits the movies, but as I found out, it IS worth a second look. And I never did really like "The Big Chill"--there always seemed something phony about it.

I wish I could put my finger on exactly what it is about films like this that I loathe so much. Return of the Secaucus 7, The Big Chill, Rules of the Game, Gosford Park, The Anniversary Party. One after another, these long winded ensemble reunion/get-together films both bore and enrage me with their awful scripts and even worse acting.Return of the Secaucus 7 is perhaps the best (or worst) example of a genre of film-making that's arguably destined to fail as soon as the opening credits end. It's just an awful, boring script and it's no wonder that very few of the "actors" went on to any kind of a career in film. These people memorized their lines and started filming. There is no passion or emotion in any of the dialogue. I was reminded over and over again of the sequence of scenes in Reservoir Dogs where Tim Roth is urged to memorize, and then make his own, an anecdote about a drug deal. His mentoring police officer tells him that it's not enough to just memorize the story. He has to know all the little details. He has to make the story utterly believable. And as the sequences unfold and he practices telling the story over and over, he is able to do just that. In Secaucus, ALL of the actors read their lines as if they've just committed them to memory. It always seems as though during the conversations in this film, the person not talking is ready to speak their next line before the other person is done speaking theirs. It's an indictment on not only the actors, but on the director.The Secaucus 7 are a group of seven friends who were wrongfully busted and detained on their way to a protest rally of the Vietnam War. This film is a reunion of the 7 (plus a few others) about 10 years later. Nothing too dramatic or exciting, and certainly not anything that most rational people would feel the need to reunite and reminisce for. All of this is revealed in synopsises you may read, and with about 10 minutes left in the film. So we watch these characters reunite for an hour and a half, but don't have any real basis as to what they have in common. At least in all of the aforementioned films above, there is a reason for the gathering of people. This is not a particularly believable reunion.The formula for these reunion ensembles seems to be as follows: Take a large group of pretentious dysfunctional mostly unlikeable middle aged adults with emotional and relationship problems and make them talk to each other about them for two hours. With a bad script. Oh, yeah. I can see why people like them.

In John Sayles debut, we mostly get talking, talking, and more talking. A great script can do amazing things for a low budget film. There really was not a point where I was disinterested in what the characters were saying.*Small spoiler* The tension between best friends JT and Jeff over Maura is great and culminated in a beautifully sequenced basketball game. You can feel the difficulty between them. I haven't seen the Big Chill. And after seeing this film I don't feel that it could top it. This movie should be an inspiration to all aspiring independent filmmakers.