Movie Details
| Title: | The Wanderers | |
| Director: | Philip Kaufman | |
| Year: | 2015 | |
| Genre: | Reprobate | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.11.15 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- Henry & June
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.11.15 | Sudden Valley Amphitheater | This Screening is part of event: 24HMM #22 So... my buddies George and Daniel and Chris have been doing their own 24-hour movie marathons for a long time now and I've never gone. Part of that is because of my experiences with Butt-numb-a-thon where, spectacle aside, it's really an endurance challenge to remain coherent through the whole night. While there is a certain pleasure that comes from falling asleep in a theater, drifting in and out of consciousness while a movie plays, I often wind up with little to no memory of the movies themselves and it wrecks my next day or two afterward. However, George and co. have always been friendly and inviting to their events so I've felt bad for not going and this time, since I have no job to keep me down, I decided to go and watch some movies then come home when I got tired. I got there just as Martin was ending. Just a quick note about how great George's setup is: A lot of people have home theater setups... George has like... a theater in his home. I mean he didn't have a projectionist with 35mm reel to reels back there or anything but he did have a nice projector, huge screen, 7.1 sound, a couple couches, chairs, and two rows of theater seats in a little stadium setup. Couple that with plex and you couldn't have a better setting for a marathon. There were maybe a dozen people there. The first movie I saw is Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers. I had no idea what this movie was. Really I had no idea that this movie existed. It's a snapshot of The Bronx in 1963 and the world of neighborhood street gangs populated by high school guys. This film has some amazing bona fides. Based on a book by Richard Price, written and directed by Philip Kaufman (falling in between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Right Stuff), featuring a huge cast of young actors (including a pre-Raiders Karen Allen and a bunch of familiar faces like Omar from HBO's OZ and Angie Bonpensiero from The Sopranos), shot by Michael Chapman, casted by Scott Rudin, with an amazing soundtrack of like every early 60s rock hit ever. It feels kind of like a mix between The Warriors and The Outsiders but this was 79, same year as Warriors and 4 years before Outsiders. The tone and pacing are a little confused which I think is why this movie fell through the cracks but there's still just a ton of charm and emotion that makes it worth watching. I was really surprised and impressed with this. It also drew a startling thought. A 79 movie set in 63 would be like making a movie today and setting it in 2000. It might be because I'm getting older and more disconnected from pop culture but it seems like the difference between 15 years ago today and 15 years ago in 1979 is really huge. I'm not sure if I'd still think that if I had lived through it... but I certainly feel like the 80s and the 90s had style definitions of what was popular at the time that fit in tune with the 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s, and 30s. The 00s seem especially blah to me... but who knows... maybe 5 years from now it will seem different. That was a long and rambling paragraph just to say that it struck me how it must not have been such a huge deal to get the soundtrack for this movie back when they did. I feel like if you used all these songs in a movie today you couldn't afford to pay any of the actors. But making a movie set in 2000 doesn't seem like a big deal at all. Time is weird. anyway... |
