From St. Elmo’s Fire to Eternity

I have a habit of watching certain movies out of a sense of obligation. I somehow got it into my head that there is a cosmic movie syllabus of films I am supposed to see because they hold some kind of cultural significance.

Two recent examples are St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) and From Here to Eternity (1953 on Netflix).

I decided I was supposed to watch St. Elmo’s Fire despite its 2.5 star rating on Netflix because along with The Breakfast Club (1985, actually this is back on Netflix and St. Elmo’s Fire is gone!), the stars of these two movies are said to make up most of the “Brat Pack”.

I would say 2.5 stars was a fairly accurate rating for this movie about a group of friends finding their way in the world in the year following college graduation. I found it impossible not to constantly compare this movie to The Breakfast Club. After all, it has three of the same stars and came out the same year. However, The Breakfast Club is ten times the movie that this was. I am tempted to say it is because high school experiences are more similar from generation to generation than early 20s experiences. For example, in the last scene of St. Elmo’s Fire everyone decides that they have outgrown their old dive bar and decide to meet up at a Houlihan’s instead?! Really? In my early 20s in the mid-2000s I decided to stop eating at corporate places like Houlihan’s and find dive bars instead.

Probably though, The Breakfast Club is better because John Hughes who wrote and directed it is awesome, and Joel Schumacher the writer and director of St. Elmo’s Fire is less so (Schumacher also directed the notoriously bad Batman & Robin (1997), famous for its nipple Batman suit).

Next I watched From Here to Eternity. There were a lot of good reasons to have this movie on my imaginary syllabus. The film stars a slew of icons of its day including Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr and Frank Sinatra. The movie also won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture.

However, I also found this one only so-so, but this time I am willing to take the majority of the blame.

I love to talk big about how great classic movies are and how much people are missing out when they say they don’t want to watch a movie if it is in black and white. I sincerely enjoy many classic films, but as unwilling as I am to admit it, it is pretty hard for me to get in the mindset to appreciate a movie that is over 60 years old.

So this movie sat in my Netflix queue, for well… an eternity. I finally decided to watch it when I needed a background distraction while framing some wall art for the house. So my dedication to really trying to appreciate this movie was pretty low. I just couldn’t gather the patience for it.

I also had built up some false expectations based on what I consider the very romantic image on the cover of the movie. I’m not sure when, but somehow the image at the top of this blog post got into my head long before I ever saw the movie. I always assumed this was the most romantic film scene ever made. I assumed the drink Sex on the Beach was named after this couple so tenderly making love in the waves.

So I stopped poking myself repeatedly in the hand with the impossible to twist IKEA picture frame wire long enough to give my full attention to the beach scene, only to learn that the couple makes out for only about 30 seconds before they get into a fight with each other and head back to the car. And there was ruined what I had always believed must be the most romantic scene ever filmed.

I ran out of time and finished the movie on my phone two days later. Side note: I would really like to know what disturbs a film maker more: Someone using their film as a background distraction while doing housework. Or watching on a three inch by two inch screen on a low-res spotty internet connection.

Unsurprisingly, I appreciated the last third of the movie that I actually paid attention to a lot more. This movie seemed a little like the Top Gun of its day. The film had the same kind of drama and romance of the military lifestyle outside a war zone. Just substitute renegade Russian planes at the end with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Also, I don’t think there was any beach volleyball, but like I said, I was not paying attention the whole time.