The worst review of "The Big Chill" ever

In the "Big Chill" the friends from the Sixties come together, because their alienated outsider friend has committed suicide, and we (the audience) are supposed to think that he's exceptional, and somehow a stand out from the group, that is basically selling out at a lightning pace, except for William Hurt, the emasculated Vietnam Vet, that was the suicide's best friend. Gen X has taken the archetype of Alex and blown him up larger than life, so that we're a generation of Alex's, or in the words of the Stones song played at his funeral, 'You can't always get what you want,' especially when you're endlessly dreaming of the Summer of Love that never comes. I read an essay recently on "Slate" about the Gen X mid-life crisis, and that our generation suffered from a sort of 'agoraphobia,' meaning we were scared to leave the house, and in my case this is true, so it was strange to read that I wasn't alone and am part of a generation of homebody's that have no idea how to enact social change. In "The Big Chill," they thought they enacted plenty of social change when they were young, and could network for the rest of their lives, having done their duty in the Sixties, but Gen X never had this feeling, even though we longed for it, hoping to find a 'scene' somewhere in Europe or New York, but never really finding it, though they say it existed in Seattle for a year or two, but these cultural high water marks are always transitory, and Williamsburg is yesterday's trash.

"The Big Chill" had it good to lament a guy that just couldn't fit in, because he still believed in Abbie Hoffman, the true Sixties guy. We're a generation of these kinds of people since they taught us in school, fueled by the ideals of their time, and it's often said that we are the most educated generation in the Nation's history, so why do we seem so dumb, or are we just geniuses for not wanting to leave the house, like Salinger after he wrote "Cather in the Rye," just too brilliant for the world. I have a feeling both are a little true, like every thought I have, unable to see a black and white world anymore, and missing Fifties TV. Alex was the foreshadowing of our generation and what makes the "Big Chill" such a great movie, aside from the script and cast; it tells the story of two generations without meaning to, falling into the great unconscious accident of all art. The asexual William Hurt becomes a homebody at the end without any ambition except that he understands art and realizes you have to let a "B" movie just sort of wash over you, and not judge it, a great Gen X trick.

In the "Big Chill" all the actors gather to remember Alex, as the embodiment of their dreams, and the movie becomes about the living more than the dead, since they can talk, and Alex is almost forgotten as the raison d'etre for the event, save some meandering reminiscences, and instead the story becomes about making life and moving on, since almost everyone has sex at the end, and Kevin Kline impregnates that actress with the cross eyes, that never was in much, save "Smooth Talk" a movie I posted on FB the other day with Laura Dern and Treat Williams, in two unforgettable performances, one great (Dern), and one bad (Williams). Alex's suicide is a spiritual death for everyone in "The Big Chill" forcing them to either confront Alex or not, and most choose not, except for Glen Close that has the most emotionally heart rending scene of the movie when she breaks down crying in the shower at the beginning, and then gives up her husband to have sex with another woman, and completely forsakes child bearing, in an almost exaggerated selfless ritual, but she's the saddest amongst the living, except for William Hurt that is a eunuch, so that the sexually alive are able to forget their martyr and move on into Wall St. and adulthood.

The delusion I had as a Gen X'er after seeing the "Big Chill" is that anyone would remember my small sad generation, but maybe I thought they never would, since the first story I ever wrote for a creative writing class in high school, was about a bunch of middle aged men, duking it out, kind of like in "The Men's Club" starring Roy Scheider, Craig Wasson, Frank Langella, and more. Yes, it was weird that a seventeen year old boy would be obsessing on a mid life crisis, but it may also be an indication of how much the Bommers just sort of swamped of us when we were coming of age, even though I don't think their parents did this to them, because they had numbers, or as Jim Morrison sang, "5 to 1, 1 to 5, no one here gets out alive!!!" I always thought the world appreciated that Gen X was a rare specimen, but I'm starting to think I'm wrong, and that we'll always exist on the fringe, not understood by the boomers. We're an isolated agoraphobic generation like a domesticated cat, but the Y'ers have assimilated our latent irony and used it as a weapon, so that we may be remembered through another generation, and maybe this is the way it always goes, except the Boomers that remembered themselves.