720 The Big Chill

[domino harvey]

The Big Chill



After the shocking suicide of their friend, a group of thirtysomethings reunite for his funeral and end up spending a weekend together, reminiscing about their shared pasts as children of the sixties and confronting the uncertainty of their lives as adults of the eighties. Poignant and warmly humorous in equal measure, this 1983 baby boomer milestone made a star of writer-director Lawrence Kasdan and is perhaps the decade’s defining ensemble film, featuring memorable performances by Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, and JoBeth Williams. And with its playlist of hit songs from the sixties, The Big Chill all but invented the consummately curated soundtrack.

THREE DISC SET

DIRECTOR-APPROVED EDITION:

• New, restored 4K digital film transfer, supervised by director of photography John Bailey and approved by director Lawrence Kasdan, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Alternate remastered 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
• New interview with Kasdan
• Reunion of cast and crew from the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, including Kasdan and actors Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, and JoBeth Williams
• Documentary from 1998 on the making of the film
• Deleted scenes
• Trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by writer and filmmaker Lena Dunham and a 1983 piece by critic Harlan Jacobson

Criterionforum.org user rating averages

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[The Narrator Returns]

The "PLUS" is just about the perfect punchline to the release. It's like Criterion has become self-aware.

[FerdinandGriffon]

A booklet featuring an essay by writer, director, and actor Lena Dunham

Amazing. At last we know why Criterion is releasing this. They gave Dunham carte blanche and she demanded champagne and The Big Chill.

[domino harvey]

They picked someone who could not possibly be less in the periphery of the film's target audience just because she's allegedly a voice of her own generation. I am pretty sure I said out loud "Who gives a fuck what Lena Dunham has to say about the Big Chill?" And I like this movie more than most here, so I'm glad to see it but yuck

[flyonthewall2983]

Were there any supplements on the Criterion laserdisc?

[FrauBlucher]

Maybe she has insight into the corpse

[CSM126]

Were there any supplements on the Criterion laserdisc?

Other than the liner notes, no.

[flyonthewall2983]

Surely not written by Dunham.

[The Narrator Returns]

Given that she was 4 at the time of that laserdisc's release, I'd wager not.

[flyonthewall2983]

There's a pretty obvious follow-up joke to that one, but I won't touch it.

[CSM126]

Torene Svitli, whoever the fuck that is.

[flyonthewall2983]

Google is your friend

Film historian and writer Torene Svitil has degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Southern California. She has written for national and international publications. Currently, she works for a nonprofit motion picture organization.

[Minkin]

Never seen this film, though I've heard it has some comparisons to Diner (accurate or no?). Will probably give this a blind buy.

I assume either the 'making of' or the cast reunion must be very lengthy - as this is given a 3 disc set.

[aox]

My mother's favorite film. She loved the collegial adult feel of the film. I think I saw this dozens of times growing up.

[Sam T.]

The choice of Dunham makes perfect sense to me. I think there's a pretty clear line of thematic continuity in the CC connecting The Big Chill, Kicking and Screeming, and Tiny Furniture, and each one probably seems endeering to its own generation and intollerable to most people of the "wrong" age. For my part (I'm 38) I strongly dislike Big Chill and Tiny Furniture for exactly the same reasons, since both seem to be films where a generation gently mocks itself for what are, in fact, very serious moral failings. But then I know baby bookers who see Kicking and Screemig in exactly that light.

I don't think it's just a "voice of her generation" thing. I think it's more along the lines of "voice of those aspects of her generation that other generations find insufferable" thing.

[Yaanu]

The choice of Dunham makes perfect sense to me. I think there's a pretty clear line of thematic continuity in the CC connecting The Big Chill, Kicking and Screeming, and Tiny Furniture, and each one probably seems endeering to its own generation and intollerable to most people of the "wrong" age. For my part (I'm 38) I strongly dislike Big Chill and Tiny Furniture for exactly the same reasons, since both seem to be films where a generation gently mocks itself for what are, in fact, very serious moral failings. But then I know baby bookers who see Kicking and Screemig in exactly that light.

I don't think it's just a "voice of her generation" thing. I think it's more along the lines of "voice of those aspects of her generation that other generations find insufferable" thing.

So it's not so much that she and "Tiny Furniture" are voices of her generation as much as it is that she is an example of her generation.

[Sam T.]

So it's not so much that she and "Tiny Furniture" are voices of her generation as much as it is that she is an example of her generation.

I'm not sure if I speak for anyone else, and I certainly can't pretend to know exactly what CC was thinking, but the first time I saw The Big Chill (which was only about ten years ago) I remember thinking "There are things I really admire about my parents' generation, but this movie is a meditation on all those things about it that I *do not* admire."

If you replace "parents" with "students" above you would have exactly my response to Tiny Furniture.

Though Big Chill looks backward and Tiny Furniture forward, they're connected by a kind of generational self-consciousness, one that's half insincere apology and half defiant celebration. Both films say "Yes, this is who we are. Sorry. (But not nearly as sorry as we should be.)"

[aox]

The choice of Dunham makes perfect sense to me. I think there's a pretty clear line of thematic continuity in the CC connecting The Big Chill, Kicking and Screeming, and Tiny Furniture, and each one probably seems endeering to its own generation and intollerable to most people of the "wrong" age. For my part (I'm 38) I strongly dislike Big Chill and Tiny Furniture for exactly the same reasons, since both seem to be films where a generation gently mocks itself for what are, in fact, very serious moral failings. But then I know baby bookers who see Kicking and Screemig in exactly that light.

I don't think it's just a "voice of her generation" thing. I think it's more along the lines of "voice of those aspects of her generation that other generations find insufferable" thing.

I agree. Do we even know if her essay is necessarily flattering to the film?

I guess I assume it is.

The only supplement I can think of that CC ever put out that really isn't flattering to the film it is attached to is the Anderson commentary to Che.

[domino harvey]

Uh, speaking of, the most obvious example would be Soderbergh walking back both King of the Hill and especially the Underneath

[Cronenfly]

I, for one, welcome CC going beyond their usual comfort zone of scholarly types for the essays. I don't necessarily care to hear what Dunham has to say in this case either, but I think it's an appropriate choice for this film for the reasons expressed above. If Criterion's going to release titles this mainstream, they might as well change things up a bit in the extras department to reflect that shift.

[aox]

Uh, speaking of, the most obvious example would be Soderbergh walking back both King of the Hill and especially the Underneath

Apologies, but I don't know those examples.

[swo17]

Well, you can read about it here.

[Gregory]

"Generations" are almost always pop culture fictions that only exist only because people believe in them and use them as license to overgeneralize and even to scapegoat (or in Brokaw's case with the "Greatest Generation" to make extremely simplistic assessments like "the greatest generation any society has ever produced"). The whole "boomer" thing started as a demographic trend that got injected with a lot of dubious cultural baggage, which is repeated so often that it becomes generally accepted.

The Big Chill is a good case in point, because it's not about the whole generation born in the demographic boom but rather about a specific subset of people who were connected to the university culture of the New Left but who were probably not as politically engaged as most of the characters in Return of the Secaucus Seven.
That general grouping only made up a relatively tiny proportion of their age group nationally, and most people born after WWII didn't wholly reject their parents' values, even within the counterculture. But the cultural impact of the generational gap was pronounced enough and the counterculture's impact great enough that lot of oversimplifying categories get applied extremely loosely. The moment one starts talking about the characters in either film it becomes clear that they're not representative of an entire generation of adults.

So Dunham is not really allegedly a voice of her generation, because there is no generation that's anything more than a vague abstraction. But the "voice of her generation" thing keeps coming up anyway ever since her semi-autobiographical but comedic TV character said something similar while hallucinating and making an ass of herself in front of her TV parents, and Dunham's detractors seized upon it as an earnest statement about her supposed image and often tie this to comments about her early and undeserved success. Thus when she writes an essay that no one has read yet, the minute it's announced the response is the familiar fixation on her age as her defining feature and what looks like the also familiar extrapolating of traits of her exaggerated fictional work and related persona into indignation about an entire generation of people and the moral failings they have to answer for. People who write about decades-old films are usually not part of the original "target audience." Maybe they invited her to do the essay because they already have a relationship with her, and she's a writer and a filmmaker who has explored similar areas of ensemble comedy-drama. Crazy talk, I know.

[flyonthewall2983]

Not the best one, but this is probably the only Criterion to get the "30 Second Bunnies" treatment

[Sam T.]

Dunham is not really allegedly a voice of her generation, because there is no generation that's anything more than a vague abstraction.

That's a fair point, but we could with as much justice claim that Dunham herself is a fiction. Isn't "Lena Dunham" just an artificial frame we draw around a set of molecules, none of which really think of themselves as part of Lena Dunham, and relatively few of which will have anything to do with the essay in question? I totally agree that any generation is a vague abstraction, but such abstractions often exert a more powerful shaping force on people's lives than concrete realities. People's thoughts, feelings, convictions, and attachments are shaped by - as much as they shape - fictions like "baby boomers."

Tiny Furniture struck me, when I first saw it, as "this generation's Big Chill." I don't think this reaction presupposes that generations exist anywhere but in people's heads. I don't even really know if my judgement of Tiny Furniture is a fair one (in The Big Chill, on the other hand, characters actually stand around explicitly discussing the meaning of their own generational affiliation, so I think it's safe to say that the film anticipates and invites such a reading). I speculate that when Criterion invited Dunham to contribute to the release, somebody there was thinking about Tiny Furniture in these terms, and that if my response is a misreading then whoever invited her has made the same mistake I made.