Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Diner (1982)

IMDb plot summary: A group of college-age buddies struggle with their imminent passage into adulthood in 1959 Baltimore.
Directed by Barry Levinson. Starring Steve Guttenberg, Mickey Rourke, and Kevin Bacon.

Diner follows a group of high school friends reuniting for a friend's wedding, and they wander around talking about life and relationships and playing pranks on each other. I am frankly completely confused about the love for this movie. It's a weirdly difficult story to follow, with so many characters who look and act exactly alike so I kept mixing them up, and I couldn't get invested in any of them because none of them are interesting or good people, and there are so many different stories that never actually follow through, just kind of disappear, and we don't even get fun philosophical ruminations on life the way you might get in other similarly structured movies. I know this is a beloved, critically acclaimed film, and I genuinely can't figure out which pieces of this are resonating with others or what it's even trying to do. While I'm posting my thoughts on it now, I may have to do a deeper dive to figure out what landed so badly for me and so well for others, and we'll have to see if that changes my mind.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Diner < Captain Phillips
Diner > Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Diner < Stepmom
Diner > Cinderella (2015)
Diner > A Time to Kill
Diner > Bee Movie
Diner > 10
Diner < Guarding Tess
Diner < Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Diner < The Apostle
Diner < Satantango
Diner > Jurassic World
Final spot: #2450 out of 3873, or 37%. That's frankly higher than I expected.

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