The Goonies (1985)

The Goonies arrives from 1985, a year when a gang of shouting children could carry a summer release on sheer lung power alone. Richard Donner's adventure has aged into a National Film Registry citation and a permanent slot in the nostalgia economy, and yet its progressive content remains thin enough to read a newspaper through. Ke Huy Quan's Data and Lupe Ontiveros's Spanish-speaking housekeeper supply ethnic texture, but the film treats them as furniture of the neighborhood, not as statements. Nobody in Astoria has a conversation about race, and the screenplay has no interest in starting one.

A pair of teenage girls, Andy and Stef, tag along and are promptly rescued when the tunnels get serious. The film offers a cheerleader and a tomboy and then asks them to scream. Chunk's weight is the running gag, most memorably in the Truffle Shuffle, a bit the filmmakers themselves later described as mockery drawn from real pain. Sloth, the deformed and childlike brother, is a comic grotesque rather than any kind of portrait of a mind that works differently. These are not oversights so much as the comic grammar of the era, delivered without apology.

The foreclosure plot gives the film a faint anti-gentrification pulse: a country club developer wants the Goon Docks, and the kids want to keep their homes. The resolution arrives as pirate jewels in a marble bag, which is to say the movie prefers gold to politics. There is no climate anxiety, no revisionist history, no queer subtext, and no sermon. It is a fun-house ride, and it knows it.