On Golden Pond

I don’t know whether it’s the Mandela Effect or Hollywood Publicist Effect, but “On Golden Pond” is not how I remembered it from 1981. I recalled a big, drawn-out, family melodrama with lots of capital A Acting from Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda and Katherine Hepburn. While Jane brings a Chris-Craft full of melodrama, she’s barely in the film. It’s really a Hepburn-dominated examination of relationship dynamics (that somehow had remained unexamined until Henry’s almost dead). Oh, and a kid gets dumped on the old folks for the summer in what must’ve surely violated the kid’s California family court visitation agreement.

War Games

At the height of the Cold War, there were a bunch of mainstream movies that came out bearing pacifist messages. “War Games” (1983) might have been the best of them, for many reasons. The then-implausible plot that an AI computer program, accidentally activated by a hacker, could take the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, becomes more plausible every day. And it stars Ferris Bueller! And Ally Sheedy co-stars as the girl in your English class you never had the guts to ask out. And Dabney Coleman! And two dudes play essentially a young Bill Gates and Paul Allen.