Week 2: Peggy Sue Got Married
Netflix Score: 0/1
Hello everyone and welcome to week 2 of 52 Weeks of Netflix! Last week I chose the movie Practical Magic, and based off that Netflix chose: Peggy Sue Got Married.
I feel like I might get booed here, but I thought this movie was HORRIBLE! I’m shocked it got an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. I knew it was famous but I always assumed it was regarded as a guilty pleasure than a legitimate film. It must be a generational thing to like this movie. A combination of yearning for simpler times and the recent success of Back to the Future made it a hit in 1986.
Does any Gen Y’er like this film?
For me, the nail in Peggy Sues coffin is Nicolas Cage. I was surprised he was in it until I saw that it was directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Answer me this Mr. Cage: what the hell was with your voice? Why would you ever model a characters voice after Pokey from Gumby? (True story, Google it).
So that everyone’s on the same page, I’ll recap this film and only slightly pepper it with disdain.
The movie begins on Peggy Sues 25th high school reunion (never mind we’re supposed to believe Kathleen Turner is 45 when she doesn’t look a day over 30!) Peggy Sue is distraught because her soon-to-be philandering ex-husband, who’s her high school sweetheart, named Charlie (Played by a 22 year old Nick Cage) has left her for another woman and she’s worried about losing face at the party. Since this is a pre-Facebook reunion, classmates haven’t been monitoring status updates for the last ten years, but rest assure the cool kids are losers now, doing cocaine in the bathroom (that’s how you know it’s the 80’s) and surprise, surprise the nerd is now a computer genius millionaire. When Peggy S. is crowned queen, she has a fit and faints. When she wakes up its 1960, and she’s back in her senior year of high school.
The plot twist is that she is still her “45” year old self but has traveled back in time to her “18” year old body! The story unfolds with her looking at her life and realizing that she can re-do history, change the choices she made. Never marry Charlie, sleep with the sexy beat neck she always wanted to bone, be the inventor of pantyhose, and cherish the time with her family who’s either distant or now dead. In the end (SPOILER ALERT) for reasons that just piss me off, she chooses to make the same exact mistakes!
I can see why Netflix recommended this picture to me. It contains magical elements, nostalgic back-drops, and a woman making bad male related decisions. If I liked Practical Magic then I should like Peggy Sue Got Married.
Wrong.
A solid recommendation would’ve been a film that is a guilty pleasure. That’s what I liked about Practical Magic; I wanted to see more movies like that, rather than a film that shares plot similarities but I’m supposed to take seriously. I’m going to count this a Netflix loss due to a lack of imagination, for being too broad and for suggesting I watch such a shitty movie!
Up next week: War of the Roses. Another movie I know nothing about…
