Thanks for the memories!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Absolutely Fantastic

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Lethargic and tedious, this ensemble drama drones on and on about nothing of significance, as a group of twenty-somethings, future yuppies, gather for a weekend reunion in New England. All the characters are Ivy League types who at one time demonstrated against the Vietnam War and who still question the status quo. Here, they talk romantic relationships, career, and gossip about each other.Assorted activities like a basketball game for the guys and board games for the ladies, charades for all and a trip to the local pub for drinks keep the plot moving. And throughout, it's talk, talk, talk, and more talk. I don't recall a film that was so dialogue driven. But all the talk is small. They're so wrapped up in themselves and their futures that, after a while, all that chatter just gets tiresome.Color cinematography trends a bit dark, and it's very conventional. But then this is a low-budget film. There are very few moving or tracking scenes. Mostly, the camera is static. Production design is minimal. The cast consists of actors who were unknown at the time. Generally, they do an acceptable job.The main problem here is a story that is mundane, trite, and very dated, and characters who are annoying and egocentric. The film offers no insights or thematic depth, just ordinary young adults who gather and talk among themselves about themselves in a setting that is common and pedestrian. "The Return Of The Secaucus Seven" has a soap-opera look and feel. I could not get interested in it at all.

John Sayles made this film for only $60,000 and only one person in the film had any previous acting experience. It's just amazing how well this turned out. It's about a couple (Mike and Katie) who invite all their college friends to spending the weekend in a cabin in New Hampshire. They all spent their college years as radicals...and now they're all turning 30. We learn who they were and how they are now. No big catastrophes or changes are made with any of the characters--we just see how these former radicals are now dealing with life. Sounds boring but I found it absolutely fascinating. The acting is all natural and realistic--I found myself actually believing these people all have been friends for 10+ years! The dialogue was sharp and on target...but John Sayles has always been a master at writing great scripts.I was in my first year of college when this came out. It was a HUGE hit in Boston (I believe it played at one independent cinema for over a year!) and I saw it again and again. Even though I was too young to really identify with the characters (their moaning about turning 30 struck me as silly) I was fascinated by their characters and situations. They do discuss issues that were relevant in 1980--that's probably what I found so interesting. Seeing it now (28 years later) it's dated (of course) but still fascinating. The references to late 70s issues, politicians and life style may confuse younger viewers. Also it was interesting to see that casual sex and drug taking is shown as being OK! I also liked the surprising and casual male nudity in a skinny dipping sequence. (None of the female actors get nude but it seems the guys had no problem). This was later remade (sort of) in Hollywood as "The Big Chill". "The Big Chill" is an excellent COMMERCIAL film...this is an excellent independent film. This made John Sayles and is also David Strathairn's first film! Absolutely fascinating motion picture. I wish Sayles had revisited these characters again in 1990 and 2000--by the end I was really wondering what happened to this people. A one of a kind and a groundbreaking independent film that was very profitable. A must see!

The first time I saw this movie was at a John Sayles movie festival. He's so interesting that I always give his movies a look, even if I don't always find them without flaws. I had been hearing so much about this one that I was really looking forward to it. Well, I was so bored that I ended up sleeping through almost all of it. But it was on IFC the other night, and even though it was on at 3AM, I managed to stay awake through it all, and I can see its merits. It IS talky, like what happens when a stageplay hits the movies, but as I found out, it IS worth a second look. And I never did really like "The Big Chill"--there always seemed something phony about it.

I wish I could put my finger on exactly what it is about films like this that I loathe so much. Return of the Secaucus 7, The Big Chill, Rules of the Game, Gosford Park, The Anniversary Party. One after another, these long winded ensemble reunion/get-together films both bore and enrage me with their awful scripts and even worse acting.Return of the Secaucus 7 is perhaps the best (or worst) example of a genre of film-making that's arguably destined to fail as soon as the opening credits end. It's just an awful, boring script and it's no wonder that very few of the "actors" went on to any kind of a career in film. These people memorized their lines and started filming. There is no passion or emotion in any of the dialogue. I was reminded over and over again of the sequence of scenes in Reservoir Dogs where Tim Roth is urged to memorize, and then make his own, an anecdote about a drug deal. His mentoring police officer tells him that it's not enough to just memorize the story. He has to know all the little details. He has to make the story utterly believable. And as the sequences unfold and he practices telling the story over and over, he is able to do just that. In Secaucus, ALL of the actors read their lines as if they've just committed them to memory. It always seems as though during the conversations in this film, the person not talking is ready to speak their next line before the other person is done speaking theirs. It's an indictment on not only the actors, but on the director.The Secaucus 7 are a group of seven friends who were wrongfully busted and detained on their way to a protest rally of the Vietnam War. This film is a reunion of the 7 (plus a few others) about 10 years later. Nothing too dramatic or exciting, and certainly not anything that most rational people would feel the need to reunite and reminisce for. All of this is revealed in synopsises you may read, and with about 10 minutes left in the film. So we watch these characters reunite for an hour and a half, but don't have any real basis as to what they have in common. At least in all of the aforementioned films above, there is a reason for the gathering of people. This is not a particularly believable reunion.The formula for these reunion ensembles seems to be as follows: Take a large group of pretentious dysfunctional mostly unlikeable middle aged adults with emotional and relationship problems and make them talk to each other about them for two hours. With a bad script. Oh, yeah. I can see why people like them.