There is a winding path to this story, so hang in there and follow me. And I guess I should also say; SPOILERS!
Last night, the wife and I watched Cocktail, the 1988 Tom Cruise epic of bartending and love in NYC and Jamaica. I knew full well going into this movie that it wasn’t good, but I had never finished it. Maybe I had seen about half of it, but that would have been about 1990 or 1991 when we got a free preview of HBO on cable. Anyway, the wife was kidding me about not knowing how the film ends, and I joked, “What, does Tom win a bar tending competition in the end?”
I was correct, in that I had seen about half of it, up to the point to where the movie moves to Jamaica. Anyway, I’m not going to kick this movie as we all know it’s not very good, but when film makes the hard right turn and Bryan Brown’s character commits suicide, my response was “Really?”
“And you thought there was going to be a bartending competition?” my wife added with laughter.
That having been said, it still was what I thought it would be; something to watch and don’t think too hard about it. Sure, maybe if the story stayed lite, not so much spurn the rich parent cliché, or my friend’s death make me change my life trope, and had a bar tending competition, and there was a bad guy “corporate” bartender who had no soul, who didn’t really “get” what bartending was all about… I mean, every bar movie can’t be Roadhouse, but still, you know, the little guy beating the big guy is always a crowd pleaser.
But, to be honest, I needed to watch a movie like Cocktail last night. I couldn’t do another round of outrage news, or political comedy from Colbert or Seth. I needed a clearly silly escape after everything that has happened; a year of Covid, an election, people ignoring medical guidance, and everything else that seems to be a harbinger of the end of the world. I actually needed to see pretty people make mixed drinks in the Caribbean, and witness their very melodramatic reactions to life. And in the end, it all works out.
So, maybe I will watch Roadhouse tonight.
