A few years back, I attended an anniversary screening for Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad, with the cast and filmmaker in attendance for a post-film Q&A. A young girl in attendance asked Dekker whether he felt any reservations upon re-viewing it twenty years later, in having one of his young characters call another a faggot. It was an honest question that deserved an honest question in response. Dekker: “Ma’am, may I ask what your name is?” Attendee: “It’s ______” Dekker: “Okay,_______, if you don’t mind me asking, have you ever been a twelve year old boy?” I feel like any negative comments I might have towards Rebecca Perry Cutter‘s Besties would result in someone saying the same thing to me, just reversing the gender. I am not much of a fan of Besties, but I also was never a timid 14-year-old girl struggling to break out of her shell. I also did not live next door to the most popular and superficial (and self-assuredly smoking hot) girl in school, who I desperately wanted to be my friend despite knowing we were two wildly different classes of individual. I also haven’t killed anyone accidentally at a party in self-defense, and therefore I should not judge how two young teenage girls are depicted handling that particular situation.

Spike Lee made his bones in the indie film world by making movies about life in Brooklyn. Films like She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing set the tone for what eventually became known as his Chronicles of Brooklyn anthology. The director hasn’t explored this particular corner of his film universe since 1998’s He Got Game, however, so it was starting to look like subject matter he had fully explored and put away. That is, until the promotion for Red Hook Summer started. Not only has this film been heralded as being a new inclusion into the Chronicles of Brooklyn, some have been calling it a direct sequel to Do the Right Thing, largely because Lee is appearing in the film as his old character, Mookie. But now that we’ve seen the first trailer, that seems to be overstating things. While Do the Right Thing was a snapshot of youth culture in Brooklyn at a certain moment in time, Red Hook Summer seems to be a much more personal, coming-of-age movie about the journey one character takes. That character is Flik Royale (Jules Brown), a young man from a nice neighborhood in Atlanta who is sent to live with his Bishop grandfather (Clarke Peters) in one of the shadier parts of Brooklyn for the summer.

In this segment of Movies We Love we visit the 1988 animated masterpiece from Isao Takahata, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli along with close friend and fellow master animator Hayao Miyazaki. Tread cautiously as there are no Totoros to be found in this tale of a brother and sister trying to survive the famine of Japan during World War II.

Goonies might never say die, but the kids on the sandlot will call you a butt sniffer and then make out with a hot lifeguard. Celebrate their bad ass status with us, won’t you?

Seasoned filmmaker Kevin Reynolds talks with us about the magic moments of filmmaking, advises aspiring filmmakers to be hobos for a while, and tries to unravel his dedication to Kevin Costner.