Everyone Is a Brat

Especially you, Andrew McCarthy but also you, Justin Timberlake! Also: Build Your Own Mini-Mall, and Kevin Costner starts PR rehab.

I recently spent about 90 minutes I’d like back watching Brats, Andrew McCarthy’s vanity documentary ostensibly about how damaging the Brat Pack label was to all of their lives and careers. It’s actually a portrait of Andrew McCarthy making sweeping assumptions about how his colleagues felt that appear based entirely on his own experience; the most interesting part of the documentary is when it openly ponders who is even in this Brat Pack, anyway. After you turn it off, thanks to the magic of New York magazine putting some of their archives online, you can look for answers yourself in the the original 1985 article, and, while you’re there, decide if it feels like something that could torpedo someone’s entire career or if Andrew just needs to make like Elsa and let it go.

Everyone, including some of the folks in the documentary, seems to have a different sense of who or what the Brat Pack was. I was in elementary school in the ‘80s, so to me, the Brat Pack members were an amalgam of th…