Welcome to the new installment of Virgin Territory, the ongoing feature in which I watch a movie I've never seen before and talk about it with someone who loves it. When putting together this last segment I sent a list of films I hadn't seen to friends I wanted on camera with me, many of these films the kind of macho classics that populate the IMDB Top 250 and whose posters decorate guys' college dorms. And to my surprise Mike Ryan, writer for Movieline, Star Wars devotee and starter of feuds between James Cameron and Piranha 3D producer Mark Canton, picked out the biggest chick flick on the list: Terms of Endearment. Winner of five Oscars, the directorial debut of James L. Brooks (who went on to make Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, among others) and practically synonymous with the word "weepie," 1983's Terms of Endearment was released before I was born, but in time for a nine-year-old Mike to see it in theaters with his mom. Aided with Mike's iPad cued up to the film's most hilarious scene, anecdotes about the fights between Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger on the set, and wondering how the guy who made this could have turned out last year's How Do You Know, Mike and I met at Ditch Plains on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to talk about this Best Picture winner.
Check out 16 minutes of our conversation below, and make sure to watch until the end for Mike's hilarious story about his failed attempt not to watch the sex scene in Top Gun while sitting next to his dad. For more Virgin Territory check out the conversation I had with Cinema Blend's own Eric Eisenberg about The Evil Dead here, and check back soon for the next installment, in which I follow the money back to the 1970s.
