It's been eight years since David Robert Mitchell released Under the Silver Lake, his much-loved, much-reviled work of Los Angeles noir. So what did Mitchell choose for his next project? Why, a family friendly dinosaur blockbuster, of course. Nobody could have seen The End of Oak Street coming, but the biggest surprise about Mitchell's action/sci-fi mashup is how much it serves as a delightful throwback to some of our favorite PG-13 creature features.
The year is 1982, and suburban living has swallowed Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) whole. Denise loves her children, but the only way she can make sense of her failing marriage to husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) is to sneak down to the basement and write away her unhappiness in an unpublished novel. But when a cosmic event causes their neighborhood to get flung millions of years into the past, the Platts must find a way to come together if they want to survive. One part Jurassic Park, one part Rick & Morty, The End of Oak Street is a throwback to the heyday of PG-13 family entertainment.
In this short excerpt from the episode, Monagle discusses why the film's depiction of a struggling marriage is part of what makes it an effective exercise in period filmmaking:
The idea of a family where two parents are going through a divorce end up falling back in love with each other throughout the process, that feels very of that era as well. In California, no-fault divorce was legalized in 1969, and so a lot of these '80s movies are dealing with the notion of "broken" or "falling apart" households, because suddenly it was more commonplace in the '70s and '80s for people to get divorced if they were no longer in love.
The End of Oak Street episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or the podcast platform of your choice.
