* * *
Adam: I'm stunned. There aren't many directors whose trademark is so noticeable, but every member of my generation knows what the phrase "A John Hughes Film" means. It will be warm, it will be funny, and you will identify with at least one of his teen characters, the kind of humanism I associate with James L. Brooks for grown-up films. In those teen movies, the adults were clueless but the teens felt real -- each insecure and fucked up in their own ways. Really, has there been a better depiction of depression in an adolescent than Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off? (And is there a more rewarding post-credits sequence than that in the same film?) Yes, okay, he screwed up the ending to Pretty In Pink -- but it led him to make Some Kind of Wonderful to atone for it.
And let's not fail to give him credit for his sillier works -- there's a reason Home Alone made such a ridiculous pile of money; it's a Bugs Bunny cartoon perfect brought to life. National Lampoon's Vacation shows a bite he didn't reveal as much later on, and Mr. Mom is an unappreciated gem; at least, I remember it well.
But it's really about those core three films -- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. When they're on, I don't change the channel. Thank you, John Hughes, for delivering such wonderful, empathetic movies to me at the right time in my life for them.
Matt: I'm a little too young to have seen the classic 1984-1987 Hughes films in the theater, but they were on basic cable every weekend (in admittedly sanitized versions), and The Breakfast Club in particular is an enduring film that might even earn the title of "classic." Yes, after that, it's a downslide--Uncle Buck? Curly Sue? Baby's Day Out? But those films in the mid-80s? It's hard to imagine a streak more significant than the Brat Pack series--Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Some Kind Of Wonderful? Not all were great, but they endure.
But the Hughes-driven film with most relevance to my age group has to be Home Alone--still the highest grossing live action comedy of all time. But what made Home Alone, along with all the other Hughes movies, was not just the slapstick comedy, but that there was a heart there--be it Catherine O'Hara's desperate quest to get home to her child, Kevin McAlister's realization that he really does love and miss his brothers and sisters in spite of what they put him through, and the actually moving subplot with Old Man Marley reconciling with his daughter. Hughes had withdrawn from Hollywood in recent years, though a concept from him was the basis for the bomb Drillbit Taylor, but his influence goes on.
Occasional Guest Shonda (Via Twitter): "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stick around once in a while you could miss it" -- my teen years were Ferris and The Breakfast Club.
And let's not fail to give him credit for his sillier works -- there's a reason Home Alone made such a ridiculous pile of money; it's a Bugs Bunny cartoon perfect brought to life. National Lampoon's Vacation shows a bite he didn't reveal as much later on, and Mr. Mom is an unappreciated gem; at least, I remember it well.
But it's really about those core three films -- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. When they're on, I don't change the channel. Thank you, John Hughes, for delivering such wonderful, empathetic movies to me at the right time in my life for them.
Matt: I'm a little too young to have seen the classic 1984-1987 Hughes films in the theater, but they were on basic cable every weekend (in admittedly sanitized versions), and The Breakfast Club in particular is an enduring film that might even earn the title of "classic." Yes, after that, it's a downslide--Uncle Buck? Curly Sue? Baby's Day Out? But those films in the mid-80s? It's hard to imagine a streak more significant than the Brat Pack series--Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Some Kind Of Wonderful? Not all were great, but they endure.
But the Hughes-driven film with most relevance to my age group has to be Home Alone--still the highest grossing live action comedy of all time. But what made Home Alone, along with all the other Hughes movies, was not just the slapstick comedy, but that there was a heart there--be it Catherine O'Hara's desperate quest to get home to her child, Kevin McAlister's realization that he really does love and miss his brothers and sisters in spite of what they put him through, and the actually moving subplot with Old Man Marley reconciling with his daughter. Hughes had withdrawn from Hollywood in recent years, though a concept from him was the basis for the bomb Drillbit Taylor, but his influence goes on.
Occasional Guest Shonda (Via Twitter): "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stick around once in a while you could miss it" -- my teen years were Ferris and The Breakfast Club.
Isaac: I had no idea that he wrote screenplays for Mr. Mom and Vacation, no idea that he was only 34 when he made Sixteen Candles, and no idea that he only directed eight movies in his career. I think his core body of work actually is Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink, the movies set principally in high schools while I was in high school, since Ferris Bueller and Weird Science are focused more on things external to high school and Home Alone, of course, is something completely different. Hughes's window opened on a pretty narrow backyard -- that of an outsider born to and among insiders, and distinguishable from them only by some trait more subtle than appearance or wealth. If the resolution of those '80s movies -- mild individualists finding common ground or romance with people not actually much different from themselves -- was too easy, it was not less comforting, and it made for good parent drop-off date movies. To me, the greatest thing in any John Hughes movie was in the the scene where Sixteen Candles's Jake talks it out with a friend at the chin-up bars in the gym. In the background, there is a one-sided wrestling match between a hulking brute and a sickly-looking kid. The kid struggles, the brute clobbers him, and you get the sense that Hughes knew that the underdog's chances weren't as great as his movies would make it seem.
Adam: Worth noting – at a time when “teen movie” meant horny guys and gratuitous nudity, John Hughes gave us movies centered around Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy. With the possible exception of Sloane in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, women weren’t sex objects in his films or empty slates, but fully-formed central characters. Compare that to today’s Apatovian universe.
Alex: It's fall of my senior year in high school and distinguished alum John Hughes is on campus filming scenes for a new film starring the guy from "War Games." Interiors are being shot nearby at a shuttered high school, Maine North, which was also used for "The Breakfast Club." We are given permission to miss school to appear as extras in the film, but, unfortunately my football coach is not as understanding, and when I explain to the production assistant that I will have to leave early for practice, I am told it is either all day or nothing. I chose football over film, a decision I regret to this day whenever I happen upon "Ferris" and see dozens of my big-haired classmates roaming the halls of Shermer High School or sitting in Sloane's history class.
For a generation, Hughes was the cool uncle who still remembered what it was like to be a teen in a world full of Rooneys, Vernons, and Grandma Helens.
Kim: I'm chiming in a little late, and so have already read many of everyone's comments. What's interesting to me is that while everyone here considers Hughes to have been personally seminal in some way or another, the subset of his work driving that view is so different for each of us. For me it's just Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller -- everything else is at best secondary. Along with just generally being the most perfect teen movie ever, Breakfast Club gave us the most fully realized "bad boy" of any film of my youth. For every girl who had the tendency to ignore the nice boy sitting next to her in class in favor of the guy cutting school to smoke under the bleachers, John Bender validated us. As for Ferris, it's not that it spoke to us all the way Breakfast Club did -- it's more that it provided us with a universe of common pop cultural experience to share together in the pre-look-up-all-the-funny-lines-on-imdb-and-find-lists-of-seminal-moments-on-random-blogs-like-this-one era. Each of us has seen the movie a million times, and we know that everyone else has as well. Who doesn't occasionally spout an "anyone? Bueller?" when faced with an unexpected silence? So that's how it is in their family . . . do you have a kiss for daddy? . . . pardon my french, but you're an asshole! . . . let my Cameron go . . . Ferris Bueller's on line two . . .
(Also: it is now 8:43 pm and no one has realized that Matt left "a princess" out of the tag line. For shame!)
No comments:
Post a Comment