I can't believe it.
How old do I feel now? Real old. The guy who made me love being young... died yesterday.
I distinctly remember a childhood of lingering around my teenage brothers and their friends, hoping to catch a few glimpses of the "adult" John Hughes movies they watched. Maybe it was the John Hughes movies that made me idealize teen years as much as I did. Maybe, despite the fact that high school was kind of lame, I never really complained about it because I seemed to suffer in similar ways to the John Hughes characters I grew up with. Maybe, because of all those movies, I never, not even today, figured I'd ever get older than 17.
Anyway, I pretty much want to thank Hughes for the work he did during 1984-1987. He's been silent lately, but he freakin' OWNED '84-'87.
It all started with
Sixteen Candles. According to my cinematic trivia genius brother, Hughes wrote and directed this one in order to impress the studio enough to deliver his real baby --
The Breakfast Club.
For a buttering-up project, there is no film perfecter. EVERY teen party sequence since has owed itself to the party in
Sixteen Candles. Strangely, I've seen few teen comedies to show the humiliation of riding the school bus. Maybe because it couldn't be topped in this one. Of course, this weirdly-rated PG movie was also quite a coming-of-ager for me. I still remember right after the pull-up scene my brother suddenly being like, "Oh, crap. Jon, close your eyes!"
Anyway,
Breakfast Club is pretty weird. It was his script that he had to fight the studio to produce, but then you check the imdb trivia and it says that a huge chunk of the emotional parts of the movie was improvised. It makes me wonder what parts he was so anxious to film in advance. It also explains the weirdness of Claire going after Bender at the end after he humiliated her so bad. Of course it wasn't Bender who made Claire cry, it was Judd Nelson who made Molly Ringwald cry.
Pretty in Pink was such an important story to Hughes that he wrote it twice. The second time, was as one of my very favorite movies --
Some Kind of Wonderful. The love triangle sexes were merely switched. The stories were about Andie & Blaine and Keith & Amanda, but all of us viewers were completely and hopelessly attached to Duckie and Watts. Watch 'em. You'll know what I mean. John Hughes' third wheels were very three-dimensional.
Oh, and
Ferris Bueller's Day Off! Sheesh! Love. It. Brilliant. I need to watch that again.
I'm sure you've seen this already (it's all over the net right now), but check out this blogger's
story about him.
Anyway, bye John. Make some awesome movies for God!
R.I.P. John Hughes (1950-2009)