We talk dismissively of teen flicks like it's some particularly unintelligent genre of exploitation flicks. It most probably was seen that way even in the 1980s when John Hughes was making some of his most celebrated films.You certainly don't march into the doors of a celebrated Film School and declare your career ambitions are to write and direct hit teen romances and comedies. It's just not done - certainly not in my day, which just followed on from the teenage-hood of sharing time with John Hughes movies.
There was something incredibly haunting and compelling about movies such as 'Pretty in Pink' and 'The Breakfast Club' that as Gen-Xers, you can't quite shake the cultural experience. Whether it be the clumsiliy didactic 'Breakfast Club' or the wantonly irresponsible 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', these films took up residence in your head and always provided context. And context is very important in the arts, thus it comes as no surprise that there has been an outpouring of commentary about John Hughes' films at his passing.
Here's the AFP.
John Hughes, best known for directing a string of 1980s hit movies including The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, has died. He was 59.
Hughes suffered a heart attack while visiting his family in Manhattan, his Los Angeles-based representatives said on Thursday.
A prolific screenwriter and director, Hughes was the creative inspiration behind a series of teen-oriented films throughout the 1980s before penning the screenplay for the smash 1990 Macaulay Culkin film Home Alone.
Here's a primer 'on Ferris Bueller'.
I wasn't totally sold on Hughes' teen films, but there was something extraordinary about the bluntness of the teens in his films. They were just like us. If Lawrence Kasdan's awful 'The Big Chill' was a Baby Boomer's confession, then 'The Breakfast Club' seemd to be a challenge voiced by Gen-X and it might have been the first instance we heard that on screen - which is amazing because Hughes himself clearly was not Gen-X. With the passage of time, we realise that what he was saying through his films was ar more universal than generational. There are probably Emo kids who resonate with 'Breakfast Club'.
Here's Time Magazine's entry.
Does any current teen out there know who John Hughes was? Anyone? Anyone? Adolescent fancies wax and wane at warp speed, but just for historical purposes, kids, you should know that in the 1980s Hughes was the intimate chronicler, confidant and cheerleader of a generation of young people. Writing scripts that could have come from inside their muddled hearts, monitoring their rampaging hormones, he built a smart shelf of adolescent zeitgeist films: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the movie etched in immortality by teacher Ben Stein's plaintive, froggy "Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?"
Everybody's talking about the teen movies, but I also like his John Candy films, especially 'Plane Trains and Automobiles'. I've been told it's a pean to sentimentalism, but I don't see the problem with proper sentiment, and John Hughes' films are incredibly proper and decent - He's the dead opposite of the Marquis deSade. All obstacles can be overcome, all impediments can be removed, there's genuine joy in life without having to look for perverse solutions for pleasure.
'PT&A' traverses the pathos and bathos of class and geography in America, as it maps an emotionally desolate landscape. It's a beautifully crafted film that any film maker worth their salt should aspire to with its insight and understanding. John Hughes understood humanity in its most pathetic as well as most generous. it was an amazing talent. It's not the kind of film that would ever get funding in Australia - which probably proves it is artistically superior to anything that could come out of Australia.
Even though he inflicted the world with Macaulay Culkin, his oeuvre encompasses some amazing cinematic moments that have passed into cultural lore. His films were bildungsroman in an age that no longer finished people into adulthood but initiated them into a world of ambiguous morality.
59 is way too young.
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