John Hughes: Classic or Dud?

They were all works of genius, but flawed genius admittedly (example being the dancing scene in Breakfast club, I never liked that bit)

Ferris comes close to my ideal film though, great soundtrack, moments of comedy, the dream that you could one day have that perfect day....

as a slight addition to the thread, what about the new batch of teen comedy (ignoring the gross out ones such as Dude where's my car? I'm thinking ten things I hate about you and she's all that etc,) are they as good? I'm starting to think so

The John Hughes formula (large bunch of teen stereotypes, obligatory dance sequence) is looking a wee bit aged now. Its only the ones which resemble Dawsons Creek - say The Breakfast Club - which really still stand up. St Elmo's Fire and Some Kind Of Wonderful stink. Of course Some Kind Of Wonderful is merely Pretty In Pink with the other ending (chick ends up with weirdo who loves her) so Pretty In Pink is pretty shit.

I don't think of Ferris Buellers Day Off as a teen movie - probably because it is actually really good.

Days Day Out is a classic though.

But actually she always better in TOTALLY RUBBISH movies, where she'd just go for broke.

I always liked it when Sheedy looked completely bemused with what was going on (with bith her life and career). Miles better than Molly Ringworm.

I take that back, I do remember the El Debarge song "Who's Johnny?" from the movie. Not a great thing to remember, but there it is.

Probably a better Artificial Intelligence movie that AI though.

I'm happy you're happy. I'm not happy contemplating this damn movie again, for which I blame you. Punk.

I think someone told me I looked like Molly Ringwald a couple of weeks ago. I'm nor sure because he was speaking in German, which I do not understand. He was pointing at my hair and the only words I could pick out were Molly Ringwald and Simple Minds. That said he was probably saying I looked like Jim

The Israali primeminister is a war criminal. He got War criminals and killers out of prison, dressed them up in soldier uniform. Armed them with knives gun bombs and torture instruments.Sent them in to the small population of 2000 people

Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein charged yesterday that the indictment in Belgium against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former IDF officers linked to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila Massacre was a political rather than a judicial act. http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/07/11/News/News.30175.html

USA-Rat-Arse(USA-Ronin (Mar 2 2002 - 15:36)\)read this An American wrote this:

Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, is one of the world's most bloodstained terrorists. He is responsible for the cold-blooded slaughter of at least 1,500 men, women and children in the Beirut refugee camps of Chatila and Sabra. Even a formal Israeli commission found Sharon personally responsible for the Lebanese massacres.(4)

In 1982, as Israel's defense minister, Sharon directed Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the carpet bombing and devastation of the city of Beirut (In Lebanon five times more women and children died than in the September New York attack). This terror bombing was carried out by Jews using jet fighters and bombs supplied by the United States.

After the Israeli military devastation and occupation, Sharon forcibly removed Palestinian resistance fighters from Lebanon. Many Palestinian women, children and old people were left behind in refugee camps near Beirut. The United States publicly guaranteed their safety and promised that they would quickly be reunited with their loved ones. When Sharon plotted their murder, he not only planned a bloody act of terrorism against the refugees; he knew it was an act of treachery against the United States that would raise intense hatred against America.

On the night of September 16, 1982, Sharon sent Phalangist murder squads into two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Chatila. With Israeli tanks and troops closely surrounding the camps to prevent any of the Palestinians from escaping, the murder squads machine-gunned, bayoneted, and bludgeoned Palestinian civilians all that night, the next day and the following night; all while the Israelis surrounding the camps listened gleefully to the machine gun fire and screams coming from inside. Sharon then sent in bulldozers to hide as much of the atrocity as he could. At least 2000 old men, women and children were butchered, and perhaps as many as 2500. (An official Lebanese investigation set the figure at 2500) Even after the efforts of Sharon's bulldozers, many Palestinians remained unburied, and Red Cross workers found whole families; including hundreds of elderly and little children, with their throats cut or disemboweled. Uncounted numbers of women and girls were also raped before they were slaughtered.

Ariel Sharon is sought for trial by the Hague Tribunal, the same body that succeeded in extraditing former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for charges of crimes against humanity in Kosovo. Sharon will not travel to Belgium for fear of arrest by the International Court for the massacre.(5) http://www.minneapolis.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=3533

. EVEN A FORMAL ISRAELI commission found Sharon PERSONALLY responsible for the Lebanese massacres.(

Atama Ii (Jan 18 2002 - 08:00) "Wasn't Sharon, after all, the one that said that Israel controlled the U.S.?" Do you have more info on this. Just curious....

I will have a look 4 you, but I think it may be controll in a more indirect tacticall fashion.

Heres an example:

"Many Palestinian women, children and old people were left behind in refugee camps near Beirut. The United States publicly guaranteed their safety and promised that they would quickly be reunited with their loved ones. When Sharon plotted their murder, he not only planned a bloody act of terrorism against the refugees; he knew it was an act of treachery against the United States that would raise intense hatred against America."

http://www.minneapolis.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=3533

A good example of a smaller country outwitting and tactically controlling a larger one! Read The Article, "Sharon regrets not killing Arafat"

i watched pretty in pink for the first time in about four years last night and, frankly, it is possibly the best film EVER, there isn't a single rubbish bit in it as far as i can see...

i'm surprised none of his films have gotten the deluxe DVD treatment yet.

I disagree with this quote from two and a half years ago! What other film has Eric Stoltz, a girl who drums, a friendly punk, Brilliant Mind by Furniture and Can't Help Falling in Love with You by Lick the Tins?

St Elmo's Fire is a bit shit, that I grant you.

it has a dream academy version of 'please please please let me get what i want'. nuff sed.

something D O O economics

and yes, I'm sure I stuck up for Some kind of wonderful upthread, it's great.

She's fabulous, ain't she?

http://www.metro.co.uk/metro/interviews/interview.html?in_page_id=8&in_interview_id=857

JH: C

It is not as good as I once thought. Terrible comedy Chinaman was always awful, obviously, but also the romantic ending now just strikes me as a fire hazard. I R OLD :(

an excellent summary of some kind of wonderful. also notable for instilling in many a young girl's heart (well, mine..) the idea that kissing your beloved on the hood of a car as stephen duffy swells up in the background is as romantic as it gets.

is it me or is Weird Science terrrrrrible

http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=389

i'm looking for just the clip in Breakfast Club where Estevez or AMH says 'demented and sad, but social'. anybody with super google chops willing to lend a hand?

this piece is mostly about hockey but also reveals that Hughes was a Dilla fan!!

He would certainly have upheld his commitment to tracking Michigan culture from afar, a sideline to his predominant infatuation with Chicago. Detroit music was paramount. When he heard J Dilla's Donuts, he was awed by the range of samples and promptly began combing music blogs and his own record collection to assemble a series of mix CDs that eventually encapsulated the source of every prominent break — an assignment he surely wouldn't have engaged in had Dilla been from Duluth and not Detroit.8 When his cache of mix CDs grew too voluminous, he resorted to passing along preloaded iPods to friends and family. I couldn't help but notice how frequently he slipped Glenn Miller's "(I've Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo" onto playlists — another chance to shoehorn the peninsula into the conversation.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9221556/filmmaker-john-hughes-nhl-fandom

Keep in mind that his son John III was a Chicago hipster and label dude who no doubt turned his dad onto some stuff. Though the above implies Hughes took Dilla fandom to the OCD next level!

what band/project was he on again? teflon tel aviv?

Ran Hefty records, was in a couple of mediocre post rock bands.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/what-about-the-breakfast-club-molly-ringwald-metoo-john-hughes-pretty-in-pink

My older daughter just saw Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles. Pretty sure she liked them both, but these movies are just so formally weird. Pacing, script, settings ...

oh man i started reading that and kept thinking that she REALLY didn't want to read some of his old NatLamp stuff but i'm glad she did and that she wrote about it. that magazine and hughes in it could be truly vile and hateful. and, of course, i grew up on it. which is why i am so vile and hateful today.

any time i put on an old 80s "kids" movie or whatever and watch with cyrus there is inevitably the horrible racist/sexist/homophobic/etc scene or three that i never remember being in the movie. it was just so normal. cyrus always calls them out loudly.

“Pretty in Pink” features a character, Duckie, who was loosely based on my best friend of forty years, Matthew Freeman. We’ve been friends since I was ten, and he worked as a production assistant on the film. Like Emil, he’s out now, but wasn’t then. (It’s one of the reasons I’ve often posited, to the consternation of some fans and the delight of others, that Duckie is gay, though there’s nothing to indicate that in the script.) “The characters John created spoke to feeling invisible and an outsider,” Matt told me recently. They got at “how we felt as closeted gay kids who could only live vicariously through others’ sexual awakenings, lest we get found out with the very real threat of being ostracized or pummeled.”

I've often posited this too. Thanks, Mollie!

Pretty in Pink is so awful.

i feel like she's wrong about YA book popularity though. the 70s saw a real boom. #mydarlingmyhamburger

i mean it used to be there were just kids books but in the 70s there were tons of books for "today's teen" and everyone read them.

thanks in large part to our lord and savior...

https://english.colostate.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/56/2017/03/sehinton.jpg

Pretty in Pink is so awful.

― "Minneapolis" (barf) (Eric H.

It wasn't made for us, as the piece makes clear, I think.

i think for all the many shit things about Hughes films, the best parts are still good and still resonate pretty well. You do have to ignore that shit stuff to get to the rest though. i'll say that he was on an upward trajectory quality wise right up through Planes, Trains, and Automobiles...and then he made She's Having a Baby and then came the '90s kids movies.

i always forget that he didn't direct Pretty In Pink, which may account for some of the sloppiness. His direction i think was extremely good in a lot of those films (FBDA and PT&A are especially well made), but PIP is nowhere near his usual level in that regard. the best parts of that film involve actors: any scene revolving around Molly Ringwald and Harry Dean Stanton, and James Spader of course.

Ringwald in every scene really acquits herself incredibly well, she manages to come away unscathed from the most embarrassing parts (anything involving Duckie basically!) If he'd directed it himself, I think it would have been a lot better, even though it does seem like he had a heavy hand in its production.

i knew so many kids in middle school, the ones who were considered to be more "troubled", who really identified with The Breakfast Club and watched it incessantly. lots of it was clunky but a lesser film would have been complete shit and taken so many easier routes out with those characters.

.and then he made She's Having a Baby

i, ahem, rescreened this recently and it is a uniquely charmless, unlikable film

Later John Hughes is totally worth it for Baby's Day Out and its scene of the baby lighting the guy's crotch on fire, and his fellow henchmen trying to stomp it out while he writhes on the ground in agony.

It wasn't made for us, as the piece makes clear, I think.

If a movie has ever been made specifically for you or I, I'm not aware of it.

I totally forgot that Sixteen Candles has a scene of the popular girl taking a shower, lit totally cheesecake. I had put the movie on my daughter's iPad, and she was watching it on an airplane. When that scene came around she totally freaked out and got embarrassed, because she knew how inappropriate it was to watch on a plane.

i really don't miss a lot of the curdled '50s shit that was such a huge part of my cultural childhood in the '70s and '80s. so many embarrassing peeking at lady underwear moments. thank god nobody grows up an altar boy anymore. Louie might have been the last gasp of the horny doo wop dinosaur.

so many movies of that era have a scene like that

watching season 2 of the wire recently and realizing half of my hatred for ziggy is his resemblance to all those idiot bowery boy sex comedy nerds trying to get laid in the '80s.

so many of those movies would probably be terrifying now to watch. all that unfunny desperation. scary stuff.

"This movie is terrible! I can't relate to this at all!"
-Eric H on Girl's Trip

As a weird kid at my school, liking the Breakfast Club was a fait accompli. It was nearby, it had a couple weird kids in it, it was funny enough, so you watched it. I also watched Ferris Bueller the same way, but I always hated Ferris and his girlfriend. In real life they were exactly the kind of suburban assholes you had to put up with to have a good time - they had a car, and were daring and fun... as long as you were doing exactly what they wanted to do.

With patience you'd finally meet a freak who would show you their tapes of really weird and fun movies (Times Square, The Hunger, Pink Flamingos, Repo Man, Urgh! A Music War, etc) and John Hughes could be set aside.

Ziggy makes more sense if you imagine him as a John Hughes dork teleported from Evanston IL and into the harsh world of Baltimore stevedores, trying to charm everyone w/bad jokes and dropping his pants, and eventually descending into a rage-filled breakdown. he's basically a rated R Duckie.

is ziggy the baby in baby days out

something like the last american virgin would totally play as a horror movie today.

tbf I suspect that movie is meant to be ugly. It's tawdry yeah, but it's also pretty unapologetically bleak with no happy ending.

"This movie is terrible! I can't relate to this at all!"
-Eric H on Girl's Trip

That ... is a lie.

If a movie has ever been made specifically for you or I, I'm not aware of it.

― "Minneapolis" (barf) (Eric H.),

surely there's a Bela Tarr movie with 45-minute shots of katydids in the grass

is ziggy the baby in baby days out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2bH3yEjGvc

only time i've seen baby's day out was on the little tv in the corner of a (state) health insurance office waiting room, but i did see it twice in a row.

Love that Molly Ringwald article.

Later John Hughes is totally worth it for Baby's Day Out and its scene of the baby lighting the guy's crotch on fire, and his fellow henchmen trying to stomp it out while he writhes on the ground in agony.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, April 6, 2018 6:08 PM (five hours ago)

always felt like there was such a strange gulf between the angst-y/sentimental side of JH's writing, the stuff ppl always seem to mean when they say "john hughes movies," and the kind of gross and crass slapstick you often see in the actual movies, which always feels way more mean-spirited than, like, the three stooges. even ferris bueller has some of that.

Bill Chambers' review of the Breakfast Club CC may only be the second best thing written on the subject this week, but it's still incredible.

I doubt I minded Bender so much back in university, because I'd conflated the movie's R rating with artistic integrity and his abrasiveness fed into that romantic notion. Now, though--now I have asshole fatigue, thanks primarily to living in 2018. I don't want to unduly punish The Breakfast Club for failing to measure up to any newfound wokeness on my part, but I also don't want to do that '80s kid thing where I pretend that something is timeless because I grew up with it. (We were the first generation aggressively catered to by advertisers. With our approval so hotly pursued, why would we ever change an opinion held in childhood?) The Breakfast Club presents a particular conundrum in that the movie itself challenges viewers not to grow up, lest their "heart die." I can't deny there's a passive-aggressive if accidental genius to that, just as I can't deny that this is a problematic film, one that is hemorrhaging relevance in a world where a kid bringing a flare gun to school would be cause for considerably more reproach than a glorified time-out and an all-white cast strikes a hostile note. Indeed, the staggering whiteness of Hughes's work makes me increasingly uncomfortable: Yes, he made films in the '80s--but not the 1880s. How are we to celebrate a man seeing past his age if that same man can't see past his race? The great thing about The Breakfast Club getting inducted into the Criterion Collection is that it reclaims the movie from both mindless detractors and the toxic pull of nostalgia by framing it as epochal--a "defining moment of cinema," per the company's manifesto.

Sixteen Candles is better and worse than expected.

Better: Molly Ringwald's fresh, winning performance; she was never better, does nothing expected, and I can see why many thought she had a career. The dialogue. Anthony Michael Hall not playing the Geek as a movie dork but as a TV-soaked weirdo.

Worse: the Asian transplant and the "Oriental" theme music announcing whenever he's onscreen. The camera's leering at Ringwald. The sitcom rhythm of anything involving the grandparents (who are extraneous).

On the other hand, the Big Party is true to my experience a decade later in private school, i.e. the Brett Kavanaugh Experience.

I'd never seen it btw

C’mon… they just drove around. That’s how the car got so many miles on it.

https://deadline.com/2022/08/ferris-buellers-day-off-spinoff-cobra-kai-creators-bill-posley-paramount-pictures-1235088658/

I really like the idea of this ... 25 years ago.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81GWEmW58eL._SL1500_.jpg

PTA muzak version of "Back in Baby's Arms" or we riot

vinyl and cd but no cassette version?

Better: Molly Ringwald's fresh, winning performance; she was never better, does nothing expected, and I can see why many thought she had a career

I’ve been kinda shocked recently to read about roles she supposedly was offered and turned down (Pretty Woman! Ghost! Blue freakin’ Velvet!)

Supposedly it was her Mom who turned down Blue Velvet, because she read the script first and was like, "NOPE!".

Ran Hefty records, was in a couple of mediocre post rock bands.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, May 4, 2013 3:29 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Listening to Bill Ding for the first time in many years. Not on Spotify, but I found a few tracks on YouTube. Still sounds pretty good to me!

The Reach the Rock score is a pretty remarkable work. I don’t know why Universal has never put it out on DVD or Blu-Ray. It’s on the Hoopla app