Life Moved Pretty Fast

It's been some year for celebrity passings. One disturbing thread is that those who've taken their last breaths were so prominent in the pop culture of my youth. Farrah Fawcett. Michael Jackson. The one-two punch of their deaths made me feel like my youth had also expired. The death of writer/director/producer/purveyor of Generation X zeitgeist John Hughes just cements it.

Hughes passed away yesterday in NYC at the age of 59. He was another of the Boomers responsible for the dangerous comedy of the National Lampoon gang in the 1970s. We would go on to pen a few Lampoon films, most notably the VACATION series. By 1984, he had begun to write and/or direct and produce the first of a series of what would be classics for a generation of banana clipped, Merry Go Round clad, Frankie Say teens. That film was SIXTEEN CANDLES. It was an unusually perceptive youth film. It was great fun, yes, hilarious, vulgar, but quite the antidote to the gaggle of idiotic teen films that had been spawned in the wake of ANIMAL HOUSE. Hughes allowed his lead characters to comment on themselves in the midst of the gags.

This was especially true of THE BREAKFAST CLUB, a film that dared to take place almost entirely in a school library, where a group of disparate yet familiar types spend a Saturday enduring detention. They talk, argue, learn about each other. It was mesmerizing. People in my high school would re-enact scenes at lunchtime. We quoted it incessantly. Hmm, THAT hasn't changed in 24 years.

FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF was another Hughes classic, a wildly enjoyable fantasy detailing the innate urge to skip school. Taken as far as it could go, honestly. Again, the characters break to talk of themselves, their circumstances. Hughes' teen films all dealt with parental relations, socioeconomic statues. popularity, those things. Timeless. The films themselves? A bit dated, but how can they not be with all the 80s props and those wonderful soundtracks? I always feel happy when I revisit a Hughes movie. Yes, even WEIRD SCIENCE.

I could also nitpick these films, how BREAKFAST CLUB is utterly predictable and how some of the characters' dynamics are hard to swallow. I'm a terrible film snob and should I hold these films to the same standards/criteria I usually place, they may not fare so well. But, Hughes did do some good work, even branching out with films like SHE'S HAVING A BABY and PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES. Then, he wrote things like HOME ALONE and many juvenile pieces that set him back, in my book. The last film he directed was CURLY SUE. For later screenplays, he used the pen name Edmond Dantes, a nod to The Count of Monte Cristo. He withdrew from visibility, never again to create something that spoke in some way to so many. But there is a legacy, one that echoes through high school hallways far beyond the fictional Shermer, Illinois.......