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John Hughes was just as, and possibly more, important to my teenage years as he was to anyone else’s from my generation. I was 12 when Sixteen Candles was released, the perfect age to inherit Hughes’ warning of impending teenage dysfunction, and my eerie resemblance to Anthony Michael Hall in both looks and manner was often noted, and yet difficult not wear as a badge of dubious honor. Farmer Ted, after all, was the “King of the Dipshits” and he got the hot girl.

However, my early infatuation with the movies of John Hughes receded quickly as I stepped into the real teenage world. In junior high I thought of The Breakfast Club as deeply profound, even going so far as to purchase an early draft of the screenplay from the back of Film Threat magazine. Just a few years later, the movie seemed ridiculously shallow and condescending, with nothing meaningful to say about the gross stereotypes it depicted or their overly maudlin predicaments. When my high school psychology teacher announced that we would be spending three class periods watching a largely worthless middle-age fantasy of adoloescence, I walked out, and nearly flunked the class because of it.

The problem with Breakfast Club is that it so earnestly tries to be profound it completely misses the mark. Hughes was far better when he was funny, and the little profundities slipped in inadvertently.

However, The Breakfast Club still elicits a fond nostalgia in me. Not so with Hughes’ even more pernicious and objectionable “classic” Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I disliked Ferris from the moment I saw it as part of a double feature with Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School (which I liked much better at the time). Ferris was exactly the kind of smug, spoiled, sociopathic teen most in need of being bitchslapped in real life.

As I wrote in my DVD review of  Wes Anderson’s wonderful Rushmore several years ago: “Rushmore re-invents adolescent angst so wondrously and hilariously that it puts all other teen comedies to instant shame. Max’s gung-ho spirit exposes Ferris Bueller as an empty fraud, and his dark confrontation of conflict makes Bueller look like a pussy.”

While I haven’t seen either Breakfast Club or Ferris in over a decade or more, last year I unfortunately revisited one of my teenhood favorites, Weird Science, which put my nostalgia to shame. What a strange, incoherent, and manically unfunny movie.

Hughes’ work certainly degenerated  in quality as he gained in fame, with his best work in the early screenplays for National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr. Mom, and his one enduring classic, Sixteen Candles, which effortlessly captures the awkwardness of the age, without trying to harness it for any greater truth.

YouTube – Superbad Sixteen Candles.

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