Tag: 1985

140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW

I won’t be using the nickname for all these actors, as it’s demeaning & limiting, even to this collection of wholly unlikable characters…

Spoiler-free Movie Review of St. Elmo’s Fire:

I’d never seen St. Elmo’s Fire before, but I’m not sure I’d say I missed it…

This is the movie where everyone who just played high schoolers a few months ago now plays college graduates, right?

Actually, I am aware that this is the appropriate age for these actors to play. It was in The Breakfast Club that they were way too old…

St. Elmo’s Fire will always be lumped in with the movies of this era, the ones with many of these cast members (I won’t be using the nickname for all these actors, as I find it demeaning and limiting). And by those standards, it fails terribly.

Released just a few short months after similarly casted The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire is woefully lacking in any of the earlier films credibility. It tries for the same approach, showcasing the trials and tribulations of young life and love, but its clumsy attempts at emotional depth and insight just emphasize how gifted John Hughes was as a writer. It’s no insult whatsoever to suggest that co-writers Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander can’t meet the standards set by John Hughes – few can. But this really is an unlikable group of characters. Maybe I would have identified with them more if I were at a similar age at the time of release.

Random thoughts while watching:

• Joel Schumacher directed this? I don’t remember any explosions – are you sure? Although it does have his patented total lack of subtlety. This may actually be a step down from his previous feature, D.C. Cab – y’know, the one with Mr. T…
• Oh man, I remembered that the theme song was a big hit, but I couldn’t remember how it went. I kept getting Huey Lewis’ Jacob’s Ladder in my head every time I tried to remember. Now I wish I didn’t get reminded. Oh wait, there’s 2 theme songs – a love song and another soft-rock one. What’s embarrassing is I’m fairly sure we had the soundtrack for this…

• I actually hated these characters before the opening credits were finished. And now I remember why I’ve never seen this before…
• I’m genuinely disappointed that this film has nothing to do with the nautical electrical phenomenon. Just a bunch of yuppie jerks…

• Wow, I didn’t even recognize Demi Moore for the first 20 minutes…
• I’m not prepared to watch 90 minutes of “cool” Rob Lowe…
• So many skinny ties…
• For the Halloween party at the club, Lowe, with his ripped tank top, bandana, dangly earring and sweaty hair, playing a mean sax, exhorts the crowd, “let’s rock” and initiates a clap in perfect time to the dreadful soft-rock his band is hammering out. How is this not a meme?

• Love the massive Billy Idol mural…
• Mare Winningham pairing off with Lowe is maybe the worst turn in a movie full to the brim with them.
• In what way is Emilio Estevez’s character not a stalker?
• The soundtrack to hell has a lot of saxophones…
• Seeing my beloved Ally Sheedy getting mauled by both Judd Nelson and Andrew McCarthy is unbearable…

St. Elmo’s Fire is more like an 80’s time capsule than anything I’ve seen. It’s not just the fashion or the music or anything, it has far more to do with the mindset and attitudes. It’s the ugly side of the 80’s – the “me first” entitlement, the casual coke use and meaningless sex…

The characters are horrible people, the dialogue is clunky, the story is preposterous. Avoid…

Poster:

Trailer:

Bechdel Test:

Pass

The Representation Test Score: C (4 pts)

(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)

[schema type=”movie” name=”St. Elmo’s Fire” description=”A group of friends, just out of college, struggle with adulthood.” director=”Joel Schumacher” actor_1=”Ally Sheedy” ]

Main Cast	Demi Moore Jules, Rob Lowe Billy Hicks, Andrew McCarthy Kevin Dolenz, Emilio Estevez Kirby Keger
Rating	R
Release Date	Fri 28 Jun 1985 UTC
Director	Joel Schumacher
Genres	Drama, Romance
Plot	A group of friends, just out of college, struggle with adulthood.
Poster
Runtime	110
Tagline	The passion burns deep.
Writers	Joel Schumacher (written by) &, Carl Kurlander (written by)
Year	1985

140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW

The solitary onion ring in your basket of fries, the picture’s nothing like any of Hughes’ other films. Mostly fun anyway, but in over head.

Spoiler-free Movie Review of Weird Science:

Always great to be back in Shermer…

Never knew this was an adaptation of sorts. I mean, sure, it’s clearly based on Frankenstein, but I didn’t realize there was a more direct link – an old comic book series from the early 1950’s of the same name published by Bill Gaines (publisher of Tales from the Crypt and MAD Magazine), specifically the story “Made of the Future” by Al Feldstein.

Maybe one reason it never occurred to me that Weird Science could be an adaptation is because it’s so obvious of a story it hardly seems like anyone would have needed to write it – stories like these just float in the ether, nearly completely developed, waiting for someone to actually commit them to film.

The premise is so simple it could have been written in crayon. If Weird Science seems like a tv show, that may be because it’s essentially I Dream of Jeannie. It did also spawn a mid-1990’s tv show on USA (and later Sci-Fi) that ran for 5 seasons and 88 episodes! I’m almost tempted to track it down to see how on earth they kept this yarn going for over 30 hours of content. Almost…

John Hughes both wrote & directed this one, and if it isn’t exactly one of his more important films, it’s every bit as fun.

The movie clocks in at just over an hour and a half and there’s no time wasted in this one. We meet the protagonists, they’re humiliated, credits run and then Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) is inspired to create a woman with the computer skills of Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith). Boom – not even seven minutes in and we know everything we need to know.

If this movie wasn’t so good it would be terrible. Actually, the film itself sort of is excellent and terrible in equal measure. For example, I love the cultural awareness like scanning a picture of David Lee Roth as part of creating this virtual girl simulation, but in the same scene the depiction of computer hacking is inexcusably poor, even for the time.

Similarly, I love the scene in the Kandy Bar where Gary is talking about his “trials and tribulations” with the girl “on the telephone”, but it doesn’t totally play as well as it did then. It’s sort of mildly offensive and just not really funny. It’s a bit of nostalgic fun watching Hall play for the back row and everything but it was hysterical when I was 12 or 13. So it doesn’t really age well. Or I don’t…

Weird Science would probably work a lot better if you didn’t know it was a John Hughes joint and subject it to comparison, because it just doesn’t stack up. And that’s really the only thing wrong with it – it came out six months after The Breakfast Club. The bar had been forever raised and this just has to be viewed differently than if it had come out earlier. I guess the first high school trilogy was meant to start with Breakfast Club but Sixteen Candles was an easier sell. From a historical framework I’d probably judge Weird Science less critically if it was the first of the three, not the third…

Nevertheless, the casting and performances are excellent. Anthony Michael Hall gets to do all the fun stuff, but Ilan Mitchell-Smith does a good job. Bill Paxton is just so good as Chet…

As Ian and Max, the semi-bullies, Robert Rusler & RDJ are funny as total dickweeds. I always thought these guys were curious. How are they the popular ones when they dress like Ducky? I may or may have not learned their weird handshake when I was in middle school…

Kelly LeBrock is just so perfect in this film. Lisa is such an interesting character and not at all what you’d expect. The zaniness and penchant for trouble, yes. But the big sister support and protectiveness, no. Her love of the boys is so clear and gentle. Dare I say motherly?

The film is really just a typical screwball 80’s comedy, hardly different in the telling than so many others. Except…there’s all these wonderful moments and great lines. Even when Hughes isn’t really stretching himself his excellence shines through…

“I really don’t think so…Sue…”

“If you want to be a party animal you have to learn to live in the jungle.”

“My dad’s a plumber and he’s into plumbing and I, well I guess you plumb, right, Dad?”

“Don’t threaten me Al! You’re out of shape, I’ll kick your arse.”

“You know, there’s going to be sex, drugs, rock-n-roll… chips, dips, chains, whips… You know, your basic high school orgy type of thing. I mean, uh, I’m not talking candlewax on the nipples, or witchcraft or anything like that, no, no, no. Just a couple of hundred kids running around in their underwear, acting like complete animals.”

“I think Gary and Wyatt are going to force everyone to redefine their terms.”

“When are you gonna learn that people will like you for who you are, not for what you can give them?”

Other thoughts:

• Great music (I think). Heard the Del Fuegos in there as well as Ratt’s Wanted Man; love it…
• Man the fashion is weird…There are so many bandanas in the party scene it almost defies belief…

• Gary’s mom shows his dad a picture of their son – it’s a photo of Hall as “Farmer Ted” from Sixteen Candles…
• Title track by Oingo Boingo is a classic…
• I find it interesting that they just brought over a fully featured character from The Road Warrior; I mean he’s even dressed the same – did he steal the costume?

• The party and especially the aftermath take up as much time as everything that came before…
• Chet’s transformation – nasty. Even worse than I remember.
• The gratuitous nudity of a random partygoer is both gratuitous and random. As much as we think of the Hughes oeuvre as being particularly enlightened with regards to female representation, there are several real stereotypical blemishes on his pictures that remind you simultaneously that the 80’s were quite a while ago and that Hughes got his start at National Lampoon…
• (That being said, I’m not sure that the story that surfaced in Kirk Honeycutt’s new book, “John Hughes: A Life in Film” about the female stars of The Breakfast Club squashing a gratuitous nude scene in their film is entirely true. It’s a great story if it’s true, but the actress in question, Karen Leigh Hopkins, who shot a few scenes as a P.E. teacher, insists that there was nothing in the script she was given requiring her to disrobe, and she certainly didn’t film any such scene. On the other hand, I’d believe just about anything that Molly Ringwald says…)

• There’s also something seriously hypocritical in painting Ian & Max as jerks with no respect for their girlfriends, considering the implicitly approved of behavior of Jake in Sixteen Candles. And he’s supposed to be the good guy!

Weird Science is sort of the odd Tinkertoy in Hughes’ box of Legos. It just doesn’t really fit in with any of his other pictures thematically or stylistically. In the end, I did end up enjoying this re-watch of a movie that I once loved, even if I didn’t, couldn’t, take the same pleasure in it as I did as a teen. That being said, why are they remaking this?

Trailer:

Bechdel Test:

Pass

The Representation Test Score: D (3 pts)

(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)

[schema type=”movie” name=”Weird Science” description=”Two high school nerds attempt to create the perfect woman, but she turns out to be more than that.” director=”John Hughes” actor_1=”Anthony Michael Hall” ]

Main Cast	Anthony Michael Hall Gary Wallace, Ilan Mitchell-Smith Wyatt Donnelly, Kelly LeBrock Lisa, Bill Paxton Chet Donnelly
Rating	PG-13
Release Date	Fri 02 Aug 1985 UTC
Director	John Hughes
Genres	Comedy, Fantasy, Romance
Plot	Two high school nerds attempt to create the perfect woman, but she turns out to be more than that.
Poster
Runtime	94
Tagline	This Bud’s for YOU!
Writers	John Hughes (written by)
Year	1985

140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW

Hughes’ greatest is arguably the most important film about teenage life. There were better, there were earlier, but none better earlier…

Spoiler-free Movie Review of The Breakfast Club:

The early John Hughes pictures, the ones that really created the classification “John Hughes movie” are widely considered to make up an arc of six films or two high school trilogies made in an astoundingly short four years from 1984 to 1987:

• The first trilogy were the first three movies he directed in addition to writing; Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science
• The second trilogy is made up of the next three pictures he wrote, of which he directed only the middle one; Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Some Kind of Wonderful

Personally, I prefer the breakdown created by Art3mis in Ready Player One:

“Her newest blog post was titled “The John Hughes Blues,” and it was an in-depth treatise on her six favorite John Hughes teen movies, which she divided into two separated trilogies: The “Dorky Girl Fantasies” trilogy (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful) and the “Dorky Boy Fantasies” trilogy (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).”

But however you choose to look at them, these six films really do make up a fairly complete statement on Hughes’ power to give voice to the (white, middle class) teenager. Hughes as both a writer and director was so much more than his teen movies, but there is unquestionably a solid body of work during those years in which his pictures maintained a strong theme. It was an impressive run, and if his name has become shorthand for a type of film, it’s a compliment and in no way meant to diminish his other considerable features.

I caught almost all of these films after the fact. The only one of his pictures that I ever saw in the theater was Ferris Bueller. I was just a bit young for some of them. I still remember being on a hike with the Scouts when the other boys were excited to see The Breakfast Club and astonished at my indifference. I was still into baseball and baseball cards and baseball and Star Wars figures and baseball. Life changes so quickly in those tween/teen years, which is of course what Hughes understood so well.

I don’t know if The Breakfast Club is the best picture in the group, but I’d argue that it’s certainly the most “important” or culturally significant.

Initially the film was supposed to be Hughes’ directorial debut. After the massive twin 1983 successes that he wrote, Mr. Mom & National Lampoon’s Vacation, he had enough juice to get his shot at directing a film, but not an hour and a half one room play of five teenagers talking, which The Breakfast Club certainly is.

It’s almost certainly a good thing that he made Sixteen Candles first. Aside from the practical considerations of learning how to make a picture, he developed relationships with two of his most storied leads, Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall that allowed for the trust necessary to deal with the much heavier topics of the 1985 film. The success of Sixteen Candles also allowed the director some small degree of pull and enhanced the audience for The Breakfast Club.

While the picture retains many of the director’s trademarks, the film is significant in the development of the filmmaker in that it strips away a lot of those elements that would define his work. Shot entirely in sequence on more or less one set, the picture eschews the jump cuts and breaking of the fourth wall that would feature so prominently in his other works. The screenplay was workshopped like a play through multiple rehearsals before filming, yet was still full of ad libs, including the soul-baring scene in which each character explains why they are in all-day detention.

Music was always an enormous part of his films, but other than the legendary theme song, the soundtrack is forgettable and doesn’t factor hugely into the action – which makes sense considering the detention hall setting.

 

Is The Breakfast Club the best film made about teenage life? I don’t know. Depends on the definition. There are better all around films that portray teens realistically and with insight, but as a film that is exclusively about teenagers, you’d have to say yes. No film better depicted more accurately and refreshingly what it was like to be a teenager. At the time, anyway. You could get into a whole discussion about how poor the representation is outside of white, middle class, middle Americans. Hughes did this deliberately, by the way; he wanted all of the characters to be physically similar while he established the stereotypes so the character of the individuals would project beyond those labels as the script trashed them.

So there is certainly a legitimate argument to be made that while this film speaks deeply to some of us, it’s only to some of us. I’d like to think that’s not the case. The themes of familial discord, struggling with expectations, peer pressure, self-identification – these are universal, even if the circumstances present themselves differently.

The reason the film passes the sniff test to me is that if you pose the question, “would this film be just as meaningful if you remade it with today’s teens, or with an all Indian cast, or set in Compton or Paris or with hearing impaired teens?”, the answer is a resounding yes.

The film moves along surprisingly swiftly, as I’m sure everyone was concerned it would be too talky and slow. Still, I would love to see a director’s cut of the picture some day. Even though Hughes was taken far too early, there’s a lot of documentation of some of the cut scenes that would be very interesting to watch.

I just realized that I haven’t even mentioned the performances, which are all wonderful. I have a certain fondness for Hall & Ringwald in particular, knowing that they were the only ones actually high school aged at time of filming. Their journey is the most believable accordingly. But Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson all turn in career highlight performances, and character actors Paul Gleason & frequent Hughes collaborator John Kapelos really do give some humanity to what would otherwise be featureless adults.

Finally, a newly restored The Breakfast Club was just released on Blu-Ray and is getting a two-night event screening tonight, March 26 and again on March 31, 2015. Details at http://www.breakfastclub30.com/

30 years later, The Breakfast Club remains in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions: a masterpiece.

Trailer:

Bechdel Test:

Pass

The Representation Test Score: C (5 pts)

(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.breakfastclub30.com/” name=”The Breakfast Club” description=”Five high school students, all different stereotypes, meet in detention, where they pour their hearts out to each other, and discover how they have a lot more in common than they thought.” director=”John Hughes” actor_1=”Emilio Estevez” actor_2=”Anthony Michael Hall” actor_3=”Judd Nelson” actor_4=”Molly Ringwald” actor_5=”Ally Sheedy”]

Main Cast	Emilio Estevez Andrew Clark, Judd Nelson John Bender, Molly Ringwald Claire Standish, Ally Sheedy Allison Reynolds
Rating	TV-14
Release Date	Fri 15 Feb 1985 UTC
Director	John Hughes
Genres	Comedy, Drama
Plot	Five high school students, all different stereotypes, meet in detention, where they pour their hearts out to each other, and discover how they have a lot more in common than they thought.
Poster
Runtime	97
Tagline	They only met once, but it changed their lives forever.
Writers	John Hughes (written by)
Year	1985