“Shane” and “Sixteen Candles”

As I recall, even back in the day there was debate over whether Ferris Bueller was a legitimate hero or just a smarmy entitled jerk.

He was a polarizing figure, that Ferris…

What really struck me is what a cowardly, kind of date rapey-by-proxy douche the love interest, Jake, is. He knows Samantha likes him because she actually wrote a note saying she would have sex with him, and he found it, but he’s still afraid to ask her out, despite being this super-confidence senior jock-type. This is supposed to make him seem sensitive. He has a hot blonde girlfriend he could “violate ten different ways any time I want,” I believe were his words. But he’s bored and wants Sam instead. This, again, is supposed to make him seem sensitive. And that’s before he dumps his unconscious girlfriend in his dad’s Rolls, driven by his new best friend, the Geek. Well, whatever. This movie was supposed to be kind of sweet and tender, right?

A lot of the sexual politics/sexual humor from the 80s holds up surprisingly poorly considering that the 80s don’t seem like that long ago (at least not to me).

Revenge of the Nerds is best not spoken of.

More generally, movies still unironically featured “lovable rake” type characters that haven’t aged well. Today they tend to just come across as skeevy.

For me, at least, this sort of thing is more striking in 80s films than in films from earlier eras because I think of the 80s as “modern times”.

Ferris holds up– almost uniquely of the whole genre. I physically can’t watch Breakfast Club anymore. Better Off Dead is still pretty funny, and Pretty In Pink/ Some Kind of Wonderful (they’re the same movie) as well as Say Anything aged better than Sixteen Candles, but they’re all very much “But you’re young so you have to tell a stupid story about your feelings that isn’t it at all. And this film is really that stupid story. “ So they’re just not as entertaining to middle-aged people as they were to teenagers.

But I can still easily rewatch Ferris Bueller and be entertained, smarmy entitled jerk and all. I even find it more entertaining after “Election.” I imagine that Ferris at some level knows he’s going to turn into Ben Stein someday, and he’s just milking being an entitled teenager for everything it’s worth before that happens.

Breakfast Club is harder on the geeky characters than we’re supposed to remember it being, and I don’t think Ringwald’s character is being ironic anymore when she says everybody else in the school looks up to her and her friends. That whatshisname turns out to be a writer really doesn’t make it better, just weird. And I don’t remember the stuff the adults say holding up well at all the last time I watched.

Nothing good happened in the 80s.

I never loved Breakfast Club as much as a lot of others, and indeed have mixed feelings about all the Hughes films quality-wise even though I enjoy watching them (and indeed, pretty much any 80’s teen movie; probably has to do with being just barely old enough to remember that decade and the way seeing so many of these informed what I though of as the real world).

Say Anything stands out from the pack more and more as time goes by.

And how can you mention Better Off Dead without talking about One Crazy Summer. I have a genuine love for that one. How can you not love Bobcat Goldthwait stumbling around in the Godzilla suit?
Also:
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“Why? You know Karate?”
“No. I know Dow.”
“What is Dow?”
“Dow is the chemical company
that makes Mace.”

In the 70s, in this genre, you have American Graffiti and Grease. Pleasant music, at least. And good-looking cars.

What’s the problem with Revenge of the Nerds? Most everybody I know likes it.

I figured I was the only one who remembered One Crazy Summer; it doesn’t seem to have entered the canon. I haven’t rewatched it… ever, IIRC. Dunno how it holds up. Hard to remember Demi Moore being that age.

Shane: Jack Palance!!!!!
The scene where Jack is standing beside his horse and in one motion is up in the saddle. It is not the usual mount with the left leg in the stirrup but just a leap up. Us horse people love that. The western what Jack did with Billy Crystal should be wiped from the face of the earth. All copies found and destroyed. God I wish I had never seen that show.

I figured I was the only one who remembered One Crazy Summer

I loved it when I saw it, but I was fifteen. I’ve avoided seeing it again because I suspect it may actually be a terrible movie, and I’d find that depressing.

Sixteen candles is pure ev psych. Male geek trades up to cute female genes by making skillful alliance with power. Rich guy is going for downmarket chick who will dutifully live the family life. The whole point is that, of course, its superficial but nature wants you to get in the gene pool even if its shallow.

Already in the early 90’s this was a bygone era. Cue Jack…
Holbo, you want the truth? You can’t handle truth! the fact is that deep down in the places you don’t talk about at parties you want Jake getting Samantha.

This, again, is supposed to make him seem sensitive. And that’s before he dumps his unconscious girlfriend in his dad’s Rolls, driven by his new best friend, the Geek. Well, whatever. This movie was supposed to be kind of sweet and tender, right?

Where-upon they have sex, of which neither of them have a memory of, but she claims from a far-off memory that it may have been good, and grants post-hoc consent to. It was skeevy. Not in Revenge of the Nerds territory, but, yeah…

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off holds up surprisingly well, given that, from an adult perspective, Bueller is kind of a smug dick who, if he were a grown up and acting like that, you’d want to punch in the face. Basically, he’s his own Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It shouldn’t work, but for some weird reason does, possibly having to do with Mathew Broderick. (imagine a remake with some current young male teen actor in the Ferris role. It’d turn into American Pie by the end of Act 1).

The Breakfast Club is a bit dated, in that that the punishment — Saturday detention — would be a laughable punishment for all of these characters’ trespasses, except Brian, who today would have been expelled forthwith. Having said that, the characters still click in a meaningful way. Which leaves us with a weird artifact of a movie, where the situation is an anachronism, but the characters and performances still shine.

L2P @16:
What’s the problem with Revenge of the Nerds? Most everybody I know likes it.

The entire nerd frat house sets up electronic surveillance in the sorority shower room, which is a felony, not a prank. The head nerd later date rapes a cheerleader. There are racist and homophobic jokes that were cringe worthy even then.

I was already at university for most of these 80s movies

It does seem to date people. Any teen movie that came out when I was in college, or later, I didn’t see unless it was a huge hit that I remembered later when I was looking for something to rent, or it was something (usually with John Cusack) that the people (mostly guys) I worked with liked. I’ve never even heard of One Crazy Summer. The Sure Thing, though–I’m sure he was supposed to be sensitive, too. (I saw Say Anything when it came out and again about fifteen years later, but unfortunately I was sick the second time, so I can’t say how it held up.)

Demi Moore: She was already playing a hardboiled Lois Lane type with IIRC a grown up younger sister in General Hospital in 1983 or so. I think it wasn’t until Ghost that I stopped thinking of her fake crazy Laura’s sensible sister.

I still like “Breakfast Club”, never liked “Ferris” (btw check out “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” – Hughes best movie as a director).

My favourite teen movie is “Risky Business”.

We recently introduced our fifteen year old daughter to 16 Candles and The Breakfast Club. It had been maybe decades since I’d seen either film, and it was difficult to separate my reaction to them now from when I first saw them as a college student in the mid-80’s (actually saw Breakfast Club at a first-run theater a couple weeks after it was released; I was a sophomore in college, so a bit older than the characters although the feelings and reactions of the characters rang true in an archetypical kind of way).

Even though I grant the criticisms, in particular the murkier matter of class in 16, there is much in these films about life in high school that still resonates. My daughter loved both movies, even though she wondered about some of the things that original viewers might have taken for granted.

I found Heathers too dark to be really engagable-with early on. When I saw it again a few years ago, it worked as beautifully for me as it did for friends all along.

I re-watched Ferris Bueller last year and, rather to my surprise, hated it. In the years since I’d last seen it, I’ve come out of the closet and started gender reassignment transitioning, and Ferris was simply too damn redolent of the kind of guy blighting my world in big ways and small. The gap between his eternally self-confident bullying and the sort of shit we learned the young Romney was up to as pranking just isn’t big enough. Ferris is the internal life of a lot of Republican big-wigs, and it’s not a place I can pleasantly pass time anymore.

Tapeheads, now. There’s a glorious little movie. “Production values” and the scene in which that phrase is spoken is one of the truest things ever shot about the entertainment biz, apart from The Player (which also has Tim Robbins, interestingly enough). The movie’s funny, it’s got Devo providing the music for an A-Ha parody, it’s got Menudo getting their just desserts, and its sex-tape excuse for a plot could fit in with a great many real news stories about GOP bosses. I don’t know that I’d actually want to call it good, but it’s so much fun.

My personal favorite screwball romantic comedy of the ’80s is Restless Natives. The main characters are all out of high school and in that void of no-prospects which was already much more a part of a lot of people’s lives than right-wing-driven nostalgia would allow. Ned Beatty is a note-perfect asshole American on vacation, the music is by Stuart Adamson and sometimes the other guys of Big Country, the story is twisty and goofy and delightful. For those who haven’t seen it, the heroes are two guys with no prospects working in a novelties and gags shop who decide to try highway robbery, with masks from the shop. They become a hit. Tourists come hoping they’ll rob that bus, and offer them baked goodies. The local authorities are not amused. The visiting CIA officer whose bus is held up is even less amused. And one of the guys has developed a serious crush on the woman who’s a tour guide on one of the buses, but of course she only knows him as the one in the clown mask when it’s robbery time. Complications ensue.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is worth a rewatch. 80’s movies were the result of their time and Hollywood in those days – look who was in the WH. Plenty of good films, but you’re talking pop.

Let me put in a plug for Shane, the novel by Jack Schaefer. Read it ragged in my early sixties childhood, before I caught the movie and had it rather diminished for me by the underwhelming Alan Ladd. Do kids in your area play cowboys any more? Difficult here to tell from observation of the public streets, the density of matched kids in any given street having diminished so greatly since the baby boom. And the discouragement of gunplay. Not a cap to be heard on the average Saturday morning, though, which I suppose is some kind of indication. Ah, the acrid odour of caps on a summer morning….

I’m too late for this, John, as Jacob and others have already weighed in, but let me add to the chorus: while not, I think, his most ambitious or admirable film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is clearly Hughes’s best, and it absolutely still holds up, 26 years on.

What also holds up? Say Anything, as others have also noted.

In truth, Shane isn’t a really one of the truly great Westerns, but it is a fascinating kind of communitarian film, and thus worth watching for that reason alone.

Say Anything still worked for me that last time I watched it (maybe 5 years ago). I think it captures the teen experience of being in love – at least from a guy’s perspective – better than anything else in the genre.

I liked Shane, but I think that mainly because of Jack Palance. He’s awesome.

Real Genius has aged quite well, I thought when I last saw it 4-5 years ago.

Only movie mentioned here I’ve seen is the Breakfast Club, which I thought was pure evil. I will see Shane, eventually, though.

My personal favorite screwball romantic comedy of the ‘80s is Restless Natives.

Ha! Yes indeed.

I’ve heard a rather fun theory that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off changes quite dramatically if you watch it from the perspective of Cameron, with Ferris Bueller as his projected alter ego, a la fight club.

See: http://www.slashfilm.com/the-ferris-bueller-fight-club-theory/

Someone’s even done a trailer: http://www.slashfilm.com/votd-the-ferris-bueller-fight-club-theory/

Seconding or thirding the (very different) durability of both Heathers (which outshines Mean Girls like the sun) and Real Genius (which has none of the loathesomeness of Revenge of the Nerds).

J. Holbo @2
It’s like Film 101: the handsome, entitled jocks are always jerks.

But cf. Splendor in the Grass (1961; Elia Kazan dir.), where the real jerk/culprit is not so much Warren Beatty (though he’s hardly admirable) as it is the sexual mores and norms of the time in which the movie is set (the 1920s).

Footloose, which I only saw for the first time this year. More like Splendor in the Grass, I guess, except that it seemed like an excuse to get country music onscreen.

“Ferris is really in Cam’s imagination” is amusing, but why stop there? He could be Jeannie’s imagination: she pretends she’s so moral, but she’s really a skank, and she pretends Ferris is such a creep, but he’s really a sad guy like Cameron.

The “Ferris is in Cam’s imagination” theory falls apart during the scenes with Jeannie and Ferris’ mom. However, if you alter the theory to say that Ferris was a real kid, probably more like Cameron than Movie Ferris, who has been seriously ill and has very recently died, with only those three+the girlfriend knowing about it yet, Mom in deep, crazytown denial, and Jeannie having to go along what that in order to avoid a total screaming breakdown…

Also Keith Edwards has a point about the ambiguous dangerousness of some of the characters in Breakfast Club. The jock could have looked like a football player instead of like a gymnast. I’ve never been sure whether Bender was supposed to be from the wrong side of the tracks or not, a real criminal or a well-off rebel.

@Jeff R.
That’s a great album, which somehow I misread the reviews of really drastically.

“I really don’t see why Ferris is such an unlikeable character. Yeah, he lies a lot. But he’s doing it for harmless reasons. The only person he really mistreats is Cameron. A hs kid taking a day off is really not a big deal and the principal only suffers so much because he makes such a big deal out of catching him. Ferris is a smug prick, but he’s also just having fun. He’s not creating abusive social hierarchies which the real life Ferris probably would be. And as far as I remember, there are no problems with the sexual politics of the film, which is why it holds up reasonably well.”

Seconded!

Ted Lemon @48:
Real Genius does still hold up pretty well (as long as we overlook the fact that our heroes technically commit an act of domestic terrorism). Especially noteworthy in that the lead is a no-name actor who has minor personal foibles he overcomes in order to grow up and be a reasonably decent person (this often gets overlooked, since Val Kilmer’s character steals every scene).

B. Steele @61
Footloose, which I only saw for the first time this year. More like Splendor in the Grass, I guess

Probably not, but it’s my fault for being unclear. The problem in ‘Splendor in the Grass’ is that ‘good girls’ in that era (and probably several decades following) are expected to remain ‘pure’ and not have sex with their boyfriends even if they want to, which really messes up high-school sweethearts Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, and the whole situation. (I saw the movie on a badly malfunctioning DVD, but I was able to get the gist.)

“It’s like I’m caught in a nostalgia wormhole for this later thing that hearkens back to this earlier thing. I experience time in reverse! The Old West was always already nostalgic for Spock to cock an eyebrow: ‘primitive technology, captain’. And Kirk gets that rakish gleam in his eye and we’re off!”

“About the future I can only reminisce
For what I had is what I’ll never get
And although this may sound strange
My future and my past are presently disarranged
And I’m surfing on wave of nostalgia for an age yet to come”

The Buzzcocks

I don’t think I’d like Ferris in real life very much–in real life all that lying and conniving, especially the way he cons his parents, wouldn’t seem so nice–but in a movie it’s funny. He wouldn’t be that terrible a person even if brought into real life as someone said upthread. Unless he continues to act like that when he’s 27 as opposed to 17. Which someone else said. I just don’t have anything original to say here.

Shane – meh. The old days of bad child actors can stay there. At least they managed to avoid having John Wayne in the film though.

High Noon for a truly great old Western.

LFC:
In retrospect, Splendor in the Grass (which I’ve seen several times, though not for a while) is “blame the parents.” Deenie’s mother says “nice girls don’t (like it, even after they’re married).” Bud’s father says, “you’re too young to settle down, don’t forget Yale, we have more money than her family these days, blow off some steam (with a flapper wannabe) and break up with her.” The beginning of Deenie’s breakdown (as Judy Blume will remind you) is her cutting her hair short, flapper-style.

In Footloose, Ariel is–similar to Deenie–losing her mind because her father and hometown are excessively strict, Kevin Bacon saves her by convincing the young people to stand up in town meeting and demand the right to have a party with music so they can dance.

People should watch more super-old westerns with Gary Cooper, and old movies with Gary Cooper generally, because when he was young Gary Cooper was the hottesttest thing ever. The most salient feature of the Breakfast Club is that it features one of those tragic 80s makeunders where the person looks worse after the makeover than before.

This discussion makes me so very happy I managed to avoid almost all those movies.

People who maintain that Sixteen Candles was a bad movie about teenagers should try to sit through Rebel Without a Cause. You have to squint a bit, I think for either to qualify as anything more than weird historical artifacts. Neither was any more accurate about teenagers, except in a very abstract sense, than Hair was about the Summer of Love, or Aleksandr Nevskii about medieval warfare.

maybe “deliberately stilted” would be better

“People should watch more super-old westerns with Gary Cooper, and old movies with Gary Cooper generally, because when he was young Gary Cooper was the hottesttest thing ever. ”

Very handsome but sooo wet. Good in Judge Roy Bean though, although over shadowed by Walter Brennan.

That should have been “perhaps the Eighties weren’t as heroic….” Doesn’t make much sense the other way ’round, does it? Well, it’s early here….

When I watched 16 candles again, I wasn’t especially struck by the creepy sexual interactions and sexual politics. After all, I remember thinking they were creepy in the 1980s, thanks to an early introduction to feminism at home.

I was struck, though, by the racism, not just in the infamous Long Duk Dong character but, for example, in the dialogue between Sam and her friend about her dreams for her 16th birthday:

Sam: All you need to make a great birthday is a pink car and a great guy. Black.
Friend: A black guy?!?!
Sam: No!! [she might as well have said “ewww!” here, given the tone of voice] A black Trans-Am and a pink guy!

RE “Ferris,” I can still get a classroom of freshmen to laugh and loosen up by saying, “Bueller, Bueller” at the right moment. There aren’t too many movie lines, let alone ones from 30-year old movies, that have had such staying power. (I know, I know: a line does not a movie make.)

Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a surprisingly accurate take on late 70s high school. I swear that I attended the pep rally in that movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLTTugZ4BIw).

And Revenge of the Nerds is a revenge fantasy for jock-abuse-of-oddballs that I actually liked as well, and that I imagine would still hold up well. Ferris never rubbed me the right way, as he always gave me that Reagan youth vibe.

I’ll defend Rebel Without a Cause til my dying breathe. A weird artifact it may be, but it is an amazing movie, especially when you consider that Jim was struggling with his sexuality, and that Plato was flat-out gay, which is why he was being bullied and why his parents abandoned him to be raised by the maid. Daring stuff for 1955, and still relevant today, alas.

It’s likely too late, and this thread is done, but it still must be mentioned: any mention of John Hughes should link to this wonderful blog post: http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

When Ferris Bueller came out, conservative scold George Will gushed about it in a fanboy column review — I kid you not. Must have tickled his Inner Republican Trickster.

George Will on a rule-flouting spree? The mind boggles.

“conservative scold George Will gushed about it in a fanboy column review —I kid you not. ”

Yeah, I happened across that when I was wikiing Ferris Beuller the other day. (I can’t believe the hostility towards Frris here) ‘The greatest movie of all time’ apparently

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1964&dat=19860626&id=zEojAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Mc8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=2201,5327513

So there wasn’t a time when Will was more….coherent?

‘The real question is, who’s more annoying: Ferris Bueller or the kid in Shane?’
actually the kid in shane grew up to be Ferris Bueller, which means that the kid in shane is also Jim McAllister.

103: Holy Christ I know! I mean, it’s fun to watch her dance with Fred Astaire, but he’s approximately one trillion years old in that movie and she is like 20. Same with the others. I just mention that about Gary Cooper because I didn’t know what he looked like not-old for ages, and then I saw this photo of him at my grandma’s and I was like rowr who the hell? Oh, that’s why we’re all “trying hard to look like Gary Cooper!” He is in a movie with Marlene Dietrich where he’s in the French Foreign Legion and at the end she walks off shoeless into the desert sands to be a camp follower and be with him, abandoning her rich lover in Tangiers, and my vagina thought: that is a very plausible and rational thing to do.

ferris bueler was dan quayles favorite film:
http://www.worldsstrangest.com/mental-floss/the-favorite-movies-of-42-famous-people/

It’s likely too late, and this thread is done, but it still must be mentioned: any mention of John Hughes should link to this wonderful blog post: http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html