Thursday, August 6, 2009

R.I.P. John Hughes



It is with great sadness that I make this post memorializing the great writer/director John Hughes, who died today at age 59. If you don't know him, he was quite simply the best mainstream filmmaker of the 1980's, and while mainstream culture in the 80's was pretty fucking horrid, Hughes' films were most certainly not. While they all possessed cliched features that seemed inescapable in that time, each of his movies maintained comedy and heartfelt sentiment. If you still don't recognize the name, let's see if you don't recognize some of the films he directed, all bonafide classics that seem to be common viewing among suburban adolescents: Sixteen Candles, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and my two favorites, The Breakfast Club and Uncle Buck. While I did not grow up in the 80's, these films all evoke a great sense of nostalgia in me, a testament to their timelessness. Shit, I used to watch Uncle Buck once a month when I was younger. His work is just accessible to everyone with a lot of underlying significance; he could possibly be called the Judd Apatow of the 80's. It is certain that many more generations of misfit teenagers will grow up with Hughes' work, which seems to have examined teenage social life so well that its features became archetypal. I'll just leave you with a quote from The Breakfast Club that all of us have dreamed of saying to that stuck-up popular bitch in high school:
"Don't you ever talk about my friends. You don't know any of my friends. You don't look at any of my friends. And you certainly wouldn't condescend to speak to any of my friends. So you just stick to the things you know: shopping, nail polish, your father's BMW, and your poor, rich drunk mother in the Caribbean. And as far as being concerned about what's gonna happen when you and I walk down the hallways of school together, you can forget it cuz it's never gonna happen. Just bury your head in the sand and wait for your fucking prom."

So, R.I.P. John Hughes, and thanks for all the classics, and for helping to define so many childhoods.

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