Remembering pop culture king John Hughes
Sad news last night that director John Hughes has died. He started out as a copywriter at Leo Burnett in Chicago and went on to define a generation of geeky teens with a great slice of pop culture and angst.
That generation then went on to be known as Generation X and for them he wrote the script and provided the soundtrack with movies like ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day off’, ‘Pretty in Pink’ and ‘The Breakfast Club’, making young stars out of the likes of Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy; Anthony Michael Hall and Emilio Estevez.
Weirdly, I was watching the start of Kevin Smith’s ‘Dogma’ last night; the bit in the film where Jay and Silent Bob go in search of the Chicago suburb (Shermer Illinois) where Hughes set his movie.
They were there under the perfect logic that the women were hot and there was no one selling drugs. Funnily enough there was nothing there. Hughes made it all up. Some of the kids in his movies might have been mean (where are you James Spader?), but nothing too serious ever happened and there always seemed to be the Smiths or New Order playing in the background.
The music was as important as what you were watching. Whether it was the final scene in ‘The Breakfast Club’ where Judd Nelson puts his fist to the sky to the sound of Simple Minds and ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me) or in ‘Pretty in Pink’ as Duckie mimed ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ in an effort to win Ringwald’s character Andie Walsh.
It was as the Los Angeles Times puts it “a very specific slice of Americana” that many understood whether you happened to be an American teen or not because the culture was trans Atlantic.
Roger Ebert once called Hughes “the philosopher of adolescence” and his influence has spread far. It wasn’t only the likes of Smith that Hughes influenced after his time in Hollywood had passed (but not before he had made ‘Home Alone’ that became one of the top-grossing live-action comedies of all time – spawning three sequels) it was an even newer generation like Judd Apatow and Co of ‘Superbad’ and ‘Knocked-up’ fame who last year said: “Basically, my stuff is just
John Hughes films with four-letter words.”
For me my favourite remains ‘The Breakfast Club’; it must have been all those detentions. The question what was your favourite Hughes movie sparked many a late night discussion and I know I wasn’t alone in that.
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