The Drudge Report is reporting that director John Hughes has died of a heart attack at 59.
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John Hughes… RIP32 comments to John Hughes… RIPLeave a Reply |
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What a shame. They don’t make movies like his anymore.
RIP Mr. Hughes
Dude. This hurts me way more than losing Michael Jackson.
Hell, yeah!!!
We’ll always have the movies, but damned if I’m not a tad numb right now. 59! Little younger than my parents.
this makes me want to cry. RIP Mr. Hughes, you were the best.
I’m stunned and shocked, even though the guy hadn’t actually made a movie since that Godawful “Curly Sue” movie in 1991.
Very sad. Always loved “Planes Trains & Automobiles” and “Uncle Buck”. He and John Candy went together very well.
Find it a little creepy weird I expressed similar sentiments about Candy and Hughes in the SCTV talk before hearing the news.
That is weird. I felt Candy’s character in Home Alone was kind of derived from his Schmenge Brothers character.
Eric, I beat you to it a day early. I was talking to a friend about a drunken night I had with Anthony Michael Hall and then we started talking Hughes movies.
Hughes had a window into the soul of upper-middle class teen-dom. He knew the awkwardness, he knew the rejection, he knew the isolation, that strange and short period between child and adult that seems to last forever. It makes you wonder what he went through as a teen and if he took copious notes along the way.
Ferris Bueller was the ultimate teen fantasy. The kid who beat the Principal, skipped school at will and was popular beyond belief. Sixteen Candles was the polar opposite. He was privy to those thoughts, hopes and fears in ways most modern filmmakers could only wish. Big Hollywood is calling him the Gen X Frank Capra, and there is no doubt he was. No one better understood the heart of their subject matter than Hughes and he had a classic filmmakers touch that is missing from much of today’s work. He was acquainted in an intimate fashion with his subjects, something Hollywood relentlessly tries to avoid in films involving the middle class or the midwest.
He has many shining moments, but for me the zenith was The Breakfast Club. He completely destroyed the teen clique conception, a movie which no one has equaled in its genre. He deconstructed the entire high school social experience using Saturday school as a performance tool, something that should have bored teens to tears but it enthralled them.
Pure genius.
From Anthony Michael Hall’s IMDb bio:
All of the characters played by Anthony in John Hughes films are actually based on Hughes himself.
Uncle Buck, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful, Home Alone…good good stuff.
He was missed even before he passed. They haven’t made movies like those in a while.
+JMJ+
I guess our next Top 5 will be John Hughes movies?
It’s interesting. I saw Ferris before it went in to wide release, in a test screening a few months earlier. I loved it. Dragged my friends to it when it came out. They loved it too, and we kept going to it over and over again. I even took my dad to it.
Somewhere, around the fourth or fifth time I saw it, however, I’d passed the boundary of “That short, seemingly endless period between childhood and adulthood that seems to last forever,” and suddenly, very suddenly, my opinion of Ferris changed, and I found myself kinda’ wishing he’d been caught in the end.
How do you know you’re a grown up? When you not-so-secretly wish Ferris got caught.
I had a similar experience with “Back to the Future.” Upon repeated viewings, I realized that I preferred the parents as they were in the beginning of the movie. Dad with the pastel sweater tied around his neck and the super-cool shades weirded me out.
Crispin Glover always weirds me out.
I will never wish Ferris gets caught. I never skipped school, would bust my kids’ butt if they did 1/2 that stuff, but I love the fantasy. The only parts I don’t like are when Cameron gets all mad at his dad. Not having a point, having fun, is what that movie was all about.
I loved 16 candles, Breakfast Club, and Ferris, the rest of them didn’t do much for me. I still quote those three movies, and can’t wait till the kids are old enough to see them. In fact, when I announced my last pregnancy, I titled the e-mail, “nine times”.
“Demented and sad but social.” That line can be used for everything!
I’ve only seen a few of these movies and my avoidance was intentional. It’s hard to understand if you’re not from the region and time, but I grew up about 20 – 30 miles from where most of these films were set, but it was an entire world away. I lived in the area, but all Hughes’ movies feature a completely different class of people than lived in my neighborhood. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and there is a lot of, mostly, good natured competition amongst communities. But the working class and white collar folks kept to themselves, and didn’t mingle. I was raised in a blue collar neighborhood and there was a great deal of resentment towards those men in ties carrying briefcases who rode the train past my house into the city to work at desks. That “doctor, lawyer, indian chief bullshit” as my father called it.
So, when I’d see a movie like “Home Alone” I’d recognize the neighborhood, know the area, and know what type of folks really lived in those homes. Who has a house that big and can afford to take that many kids to Paris for Christmas? One of those guys with the briefcase, on the commuter train, that’s who.
John Hughes’ movies do seem well made, and I can see the guy had talent, but his settings were literally “too close to home” for me, and I could never get beyond my seething resentment of the teens in those films to enjoy the stories.
Know exactly what you mean, Rufus, though on the smaller scales of NE and then NW Ohio geography class wars. Even after my dad climbed the social strata, out of the mechanic into the auto engineer and briefcase categories, it was always like putting the lipstick on the proverbial underdog pigs.
However, I also felt a kinship with king of the dipshits Farmer
FredTed and the Duckman enough to really dig Hughes’ movies, especially the ones he wrote yet didn’t direct (Mr. Mom and Vacation). Wish fulfillment and all, and isn’t that what the movies are supposed to do for us?I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than bits (on cable) of any John Hughes film. Without meaning to disrespect everybody else, I’m upset over the death of Budd Schulberg, who gave us “On the Waterfront.”
JohnFN,
One, small nit to pick with your comment. If you knew the area and the real estate market, people in John Hughes films are not “upper middle class.” They are ridiculously wealthy. http://www.geocities.com/xanderubi/html/john_hughes_shooting_locations.html
You can’t have the size homes those folks had, on the land they had without being in the upper 5% of family household income in the nation; probably more like 1%. I played football and ran track in High School. We had a great track team and occassionally got invited to meets at some of the schools featured in these movies. When the bus would get close to those schools, and I saw how those kids lived… I couldn’t wait to get on the track and beat them.
I wouldn’t say that John Hughes was the Capra of our times, or any other comparison to directors from that era. He was sort of an anti-Capra. Where Capra’s movies were about one unselfish person making a difference on the lives of many others through championing “lost causes,” Hughes’ earlier films were about selfish insular causes of individuals or teens against the responsible adult world. Not to rag on him because those films were enjoyable, but our nostalgia for them amplifies our sentiment. I doubt anyone here would feel the same about these movies if we were the ages we are now, when these movies first came out. John Hughes was John Hughes and that’s good enough.
Matt,
I saw “Breakfast Club” when I was the age of the kids in it and I saw through it then. A bunch of whiny, pampered brats. I remember, about 20 minutes in, turning to the girl I was with and saying, “watch, I’ll bet anything the ‘bad boy’ will get them all to smoke pot, and then they’ll all realize they have a lot in common, and get along with each other.” I hate teen angst. Hate it. I was too busy working, going to school and playing sports to have any time for angst when I was a teen. Those kids had far too much free time. Must be nice.
Me too, but I enjoyed it. I didn’t have teen angst, but my brother, friends, and I had rebellious streaks, that I connected with in some of his movies. Actually, we were just jackasses.
Matt, I was a major rebel and charlatan myself, but I could never relate to teens who had everything rebelling. What are they rebelling against? I was actually rebelling against a world that had folks like their parents, and them. I was rebelling because I didn’t have their lives. How could the people who had that life rebel? If I were them, I’d wake up every morning, kiss both my parents and drop to my knees and thank them for giving me a life where I could go to those schools, wear those clothes and drive those cars. Then I’d go to school and thank my teachers for teaching classes that will help me get into great colleges, where I’ll network, and get a great job, like the old man has…
It was impossible for me to have any empathy for those characters.
+JMJ+
Republibot: I don’t think I’ve ever wished Ferris would get caught, but I did identify with his sister’s frustration very much. Yeah, she probably should have just lightened up a bit (as she did in the end), but she also had a sense of justice that no one else seemed to care about.
Many years after seeing (and thoroughly enjoying) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for the first time, I became a teacher . . . . and found myself in the awful position of being “Principal Rooney” to the bunch of delinquents who were my students! =P So I can say I’ve seen the “day off” from both sides, and think that getting caught in the future would have done wonders for Ferris’ character.
+JMJ+
Rufus, most of the subtleties of class fly right over my head when I watch John Hughes’ movies, but I get what you mean. There’s a part in The Outsiders when a “Soc” girl tells the “Greaser” Ponyboy that things are “hard all over”–and I just wanted to tell her to go back to her big house and rich parents and SHUT UP.
Enbrethiliel,
That’s why I wrote that it’s difficult to understand without growing up in my neighborhood. All the images I saw in those movies were familiar to me. I had been to a track meet in the High School where “Breakfast Club” was set. When I saw “Home Alone” I instantly recognized the neighborhood. So, it was impossible for me to allow the class to “fly right over my head.”
Imagine there was a snooty prep school in your hometown, where a lot of wealthy, rich girls went. You see a movie that uses that school as a setting. No matter what the story you’re going to be thinking of those snooty girls in every scene.
Two Things:
Van Wilder, in the same genre, has a surprising amount of depth (for a raunch comedy) and basically admits to the conceit in Ferris Bueller, that the main character is trying to hide from real life. At the same time, it gives the character a bit of a selfless angle as an entrepreneurial good guy, who’s helped elevate and encourage everyone around him.
Second, I play around with a lot of story ideas of a teenager having been raised in some sort of life where they deal with life-or-death situations and are left to fend on their own. I’ve conceived of similar cathartic scenes where this hypothetical teenager gives everyone else a dose of reality in explaining how things are.
+JMJ+
Um, Rufus, I went to the snooty prep school for girls with wealthy families. =P
That’s funny! I had a hunch, Enbrethiliel!
Believe me, there are no hard feelings. My kids go to prep schools and their home (the Firefly mansion) looks like the set of a John Hughes film. Mrs. Firefly and I work hard to keep them grounded, but I want my kids to have a better education than I did and grow up without the class envy I had. I just hope they don’t end up having disdain for the class their old man came from. So far, so good.
Teens rebel because it’s what we’re programmed to do at a certain age. Your hormones kick in a change in your neuroanatomy, the wiring in your head changes, it takes about ten months to a year to happen, and during that period your emotions are crazy, and you are actually LESS rational (Yes, this has been proven again and again) than you were the year before. Then it passes, and, provided nothing particularly horrible or stupid happens to you during the transitional phase, you’re more rational again.
It’s got nothing to to with whether you live in “Shermer, Illinois” or are a homeless gutterwhelp in the worst part of Calcutta, you hit that phase and you rebel. Some people can contain it better than others, some people can’t. It’s the late-adolescent version of the terrible twos.