I feel like running to something apolitical.  John Hughes, maybe?

He defined the genre of teenage comedy movies for the decade of the 1980s.  And for the life of me, I only really know — from that batch of his ouvre — The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller.  I think I have seen Pretty in Pink and I know I have seen Sixteen Candles, but I barely remember either of those two (kind of girly, those two, aren’t they?), and click past furiously the Psychedelic Furs’ song whenever it pops up on pandora.  I don’t see anything interesting about the premise to Weird Science, and would only watch it if someone paid me to.

Hughes means more for others in my age-group, and the age group that proceeds me, than he does for me.  Ferris Bueller has the feeling of a classic rock song that I assume is good, don’t quite remember not having seen, and has been so overplayed that I don’t think I’d have much of a reaction to it if played in front of me.  Yes, Ferrari totaled — whoopee!  Yes — Ben Stein… funny.  Yes, it’s a fairly smart fantasy and everyone would like to get away with what Bueller does, and yes also the time sequence of Mr. Rooney catching the school bus in the evening doesn’t make sense. 

The Breakfast Club goes straight to the teenage audience’s biases in certain ways– the Prinipal a so very vindictive foil.  It has one great thing going for it — understanding the classic dramatic tradition of a set of characters stuck in a single room for an extended time, for emotional claustrophobic effect.  But, unlike — say – 12 Angry Men, this narrative is diverted for a sequence of stoned dancing.  Oh, and also that oddly schizophrenic message that comes with the “Princess” (Molly Ringwald, Claire) ‘s make-over of the “basket case” to conform to societal standards of beauty – a complete 180 from the general message that goes something like “We’re all the same under the skin”.

I see from his list that he did in fact direct Home Alone 3.  Interesting movie experience for me: Out in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk, entreated by a group of Turkish students asking me vague questions.  Strange times –and better that the movie be dubbed in Russia as, I already saw it in the form of Home Alone 1 and Home Alone 2… which was why it was chosen to be shown, I suppose — no point in paying strictest attention — lest I not be able to answer Turks’ vague questions, and eat my endless supply of rice pudding.  The one thing that can be said about the Home Alone Series is that in filming the same movie three times in three different settings, Home Alone 2 becomes a sort of unthought of classic overview for New York City.  I assume Fuerris Bueller is sort of the same for Chicago, but again: how would I be able to tell anymore?

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