Excellent, enduring movie that represents an era/age

Rating: 10/10 (8 December 2001)

Note: Recommended to have seen film
The Breakfast Club, a movie about 5 dissimilar teenagers who get stuck together on a saturday because of detention, was just not about some inner-discovery-developing-plot or even necessarily the humor (though I found that a very vital part of the film). But before I display my perspective, I'd like to address those of a few other people. For those of you who criticize The Breakfast Club, you're obviously not looking at it for the right reasons. If you see the characters as flat and the plot and its issues as mundane, you're analyzing the movie in an incorrect way. Maybe in viewing the movie you seem to have lapsed over the fact that the movie was a Teen movie dealing with Teen issues. (For the few who might suddenly think that this label turns all the characters into Alicia Silverstone look-a-likes talking about their hair, think of such movies as Rebel Without a Cause or even Cameron Crowe's older films, for example). The Breakfast Club manages to combine all it's character's into one setting (Shermer High School/Shermer High School Library), without any major change in setting, character addition, or sudden abrupt plot twist and yet still manages to stay interesting. In such situation, one must assume the dialogue would hold the movie together, and for the most part, I'd say this is the case in The Breakfast Club. The steady humor (usually good) was very important for leveling out the (countering) occasional seriousness of the film. Some of the dialogue was filled with some rough phrasing; however, in my opinion, it could almost be considered intentional. When a group of teenagers, seemingly cast in completely different molds, are thrown together and suddenly find themselves talking about their own appropriate, deepest problems to these (formerly) strangers, would it honestly come out in the most articulate of speech? This is why I feel you shouldn't blame The Breakfast Club for its "amateur psychology" (as some have phrased it), or more more appropriately, I think it should be awarded for managing to deal with some issues of high school and teenage life that it did without creating some ludicrous, unbelievable situation inorder to achieve it. Even so, one should not dissect and scrutinize every single line; you can only appreciate the movie by absorbing it as a whole of its parts. To me, the gift of the The Breakfast Club is not one certain thing, but surely through it all we can find positive. The movie was very well acted by everyone of its characters and if one of them had gone astray it easily could have failed. However it was teenagers addressing their issues on their own terms, supplemented by laughs, that made The Breakfast Club into a great 80s movie, a great teen movie, and just a plain, great movie as well.