Best John Hughes Movie

Rating: 10/10 (16 September 2015)

There are many John Hughes masterpieces. In many ways, he is the definitive filmmaker of the 1980s. In fact, he is often the first name that comes up when people think of the eighties in movies. But like some other great filmmakers (Soderbergh comes , his filmography is composed of some bad movies, some good movies, some great movies (including Ferris Bueller) and one masterpiece. This film is that masterpiece.
I say way too often that a film takes a basic premise and makes it work. But for a film like this, such cannot go unmentioned. The first sentence of the Wikipedia recap is this: Five high school students from different walks of life endure a Saturday detention under a power-hungry principal.
That right there describes the basic premise of the movie perfectly. There are only a handful of films that you can describe in just one sentence. This is one of them. You could hardly think of a simpler movie if you tried. But it works because of the characters.
All five of them are, on the surface, your basic high school stereotypes, ones that films had played on a lot, but particularly over the preceding decade. But as they are thrown in a room and forced to interact, we discover that they are more than what they appear to be, that they are complex human beings that are often unfairly divided by our culture, including by many movies. It's kinda meta when you think about it.
Anyways, it is a simple theme, yet a powerful one. That is probably why so many high school movies of the last few decades have tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to copy it. So many have done it, in fact, that is hard to remember that when this came out, it was the subversion of many movie clichés and patterns It was fresh and new and innovative.
But that is not why this movie worked then and it is not why it works now. The characters this film runs through have humanity. Many of the failed rip-offs of this movie have just had a character prove that they are not a trait without giving off the feeling that they are not a character, that they are at least similar to a real person. Hughes didn't just understand what he was doing, he understood why. And that, with an assist from some truly impressive acting from the Brat Pack, is why this film endures. That is why this film is still watched and remembered today when so many other movies have been forgotten. This is why there are people my age who say that this is their favorite film of all time.
This is not a heavyhanded film. It does not often shout. But when it does, you can almost hear it saying 'Don't you forget about me.'