Smoke up, Johnny

Rating: Null/10 (10 September 1999)

Any gen-x kid will claim this movie as the essential icon of their adolescence. Around the time Courtney Love was giving interviews likening Kurt Cobain to John Bender, I turned off on this movie--a re-viewing four or five years ago made me gag. But seeing it again now, in the light of the current teen pap (all of which, AMERICAN PIE excepted, might have been co-signed by Tipper Gore), John Hughes' insistence on the pain of class differences (of many shapes and sizes) seems forthright and refreshing. Cheesy and pandering as it is (remember Ally Sheedy intoning, "When you grow up...your heart dies"?), the movie touches, in a crude, pop way, on the varieties of pain of adolescence. (Middle-aged folk wondering why in the aftermath of the Colorado shooting might look sooner to this movie than gun-toting video games.) If someone tapped the group-therapy catharsis of this movie in 1999, they'd have to buy new land to store the cash.
The saddest part of this story? Not Judd Nelson's descent into nostril-flaring as a mass murderer in RELENTLESS; it's what happened to John Hughes. The next time you tune in to a few minutes of this on cable, remember these words: BABY'S DAY OUT.