John Hughes helped to define the eighties by creating such realistic portraits of teenage life. The eighties can be described as rebellious, but Hughes manages to convey that rebellion with movies about the exterior innocence and interior fear of high school culture. There hasn’t been anyone better since Hughes at capturing teenage youth.
The Brat Pack Movies & Music Collection is another DVD box set of Hughes’ beloved high school trilogy (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science). Each encapsulates a different moment in youth.
Sixteen Candles (1984)
Today, Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) turns 16, the age every girl – and sometimes every guy – waits for with great anticipation and joy. I’m not sure I know why turning 16 is such a special event in a girl’s life. Is it because 18 is the semi-official age of adulthood and 16 is the age in-between being a teenager and an adult? Anyway, Samantha’s birthday happens to fall the day before her older sister’s wedding. Naturally, her entire family is frantic about getting ready for another important event in a girl’s life.
Her grandparents fly in to stay with the family. The house is filled with people and in the confusion of everything, not one person in her family seems to have remembered her 16th birthday – one of the most important events in a young girl’s life. She at first dismisses it as maybe a joke, a small lapse in memory; but as the day wears on, she realizes that her family has truly forgotten about her birthday, culminating in a heart wrenching scene of Samantha, at the school dance, running away from a geek (Anthony Michael Hall), finding a secluded spot and crying.
Before that, she had just witnessed Jake Ryan dancing with his girlfriend. Samantha stares, which Jake notices and exchanges eye contact. What’s a girl to do? This conflicts with Samantha’s already fragile emotional state, wondering where to fit these pieces and trying to find her self-worth.
The beauty of Sixteen Candles is its realism and its attention to the finer details in high school, like the conversations that girls have about their crushes or the conversations that boys have describing just the outer parts of the female body. The heart of Sixteen Candles is the raw emotions that the film portrays, especially the embarrassing moments that everyone has experienced or at least seen. It doesn’t matter that Samantha acts incredibly awkward around the boy that she’s in love with because the feeling is relative. What guy hasn’t been embarrassingly awkward around his crush? Even though the film is about a girl, everyone can empathize and sympathize with her feelings.
Article comments
1 - rob
All of these films are excellent. Seen them all several times over. They seem some what dated in 2005, but I'm sure that the main themes are still relevant to today's teens.
2 - Tan The Man
Yeah, they are somewhat dated, but that's more of the ever evolving teen culture than it is the movies.
3 - Scott Butki
Good review. I miss John Hughes making new teen movies.
He always had a great ear for soundtracks too.
I remember I once had to write a college english essay on what Breakfast Club character I most resembled.