Thursday , March 28 2024
A simple story that transcends time and place?

Blu-ray Review: The Breakfast Club: 25th Anniversary Edition

The Breakfast Club is a 1985 teen drama that was written and directed by American director John Hughes. The story follows five teenagers that are from different high school cliques. They are all forced to spend a Saturday in detention and, in doing so, are forced to come to terms with each other.

Over the course of the last 25 years, The Breakfast Club has become a cult classic that has influenced many other coming of age films. It stars a group of actors who at the time became known as the Brat Pack and included Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall.

For the storyline, the five students report to detention at 7 am on Saturday to serve time for things that they have done. Being from different cliques, each student appears to have nothing in common with the others and, in fact, some have no respect for the others.

They are stationed in the library and each student is supposed to write a 1000 word essay on who they think they are. Throughout most of the day, they are left unsupervised and while under orders to not talk, they spend the day interacting with each other.

John Bender (Nelson) is the catalyst. He is the character who drives the plot and clashes with the principle Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason). He is the one who challenges everyone to evaluate themselves and forces them to actually look at, and see each other, for who they really are, and not just their clique definitions – athlete, basket case, princess, brain, and criminal.

The Breakfast Club is presented as a VC-1 encoded 1080p transfer with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio and overall is good quality. Keep in mind that this is not a major high definition restoration edition, but the color is very good, the grain has a natural look to it and overall appears sharp.

The audio, which plays a large part in The Breakfast Club, is really very good, beginning with the opening of “Don’t You Forget About Me” from Simple Minds, which is the anthem for the movie on the whole. It is a DTS-HD master audio 5.1 track, and the dialog from the actors is overall very clear.

The extras included in this Blu-ray include commentary by Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall where they discuss quite a bit about the details of the movie. “Sincerely Yours” is a 51-minute, 12-part look back on the film with in-depth segments about each of the characters, and “The Most Convenient Definitions: The Origins of the Brat Pack” which is a five-minute discussion about the New York Magazine story that created the term.

The Breakfast Club is a simple story that transcends time and place. While the clothing styles may date it, and the lighthearted take on the student’s drug use may be out of sync today, the storyline is just as real today as it was 25 years ago. It captured the tone of the time and the emotions of these five students are contrastingly both lighthearted and raw to the bone painful, bringing a realistic experience that endures long after the movie’s end. 

About T. Michael Testi

Photographer, writer, software engineer, educator, and maker of fine images.

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