Rewind Wednesday: Double Time!!

In honor of the late filmaker John Hughes, I figure I would pay tribute to him on today's rewind Wednesday. And instead of one you get two for the price of one!! Today's features include: The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

"They only met once, but it changed their lives forever."......The Breakfast Club is a 1985 American teen film written and directed by the late John Hughes. The storyline follows five teenagers (each representing a different clique in high school) as they spend a Saturday in detention together and come to realize that they are all deeper than their respective stereotypes. The film has become a cult classic and has had a tremendous influence on many coming-of-age films since then. And interestingly enough it was shot entirely in sequence beginning on March 28, 1984 and ending May, 1984.

This film was a dead on target examination of teen life in 1984/85. Considering this was a very challenging thing to do--release a film about teens just talking and relating to each other. Just think we can all remember being a teenager. It was truly a crazy, intense time "when your highs were higher and your lows were lower", this made every experience that much more significant. Hughes was truly brilliant in how he captures that environment and all the social hills and valleys that it comprised. To truly understand this film you must think back to your own high school days...Think about your last year there and take it from there.

Each of the film's young stars would also became part of the Brat Pack (whose other members include Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy and Demi Moore), a group of actors who found fame at the same time and were sometimes cast in movies together. Director John Hughes would also make an appearance in an uncredited role as Brian's father. Out of the entire cast, only Hall and Ringwald were actually high school age upon the movie's release; Nelson was twenty-five while Sheedy and Estévez were both twenty-two years old.

In 2005, MTV announced that the film would be rewarded with the Silver Bucket of Excellence Award in honor of its twentieth Anniversary at the MTV Movie Awards. To coincide with the event, MTV attempted to reunite the original cast. Sheedy, Ringwald, and Hall appeared together on stage, with Kapelos in the audience, and Gleason personally gave the award to his former castmates. Estévez could not attend the reunion because of other commitments, and Nelson appeared earlier in the show but left before the on-stage reunion for reasons unknown, prompting Hall to joke that the two were "in Africa with Dave Chappelle."

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Now let's switch the channel here to another classic, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This 1986 comedy film which was also written and directed by John Hughes. It would star Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones and Jennifer Grey.

In this film we get to follow high school senior Ferris Bueller, who decides to skip school and spend the spring day in downtown Chicago. Accompanied by his girlfriend Sloane Peterson and his best friend Cameron Frye, he creatively avoids his school's Dean of Students Edward Rooney, his resentful sister Jeanie, and his parents all in one day. Throughout the film, Broderick occasionally speaks to the camera to explain to the audience his character's techniques and thoughts.

Many have asked, "How can we use a film such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off to consider and reconsider Louis Althusser's theories of ideology, aesthetics, institutions such as schools and families, and mass culture?" Some even say the film simply "portrayed teachers as humorless buffoons." Hmmm something to think about.

Broderick would end up getting nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1987 for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.

This is one of those films that will always be remembered as one of the best comedies for the 80's!

Little Known Facts:

1) Maine North High School in Des Plaines, Illinois was used in the filming of The Breakfast Club, the same school used for some of the school-based scenes in John Hughes's Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which was released just a year after The Breakfast Club.

2) The Breakfast Club was ranked number# 1 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the "50 Best High School Movies" and has had a tremendous impact on both the teen film genre and on popular culture since the 1980s.

3) The theme song titled "Don't You (Forget About Me)", performed by Simple Minds, reached #1 on the U.S. Hot 100 in 1985, where it stayed for 1 week, and has since then become a symbol of teen films. The song has also been repeatedly used in several teen films as well as television programs and in a 2008 back-to-school commercial for the clothing store JC Penney.

4) No soundtrack was ever released for the Ferris Bueller's Day Off, as director John Hughes felt the songs would not work well together as a continuous album. Some of the music was heard out of a radio, supposedly tuned to 89WLS, Chicago in its "MusicRadio" Top40 days. Fred Winston was a featured voice in the movie (heard coming out of a clock radio).

R.I.P. John Hughes