Director John Hughes, RIP

he was pretty great imo, i find all his films pretty entertaining and containing some elements of truth. this may stem from me having grown up in the chicago suburbs, though.

Oh God, I wanted that huge Microphonies poster in FB's bedroom so badly, and his Fairlight (or Synclavier)

My favourite part of FBDO is Cameron's little shimmy on the rotating kitchen barstool during the call to Rooney,
dunno why, but there's something perfect about that.

The scene where Buck knocks all the pots and pans down and then says "SHIT!" made me laugh harder than just about anything I've ever seen. John Candy was a genius.

the weird joke in FBDO that always makes me laugh is cameron in bed, singing to himself "when cameron was in egypt's land" and then the full chorus swelling up for "let my cameron go"

haha

The Great Outdoors

Also 'never had one lesson!"

my favorite john hughes lol is

"dad, what about you?"

"flip you!"

Annette Benning is so fetching and funny in The Great Outdoors. Her first movie role!

those nat lamp stories are FUCKED UP

jaymc, i think i've repressed any time spent in Ms. B's office, which wasn't much to begin with.

those nat lamp stories are FUCKED UP

yeah that was kinda disturbing - they're vaguely pornographic and not really ... funny? and yet they are deeply reflective of adolescent angst and whatnot

UNCLE BUCK.

everything else i kinda take or leave. especially the teen movies. but for uncle buck alone he's earned his cloud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po2ahzuziEw

Love him or hate him, if you were a teen in 1980s Illinois, John Hughes meant something. To think I have not seen a John Hughes movie in years, I have been so negligent.

The real genius behind FBDO was Matthew Broderick. Everyone should read the original script to see what a huge asshole Hughes originally made him out to be, and how another another could have completely ruined the movie.

another ACTOR

For those talking about JC in Career Opportunities: 1p3 crush thread :-)

Rogermexico - I had a long drive the other day and listened to the 16 candles sndtrk on repeat. That TT song you linked the youtube to is one of my favorites.

The real genius behind FBDO was Matthew Broderick. Everyone should read the original script to see what a huge asshole Hughes originally made him out to be, and how another another could have completely ruined the movie.

Yeah -- Broderick really is a young Reagan in that movie.

So sad about this. RIP.

http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/5911/ferris-bueller-and-ed-rooney-misunderstood/

that article could have done one better and suggested that while Bueller was a psychopath, Rooney just wanted to pork him ("your ass is mine, bueller!").

"I did not achieve this position in life by having some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind. "

From imdb:

"Although he has been offered the distinguished alumni award from Glenbrook North High School, he has refused it in reflection of his not so great memories of the north shore and the school itself."

Researchers estimate that 80% of Ferrari owners are psychopaths

Hughes isn't dead unless Jeffrey Jones has inspected the corpse. Someone roll his old bones over there.

Alf!

Pucker up, buttercup.

Ferris is a total asshole and I never need/want to see that movie again. It is on cable constantly.

Rogermexico - I had a long drive the other day and listened to the 16 candles sndtrk on repeat. That TT song you linked the youtube to is one of my favorites.

― ENBB, Thursday, August 6, 2009 3:14 PM

<3

Soundtrackwise Pretty In Pink gets all the love but it's amazing imo and "If You Were Here" closes the deal like a motherfucker.

What a shitty day this has been. Btfl Thompson Twins track there, rogermexico. And RIP.

When i was 12 my mum sneaked me into see my first '15' rated film at the cinema and it was Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I often mention that small fact to people as a way of demonstrating that my mum was cool. RIP MR Hughes.

i was sort of embarrassed as a teenager by how much i liked john hughes movies. i was an aspiring film snob and never would have listed the breakfast club as one of my favorite movies, even though it was. it's hard for me to say how well the movies "hold up" because they're so entwined with my adolescence that i don't have a good perspective on them. but i do think john hughes had a real handle on the intensity of the drama of teenage life, how much and how deeply even small social conflicts matter -- and he didn't condescend to that adolescent perspective, he respected it. mythologized it, even. (and wasn't the first or last to do so, obviously, by a long shot. and maybe it's way too easy to call his movies the catcher in the rye of the '80s -- but i don't think it's far-fetched.)

even though I didn't care for it, a big reason I didn't hate Juno is that I hadn't seen a film pandering to teens in that magical Hughes way in a while.

To me Planes, Trains, and Automobiles has always been his best.

looking over this thread, i realize that the only movies hughes directed that i have seen in toto are

- ferris bueller's day off
- sixteen candles

no doubt i've seen parts of the others (breakfast club, weird science, etc.) on television.

of the ones he had a hand in but didn't direct, i've seen home alone and most of the "vacation" series, and again, parts of many others.

i THOUGHT i had seen breakfast club but evidently not, as all the references are going over my head.

Kurt Loder's take on Hughes:

Aug 6 2009 7:32 PM EDT
John Hughes, 1950-2009, By Kurt Loder
The teen-movie king of the 1980s dies in New York City.

John Hughes did one thing extraordinarily well that most critics thought wasn't worth doing at all. He made teen comedies — funny, distinctively humane pictures that resonated with young people in the 1980s in ways that we, now living in a much raunchier age, may not see again.

Hughes, who died of a heart attack on Thursday (August 6), during a visit to Manhattan, was a madly prolific writer, director and producer with a strong aversion to the Hollywood movie-making machine. Even at his hit-churning peak, he remained stubbornly based in Chicago, and rued every moment he had to spend in Los Angeles. "L.A. is a real bad place to get a perspective on the country," he once told the New York Times. "I never saw anything but the 405 freeway going to and from work. And I realized when I sat down to work I didn't have anything to write about."

He was a one-time ad man (and National Lampoon writer) who started out in the business selling scripts for movies like "Mr. Mom" and "Vacation" (the first film in what eventually became a Chevy Chase trilogy). He broke into directing — and scored his first hit — with the 1984 "Sixteen Candles," the movie that turned Molly Ringwald into a major teen star. The following year came "The Breakfast Club," which helped make "Brat Pack" celebrities out of Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall. From that point, he pretty much owned the teen '80s with "Pretty in Pink" and "Some Kind of Wonderful" (which he wrote) and "Weird Science" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (which he wrote and directed). He started branching out with the 1987 "Planes, Trains & Automobiles," a more grown-up sort of picture starring Steve Martin and the late John Candy. (Hughes claimed he wrote the script for it in three days. According to Molly Ringwald, he polished off the screenplay for "Sixteen Candles" in just two.)

Then came his biggest hit, the 1990 "Home Alone" — the movie that turned Macaulay Culkin into an international screamy-face icon. Written and produced by Hughes, and directed by his friend Chris Columbus, the picture was made (in and around Chicago) for about $18 million, and went on to gross more than $530 million worldwide. Hughes no doubt appreciated the financial avalanche (he was always closely involved in the marketing of his films), but there was an equally important creative gratification. "I made a segment of the marketplace laugh at things they don't usually laugh at," he said. "It wasn't macho jokes. It was this little kid running around dropping paint cans on guys. And you could hear grown men laugh. That was really satisfying for me."

After the piddling "Curly Sue" in 1991, Hughes abandoned directing to concentrate entirely on writing and producing, continuing to turn out some scripts under the pen name Edmond Dantès (the titular character in Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo). One of these screenplays, after lying around unproduced for 20 years, was exhumed for last year's Owen Wilson comedy "Drillbit Taylor," with unfortunate results.

Hughes seemed to become somewhat reclusive in his later years — but what did he have left to prove? His movies — solidly constructed, unapologetically mainstream — made a powerful emotional connection with a mass audience, and they may retain a following as long as there are teenagers around to discover them.

"I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things," Hughes said of his work. "The extraordinary doesn't interest me. I'm not interested in psychotics. I'm interested in the person you don't expect to have a story. I like Mr. Everyman."

Mr. Everyman liked him right back.

RIP Mr. Hughes. It's difficult to articulate just how much you've influenced me as an aspiring filmmaker. Thank you so much for all you gave.

My family has watched Planes, Trains & Automobiles every Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember. I'm sure we will this year, too.

rip

Shall probably go out and get BC, FBDO and PIP on DVD after work and get some popcorn and watch them all.

PT&A is one of the 10 best hollywood movies of the '80s imo

funny, distinctively humane pictures that resonated with young people in the 1980s in ways that we, now living in a much raunchier age, may not see again.

his teen comedies could be plenty damn raunchy in a post-animal house way, and not that much more "humane" than American Pie (and again, Juno!) in the long run.

i realize nobody on here has really pushed that argument, but i'd hate to see his passing cause some "whatever happened to heart?" thing as if his movies didn't co-exist with porkys and screwballs.

that would be the real tragedy.

Loder is notorious for playing the old man card these days and pretending the past was a better time for...well, everything. I'm aware that it's a bunch of shit, but I love him for it nonetheless.

too soo, slocki? sorry.

"soon"

And for the record, I usually like movies with happy resolutions however unrealistic they might be. But I also like movies with unhappy endings if they better serve the story. I think the Hughes films all had the endings they earned.