To say that I was obsessed with The Breakfast Club growing up would be an understatement. It's one of five or six movies I've watched more times than any others. I hate watching movies on television (the dubbed over profanity makes my purist self revolt) so I haven't seen it in several years now but it's burned into my brain cells. I was madly in love with Molly Ringwald for two whole years. I obsessed over Ally Sheedy and the simple profundity of "...they ignore me" as chief behavioral, sartorial influence. My best girlfriend and I use to talk about the movie daily, wondering about our future selves...When you grow up, your heart dies....and vowing to remember how we felt in high school if we ever looked back on the movie and felt it wasn't totally brilliant and deserving of multiple Oscars.
Oh, teen angst! You are so hateful to live with and then immediately loveable the second you've moved out.
So for The Breakfast Club alone, I must thank writer/director (and then mostly just writer) John Hughes who passed away today at the age of 59. And that's just one of the great things he gave us. There's also the other indisputable Molly Ringwald classic Sixteen Candles and the choice dialogue and monologues of St. Elmo's Fire which are both godawful and wonderful, often at the same time.I've never quite understood why a director that popular quit so early (at 40 actually... though he continued to write, moving his focus to sequels and franchises) and I'll never understand why people have to die young. But his films or, more accurately, his enormous contributions to pop culture, will live on.
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