It has been a year since John Hughes died suddenly. I was pretty sad over the news, I welled up some during the ending of Sixteen Candles last Summer for Alamo’s Girlie Night. Recently I stumbled upon this documentary via Netflix streaming. As part of my current goal of clearing out our queue before adding anything else (now complicated by the arrival of a new Simpsons DVD set), I finally felt prepared to watch.
I’ll start with the negative parts.
The movie turned out to be a vanity piece for a quartet of Canadians who are at least 15 years younger than I am. It’s great they loved Hughes’ string of teen comedies but their connection or affinity to these films are equal to Beatles fans under 50; it’s second-hand at best because they weren’t old enough to experience the zeitgeist happening in teen culture from 1984-1987. Personally, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass which flicks were their favorites nor could I sit through their road trip to Chicago in order to stalk the reclusive director/writer. Thankfully, the fast-forward button functions with streams.
There are also interviews with some high school kids complaining about how today’s movies involving teenagers suck and how they can’t relate to the characters. Despite them being Canadian, they’re not that radically different from us in the States. However, their complaint isn’t new. This was a common gripe long before Hughes’ Sixteen Candles debuted. Hollywood had always cast twenty-year-olds for decades and still does. The only pseudo-exception I can think of immediately would be Square Pegs yet the principal actresses were 16, not 14 like their characters. Besides, Hughes only had age-appropriate principal actors a few times with Molly Ringwald, Michael-Anthony Hall, Mia Sara and Ilan Mitchell-Smith. The rest were easily in their early to mid Twenties and Alan Ruck, the dude who played Cameron, was 29 when Ferris was filmed!
Moving to the good parts which kept me watching until the end because it still did a good job celebrating Hughes’ works.
Somehow the producers succeeded in getting great interviews from the less-famous actors: Smith (retired), Sara, Kelly LeBrock, Gedde Wantanabe, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, John Kapelos (Carl the Janitor), Andrew McCarthy, Annie Potts and Alan Ruck; the director Howard Deutch (Pretty, Wonderful), Chicago film critic (and former screenwriter) Roger Ebert, Kevin Smith and the producers/writers/directors responsible for She’s All That, Not Another Teen Movie, Pump Up the Volume, Juno and Napoleon Dynamite. There’s some other people I didn’t recognize nor consider important to the conversation. The biggest surprise for me was Jim Kerr, the lead singer of Simple Minds, telling the story about how John Hughes twisted his arm into doing the hit he didn’t want to do. His explanation is very amusing, especially with it being coated in his Scottish brogue. This is where the documentary succeeds because the participants are sharing their experiences on making these films, their interactions with Hughes, the inspiration he gave them and everything else.
I did also like seeing the clips of negative reviews Hughes received when his films were initially released. One very painful scene came from the other Chicago critic Gene Siskel tearing Ferris a new sphincter. It’s nice to know Hughes’ heyday wasn’t received with unanimous praise (my mother generally rolled her eyes at Breakfast‘s language) and eventually he has been vindicated for the bulk of his Eighties work; the Nineties would be best ignored…Curly Sue, pass.
So I’ll spoil the ending of this craptacular homage to save you 90 minutes you won’t get back. The Canadians arrive in Chicago, patrol the ‘burb Hughes lives in, try to pry information from the residents and go to the director’s house. One volunteers to ring the doorbell, ask for an audience, receives rejection but leaves a package with the person who answered the door. What’s inside? A DVD of the interviews they collected and a hand-written letter from the flat four. The result? It’s all returned six weeks later via FedEx, leaving them puzzled if the subject read or watched the material.
This demonstrates what a bunch of amateurs they are. If they had any sense of decorum, they would’ve pursued proper channels through his agent (he still wrote scripts under the alias Edmond Dantes) or if that was a bust, get Roger Ebert’s assistance. Showing up unannounced to ambush him with a camera crew, outside his house is a tactic reserved by the goons at Fox News. Besides, if they knew the man as much as they claimed, they should’ve known about his reluctance to discuss the past.
Maybe some other people will make a better, more fitting and complete tribute to John Hughes. One which will include works these dullards overlooked since his vision encompassed more than teen flicks: Hughes’ time writing for National Lampoon the magazine and films, he did write the first three Vacations; other successes based in Chicago, love them or hate them: Uncle Buck; She’s Having a Baby; Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and Home Alone. A well-versed team of producers, not wannabes, research their subject regardless of how well they think they know it. While writing this post, even I learned some things in my fact-checking such as his involvement as the screenwriter for the awful Flubber remake and the Americanization of Les Visiteurs.