John Hughes

From time to time I like to get off of the Falcons and world of sports and focus on some other parts of the world at large. In this case I want to talk about John Hughes.

For anyone my age, I am 30 John Hughes films were an ever present part of our lives: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Uncle Buck, Home Alone, Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Weird Science were so popular and so well done that when i heard that he had died it reminded me about how much of my youth was defined by his movies.

When you think about growing up and where you were when you first saw that scene with Maculey Culkin grilling John Candy about why he isn’t married and how many consecutive questions asked in Uncle Buck is still a gut bust every time I see it.

Or watching Molly Ringwald getting felt up my her grandmother in Sixteen Candles and laughing at the horrors of growing up and not fitting in all while the foringn exchange student says wacky shit like “What’s happening hot stuff?”

Hughes captured a time in the 80’s and early to mid 90’s that is so far reaching in comedies of today. Would we have a Judd Apatow without a John Hughes? I am not so sure we would. It was the ability to take messed up, damaged individules in one way or another and mix them with the social misfits that so many of us felt like and he gave us a sense that no matter what there was someone more messed up than us.

The Breakfast Club was a defining movie in my life because it felt important to the 6 year old kid in LA who thought that even though every social achetype of high school was represented at the end of the day they were all equal in the fact that high school sucked. And it was because they all had to be in the same place and do the same things for just one Saturday they were somehow unified and lost their cliques and labels. From the opening title with the lyric from David Bowie’s Changes I was instantly connected and would be for the rest of my life.