Mourning Pink

A little part of my childhood (well, adolescence, really) died yesterday.


John Hughes is gone.


Granted, he hadn't directed a film in nearly twenty years, and his entire writing output since the end of the eighties has been a depressing cavalcade of dreck - excessively violent live-action cartoons where some child or dog (or baby) continually abuses bumbling and/or villainous adults - endless, cynical variations on the cash-cow Home Alone formula (Baby's Day Out, Dennis the Menace, the live-action 101 Dalmations, Beethoven ad-infinitum).

So he's really been gone a lot longer than one day.

And yet - I still feel like I've lost something. Because when he was good, he was very good.

His teen films in the eighties were the touchstones of my high school years. The seeming stereotypes that populated his films had complicated inner lives - no one was quite what they seemed on the surface. I, and many others, could relate. Here was someone who knew how to talk to us, without talking down to us.

I never realized how compressed his career was. He only ever directed eight films - all the teen ones released while I was in high school, and every single one of them released before I finished college. In fact, all of his best output, both writing and directing - from Vacation to Ferris Bueller on through Christmas Vacation - was released over the course of about six years.

And then came Home Alone, which seems to be the turning point.

I'm not sure what makes me sadder, really - that he's dead, or that he gave up so many years ago, and stopped trying. I'm sure he made a good living off of his later stuff, and maybe that was more important to him than any artistic goals.

But now we'll never know what could have been.



Here's my list of favorites:




Essential John Hughes


1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off - His masterwork. Very funny and always fun, and, ultimately, slightly bittersweet. Hughes' last teen film (as a director), fittingly about a boy about to graduate high school.

2. The Breakfast Club - another classic. More serious, but still funny. About a bunch of kids sitting around in detention, yet it never gets boring - thanks to Hughes' great gift for writing dialogue.

3. Some Kind of Wonderful / Pretty in Pink - Although Hughes directed neither of these, he wrote them both, and his imprint is all over them. They're basically the same movie (poor misfit pines for beautiful rich kid), but with genders switched and the ending changed. I always preferred SKoW, because the ending seemed more honest.

4. Planes, Trains and Automobiles / She's Having a Baby - very different films, but both very good. These represent the entirety of Hughes' all-too-brief "adult" phase.

6. Vacation (also, European Vacation and Christmas Vacation) - Again, Hughes didn't direct, but he wrote all three. The first is my favorite, but some people prefer the third.

6. Sixteen Candles - stylistically, this sits halfway between Vacation and Pretty in Pink. It's a teen film starring Molly Ringwald (and the first film Hughes directed), but it also evidences some of the goofy humor of the Chevy Chase films.

7. Weird Science - I loved it at the time, and I still love the Oingo Boingo theme song, but it hasn't stuck with me like the others. Still worth seeing, though.

8. Uncle Buck - Not one of my favorites, but it's worth seeing for John Candy. This was from the year before Home Alone (and even includes Macaulay Culkin as one of the kids), and seems to be Hughes' first script where young children play an important role. Unfortunately, it's a harbinger of things to come.

9. And, of course, Home Alone - Hughes wrote it, but didn't direct it. I've never liked it, and only find it significant as the marker signifying the point where his career went off the rails. The basic, lowest-common-denominator elements of every script that followed can be found here.




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So there you have it. I think I've written way too much - far more than I intended.

But I just wanted to put something down - my little memorial, I suppose, in my little corner of cyberspace.






We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all.
- The Breakfast Club