Saturday, August 08, 2009

John Hughes Merges with The Infinite

John Hughes wrote "National Lampoon's Vacation". For that reason alone, the man deserves your respect. You may discuss your love of "The Breakfast Club" (which I wrote about here not all that long ago), but I was more of a fan of the "Vacation" movies, "Planes, Trains and Automobiles", and especially "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". That doesn't mean I don't like the more Ringwald-centric films. But you have to have your favorites.

Like everyone else, I was shocked to hear the man who was behind so many of the culture-touchstone movies of my generation has passed at 59.

There's not much else to be said that hasn't yet been said. The man made a lot of movies, many of them good, many of them entertaining when he moved into family faire (I kind of liked his '101 Dalmatians' live action movie. So sue me. I like puppies.).

And that's not a bad legacy.

Thanks to Nathan C. for the alert and Variety article.

3 comments:

NTT said...

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Michael Corley said...

It is the greatest cliche... yet Ferris Buller's Day Off truly did define a generation.

J.S. said...

Yeah, it's easy (and somewhat tempting) to just try to pigeonhole Hughes as just someone who made sort of cheesey teen movies and broad comedies, but I think that in order to appreciate the man you sort of have to look at what was going on before Hughes came on the scene. In particular, he just went a really long way in turning teenagers into real human beings with actual, legitimate tragedies, victories, and emotional struggles playing out in their lives. His films weren't perfect, but he took genres that had been previously populated with artificial, two dimensional characters and he added real humanity to the mix. Via con dios, Mr. Hughes. I still like The Breakfast Club.