A fey young man storms across Cleo’s to the back room and taps a tall woman on the shoulder. “Kate Winslet called. She wants her face back,” he says before sashaying over to another woman, delivering more bizarrely aggressive compliments as he mingles. The booths are filled with groups of friends dishing amiable celebrity gossip and sipping beer, eyes glancing up at one of the many televisions as this year’s Oscars begin. The ubiquitous sight of heads bent over cellphones indicates the tweeting has also started. It continues all night.

Clooney is universally loved, even if he looks cagey every time the camera pans to his face. The guy from “Short Circuit” elicits multiple cries of “Johnny Five!” when he wins an Oscar for “The Cove.” Nobody has thought of that guy in years. Molly Ringwald, looking terrified in a grape-colored toga and questionable jewelry, inspires one gentleman to mutter, “Pretty in pink, not so much purple,” while passing around a tray of cupcakes. It’s a friendly, low-key affair, though fiery debates erupt over nominees. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Breaking News” from Variety on my phone on the 66 home: John Hughes dead at 59. Eyes sting a little and immediately I remember the Simple Minds lyrics, “Don’t you forget about me, no, no, no,” heard in “The Breakfast Club.” John Hughes, the man, had been all but forgotten as a briefly prolific filmmaker (eight features in eight years, thirty-five-plus script credits), but the movies, the lines of dialogue, comic and observational, and yes, the songs, they’re stuck in an impressively expansive collective brain.

. . .

Five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks and loose pages spilled across the surface of the desk. “These are his pages,” the woman offering me the sudden urgent weekend task said. “What you have to do is take all these typed pages and make sure they match up to the pages on the disk,” compiled in a now-defunct, now-obscure word-processing program, “and you have to be careful not to change anything. John doesn’t like anyone changing things. A comma, a word. We just need a working copy for the production office.” I looked at one of the several front pages. “Uncle Buck.” Read the rest of this entry »

There will likely be no gold-plated casket for John Hughes, no huge wake at the Staples Center in Los Angeles and no blowout eulogies or mournful dirges from Al Sharpton and Stevie Wonder.

There should. (Please hold the bad guitar solos from an opportunistic John Mayer, though.)

While I spent my childhood mesmerized by Michael Jackson, I spent my life in communion with John Hughes.

Jackson was a superhero, his Moonwalk a secret power. Though inspiring, he was as unrelatable as any man who calls a chimp named Bubbles his friend and embraces baby tigers while striking model poses in a Don Johnson leisure suit.

Sure, from his J.D. Salinger-like reclusiveness to that tortoise-shell-eyeglasses-adorned-hunky-brooding look in the press photo making the rounds last week, Hughes had his quirks.

But, yearbook photos circa 1988 will confirm many of us also had our own questionable pompadours, frizzy haircuts and Oliver People’s-plastic-glasses-frame phase.

And, while Jackson would dangle a baby, unveil the latest horrors of his alleged plastic surgeries, and celebrate the scorn and ire he raised with a concert, an album or a stroll through a public market in a SARS-virus-chic ensemble, Hughes embraced failure in a more human way.

No one knows for sure, but it seems cinematic failures like “Curly Sue,” “Dutch,” and “Beethoven” maybe did him in, turned him into a bit of a haunted Elvis-like figure roaming his North Shore mansion or his farm in Harvard, Illinois in search of what went wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year I composed and presented my personal love letter to John Hughes and Molly Ringwald—a live theatrical fusion of the three films they made together titled “MOLLYWOOD.” As an awkward gay teenage boy in 1980s Midwest, I searched desperately for any reflection of my own feelings of isolation and longing and for guidance in understanding how I might fit into this seemingly hostile landscape. And then John Hughes gave me “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink”—three 1980s Midwest fairytales about awkward teenage isolation and longing. I didn’t need deep socio-political deconstruction of my experience; I just needed to know I wasn’t uniquely alone in feeling unique and alone.  If Molly Ringwald could weather the storms of teen angst, then so could I. If, in the final reel, Molly could win the heart of the heartthrob, then maybe my heart would win, too.

I hereby submit Scooty’s Molly-festo: Read the rest of this entry »

By any meaningful standard, being an American teenager sucks pond water. (It’s probably worse in Beirut, I know, but let’s save that discussion for another time, friend.) Nothing interesting is happening—all the real-life conflicts and adventures are thrice-told clichés, and most of the excitement exists only in fantasy and potential. Every popped zit feels like the explosion of Krakatoa. Everything goes on your permanent record. And you’re not even allowed to commiserate with most of your potential allies; tribal cliques set every teenager at odds with every other, and it’s death to traitors.

Thus, by any meaningful standard, “The Breakfast Club” is an Important American Film. It was the first humanistic teen comedy, dragging the genre above the cynical jerkoff fodder of “Porky’s” forcing a serious examination of high-school scene politics, and concluding with profound optimism. Every “American Pie” or “Juno” owes an impossible debt to John Hughes and the kids from Shermer. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“American Teen” debuted at Sundance 2008, and some viewers begrudged the sale to Paramount Vantage of Nanette Burstein’s eminently entertaining, beautifully constructed snapshot of the lives of several teenagers across a senior year at a Warsaw, Indiana high school. “What sort of fresh nonfiction is this!” seemed the exclamation-point-capped question. After the 38-year-old Burstein’s co-directed “On the Ropes” (1999) and “The Kid Stays In The Picture” (2002), you follow the expected acts and acting-out of American teenage life with restless curiosity. Yet some of the criticism leveled at the film was that it’s simply too well made, that it could not be true with its genuinely entertaining set of characters and its superbly structured narrative. Nonsense. There are moments where Burstein goes subjective with animation, text-messaging and other useful means to illustrate the inner sturm-und-prank of the dreamlife of teenagers, and once it’s all done, it holds together: familiar archetypes, illustrated eyes-wide with verve and vigor, remain archetypes for a reason. One I’ll pick out: Hannah Bailey, the shy-tall-sweet-smart-artistic girl who’d've been cast in a fiction film in different eras as Molly Ringwald or as Claire Danes. Here, Hannah’s herself: fitful, twitchy, troubled and ultimately triumphant. The ending(s) are pretty wonderful. See Newcity.com for an extended interview with Burstein. 95m. (Ray Pride)