The Breakfast Club
Yeah. I know.
But it's on and I'm temporarily stuck inside.
I once had a professor who made us watch 15 minutes of this movie every day and then dissect the characters, their motivations, methods to handle their issues, ways to connect with them, etc. Because of that, I sort of lost just how fantastic the overall movie actually was.
The casting was dead solid perfect. Yes each character was a stereotype to an extent. And yeah, the resolution was a little packaged. But the movie itself? Quite simply the greatest teen angst movie ever made. John Hughes should have started and stopped here.
Molly Ringwald carries just the right rich bitch princess tone. Judd is outstanding playing a ramped up version of me in high school. Emilio turns in a solid performance as the jock. Sheedy is adorable as the weirdo. Anthony Michael Hall has the dweeb down pat.
Paul Gleason is somewhat undervalued in his role as Principal Vernon. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s you had to deal with at least one Vernon. The empty threat bully who spouted cliches and thought them life lessons was a staple of every high school. So was the guy who told him to fuck off, like Nelson's character did.
"I make $31,000. I have a home. I'm not going to waste that on a piece of punk like you..... Just as I thought, you're a gutless turd."
That particular speech was delivered to me by our Vice Principal, a bald black man named Mr. Thomas (he called himself Mr. T) just before he shut me up in the "hot box" for an entire day.
The movie is 25 years old (will there be a 25th anniversary retrospective? Maybe a sequel, called The Country Club where we find out that Bender is a state senator, the wrestler works at a factory, the princess finished community college and works as a hairdresser, the weirdo owns a restaurant and the nerd is an accountant stuck in a boring life with a wife who is fucking her massage therapist?). Even at 25, it still perfectly captures all the emotion, frustration, fear, hope, pain, anger and joy of that particular time in a person's maturity.
It's an outstanding character study and one of my favorite movies of all time.
If I only had ten movies on an island, I'd hope one of them was this one.
A good story well told and well acted. Can't ask for anything more. Except nudity and that might have been creepy here.
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