The Breakfast Club

I can't remember the first time I saw The Breakfast Club (1985), but I know I was younger than the intended audience by more than a bit. And I do remember the blank videocassette tape on which we recorded the movie via TBS, so that all the swear words were edited out. It's the kind of film that seemed emotionally raw to me as a child. Now that I'm an adult, the obvious commercial aspects of The Breakfast Club are apparent. It seems more than a bit calculated to appeal to the egos of bored, spoiled American adolescents who hate their parents, and I think in that respect, The Breakfast Club errs.

I'm not exactly making a novel point here. Many critics before me have noticed that this movie inflates the problems of young people in order to draw them in. And yes, it does do that. It's kind of an odd trick, this idea of luring viewers in via flattery. It may bespeak a lack of confidence in what this movie has to offer that's actually real and true and funny, which is the fresh-faced cast. But despite its flaws, there's something to this movie, a kind of alchemy that exists in spite of its singular movie studio marketing designs on its audience. And I'd be willing to bet that teenagers of 2014 (I almost wrote 2013!) could still relate to the five kids in what may be writer-director John Hughes' most iconic film. (What's more iconic than Judd Nelson raising his fist in the air as the credits role, ticking away to that grand Simple Minds song, "Don't You Forget About Me"?)

Beneath the commercialism, there are five characters who come to life thanks to the performances of Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, and Ally Sheedy, all of whom--as most of us already know--embody various American teenager stereotypes, gathered in the library of their suburban Chicago high school for Saturday detention. There's the jock, the spoiled girl, the bad boy, the nerd, and the consummate weirdo.

The latter is played by Sheedy. I really just have to stop and talk about about her performance for a moment. I've always liked Ally Sheedy--I even had a little crush on her as a kid--and I always feel validated when a critic likes her performance in this movie. It's the most authentic performance in The Breakfast Club, and when everyone else gets involved in big speeches full of emotionally charged dialogue, Ally Sheedy's off in her own little world doing something joyfully weird. She confesses late in the movie--after everyone else has been bearing their decidedly much younger souls--that she came to detention because she didn't have anything better to do. It's a refreshingly unexpected confession from a movie that's chock full of confessions of a lesser, more obvious kind. Sheedy saves this movie from being totally pre-fab.

I think that when it comes to comic/dramatic perceptions of high school culture and adolescent malaise, Sixteen Candles holds up as the better John Hughes film. But The Breakfast Club still works nearly thirty years later as a kind of Hollywood product's idea of what it would be like to be an alienated teenager. It's as much a part of its decade as Rebel Without A Cause is a part of the 1950s, and you really have to have grown up on the movie to appreciate it. That or you have to love the movie's over-the-top drama, which John Hughes still manages to reign in to a degree. (It's the opposite of what happens in the movie St. Elmo's Fire, which got completely away from its director, and which stars three of the actors from this film.)

Paul Gleason plays the dean, a contrived villain whose badness unites the five disparate students: They may not like each other much, but they're in accord with their disdain for him. The dean doesn't see them or care to know them as human beings, and as a teacher I resented him because I don't think every teacher is like this. Granted, there are plenty of them--desk jockeys who teach for the summers off and despise the kids more and more every year--and maybe John Hughes was right to make this guy such a dick. But I also think he's a convenient obstacle for the kids to overcome and be drawn to each other. It's as if John Hughes were trying to say, "See? I get how awful grown-ups are." He prompts what may be the most ridiculous line in the movie, uttered by Sheedy's character: She says that when you grow up, "your heart dies." Is it a youthful exaggeration or some kind of brilliant, cynical truth? Maybe a little bit of both. The Breakfast Club is at least a happy reminder of how movies used to be: unashamedly dramatic and funny at the same time without a shred of that abysmal self-awareness that plagues current cinema. ★★½ 

St. Elmo's Fire

Bad. Really bad. The writing--by director Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander--is utterly preposterous. It's about the fear of encroaching adulthood that upsets the relationships of seven tight-knit college friends. Some of them self-destruct so ridiculously and so unexpectedly (such as Emilio Estevez, who becomes obsessed with a girl he dated once and starts stalking her) that all you can do is laugh, while others are too obviously predetermined to some kind of tragic separate peace. For example: Demi Moore, playing the vapid, cocaine-addicted party girl who's buying everything on credit and sleeping with her married boss. These people stab each other in the back with relish and laugh it off as they slide the knife back out. It's hard to care about characters who are so obviously the concoction of a slick Hollywood marketing campaign, complete with a sentimental music score that forces the audience to feel sympathetic toward them. With Rob Lowe as the alcoholic rock star/party animal who always seems to be carrying his saxophone around, Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy as the not-so-happy co-habitating couple, Andrew McCarthy as the pensive, cynical writer who's in love with Sheedy, Mare Winningham as the frumpy friend who loves Rob Lowe too much, Martin Balsam, and Andie McDowell as Emilio's obsession, who delivers perhaps the worst performance of the movie. (Her character strikes a heavy blow toward women's lib: when the stalker crashes a party she's at, she takes him home to talk things out!) David Foster composed the sappy music, which you've probably heard on the radio before. 110 min. 1985. ★½

Repo Man

Repo Man (1984) is just about the weirdest movie I've seen in a long time. It's set in Los Angeles, the grungy Los Angeles that resembles every other grungy city full of rundown buildings and displaced persons, and there are enough displaced persons in Repo Man to populate an entire city. It's a punk scifi satire from British writer-director Alex Cox, and it stars Emilio Estevez as an aimless youth who begins working for a team of hardboiled, loony repo men headed by Harry Dean Stanton. All the repo men (and there are several "companies" of them--rival repo men and women--in this film) are on the lookout for a Chevy Malibu being driven around by a doddering old fool who might be crazy or might be drunk or maybe both: there's a 20,000 dollar price tag on the car, and the government's after it too. Men in antiseptic-looking white uniforms and gas masks keep popping up, scooping up dead bodies off the streets and placing them into big government trucks, and there's apparently some glowing, glimmering nuclear waste in the trunk of the car.

The problem with Repo Man is that it never fully crystallizes. Alex Cox apparently had a lot of ideas zooming around in his brain when he wrote and directed this, his first feature, after graduating from UCLA's film school. This is exactly the kind of mishmash a film student would come up with. It has some clever ideas--there are plenty of amusing gags throughout the film that catch your ear or your eye--but a lot of unformed ones too, and the unformed ideas take over. Cox keeps cutting to different scenes with his characters and never allows for enough time to develop either the people or the situations. The minute you feel that the movie might start to gel, he cuts. And this turns out to be a real liability. Repo Man is a junkyard of a movie: all kinds of intriguing parts, loaded with meaning and cleverness, but ultimately disorganized to a fault.

Its biggest asset turns out to be its sense of humor, which has the effect of winning over the viewer. We might feel lost--and we might feel completely at the mercy of a mad director who has no idea where he's going--but at least we're enjoying the chaotic mess of a movie along the way. And Estevez is a fun lead. He's kind of a prick, going after what he wants with no scruples whatsoever: he propositions a girl as though he's asking her for a piece of gum, and he tells his parents he loves them because he's after a once-promised cash gift from his father. (He's disappointed to find that they've already sent the money to some phony televangelist.)

The supporting cast includes Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash, Sy Richardson, Susan Barnes, Fox Harris, Tom Finnegan, Del Zamora, Eddie Velez, Zander Schloss, Jennifer Balgobin, Dick Rude, Miguel Sandoval, and Vonetta McGee. 92 min. ★★½