The John Hughes teen movies everyone likes are Breakfast Club, Pretty and Pink, Ferris Bueller and Some Kind of Wonderful. People forget Weird Science and Sixteen Candles is mixed.
Candles was the first and you can see plenty of what was great about later Hughes here - the depiction of strong female friendships (Randy - who people forget - and Sam, Caroline and her friends when they're drunk and one cuts her hair), the quiet chats between people (Sam and her dad, Sam and the Geek, even Jake and the Geek).
The humour is really broad - you have to see it as a transitional piece from 80s teen sex comedies to more mature work. This was made at a time when Private School and Porky's were the touchstone comedies.
So you've got a lot of racist jokes - the groom's father is in the Mafia, the Chinese exchange student is a horny idiot. There's also a fair bit of rape humour - Jake offers his girlfriend to the Geek...and the Geek takes advantage of her pretty much.... and then she enjoys it and they start going out. (Presumably the Geek went on to become a millionaire so many Caroline's smart but she did not give consent.)
It's surprising how passive Sam is - the only real act she does is write that she fantasizes about Jake on a form, which she means to show to her friend but Jake reads. I guess she goes to the dance.
The active ones are Jake - who tries to see if Sam likes her - and the Geek - who is chasing after Sam.
The world though is rich - there's a lot of characters but it's easy to follow who is who: the wisecracking brother Mike (who gets many of the best lines), the parents, the two sets of grandparents, the wasted sister (this movie is part teen romance but about 25% Father of the Bride style family wedding comedy - National Lampoon's Wedding... which actually would've been a a good movie), you've got the jocks and their world and the cool kids and their world and the geeks and their world (Love the references to floppy disks!).
There's warm, farce, insight, laugh out loud jokes, satire and moments of extreme dodginess.
No comments:
Post a Comment