It was 40 years ago today

No one asked you. Kindly exit the thread now.

 

The same with Grease. The pretty virginal girl finally wins the guy over by getting a makeover into a dominatrix.

 

The Breakfast Club taught me that the geeky guy was going to get used for his smarts and then discarded, so why the hell are you risking everything by letting Renee blatantly copy off your geometry test when you are too damn shy to even ask for the date she would turn down you fucking loser God would you please just grow up already?

I’m sorry, where were we?

 

Despite my love of 80s movies, I think I have only seen Breakfast Club once all the way through. The Citizen Kane of Ally Sheedy 80s movies is clearly WarGames!

 

Worst line of WarGames was Sheedy's "I told you not to start playing games with that thing" when they were desperately trying to stop Joshua from launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

NOW is the time to get your "I told you so" in?

Of course, they did it so the "GAMES!" lightbulb would go off in David's head.

 

Whatever the themes, I really enjoyed those 80's movies:

Breakfast Club
Sixteen Candles
Some Kind of Wonderful
Pretty in Pink
St. Elmo's Fire
Class
Heaven Help Us (very underrated, so funny)
About Last Night

 

Always hated the "Breakfast Club" ... and I was a fan of John Hughes, especially back then. Came out when I was going from 8th grade to high school, so it should speak to me, but it didn't then, and it seems ridiculous to me once I reached adulthood.

Broadly drawn characters and Hughes' views on teens and relations with adults has always been weird. His world view works in his comedies to a point, but in a semi-serious movie, his caricatures are kind of embarrassing.

 

I was in the Class of '76, so "Dazed and Confused" was the movie that encapsulated my high school experience.

Although to be accurate, the main characters in D&C were not Class of '76 -- they were '77s, the rising seniors who took over the social apparatus as the current graduating class (MY class) went out the door.

D&C was dead-on balls accurate in depicting the culture of cruising around to hastily-thrown together keggers in farm fields, going to weird hybrid nightclubs which were sone combinations of Chuck E. Cheeses and biker pool halls/ beer bars, in the magical 6-8 years between the lowering of the drinking age to 18 in most states nationwide.

Lowering the drinking age ensured about half of high school seniors (and some juniors) would be legally able to obtain alcohol, untik the slamming of the doors with the federally dictated rise of the cutoff back to 21 by the end of the decade.

While D&C got all the atmospherics right, they didn't get the pecking order politics or the transfer of social supremacy right, at least not as it usually happened in Starrville in my days in the 1970s.

In Starrville, a B1G college town, a fairly large percentage of the graduating classes (about 25% i believe) every year from Starrville High stayed home and went to Starrville State, while another 10% maybe went to Starrville Metro Community College, making a solid 1/3 of the graduating cksss that was going to college in town, then add on the people who launched into the job market and stayed home and got jobs in the area, they were still around as well.

Bottom line, when our classes graduated, we didn't all pack up, dissipate and disappear -- the outgoing graduating class for the most part hung around and dominated the summertime kegger and bar hopping scene (as the seniors the year before had done as well).

It wasn't really until August when the people who WERE going out of town to go to college basically started packing up, pretty much everybody would go Up North or some vacation paradise for a week or two, and then later August when preseason practice in most sports kicked off, that the true passing of the party torch to the succeeding senior class took place.

When the dorms and student apartments at Starrville State started filling up, as well as the then-flourishing college town bars, most of us townies started to junp into the college party circuit, and finally started leaving the high school keggers behind.

But even that wasn't really a clean break either-- if you were still in the phone loop for kegger hotlines, you could still show up, especially to chase girls in the class behind you.

But once college classes opened and B1G college football games kicked off, if you were a college kid hanging out at high school keggers, you had the moderately awkward feeling of being unofficial chaperones.

 

The only John Hughes element that ever rang true to my experience was Eric Stoltz befriending that punk-metal dude. I was a straitlaced kid (never did drugs, smoke, drank, snuck out at night) but had friends from all strata of the high school ecosystem. I had friends like that metal dude. In college too.

 

You left out Taps.

 

I was somewhat the nerd but also ran with the athletes and cheerleaders since I played sports and had known them all since grade school so I saw the wrestler dude and the rich girl. I also had friends who were non-traditional and were as we called it "burn outs". Maybe that's why I didn't knock The Breakfast Club because I saw and interacted with those cliques. (Of course I chafed at them and longed to go to college because I didn't want HS to be the epitome of my youth, which turned out awesome IMHO.)

 

Excellent movie!