Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Directed by John Hughes
After high school slacker Ferris Bueller successfully fakes an illness in order to skip school for the day, he goes on a series of adventures throughout Chicago with his girlfriend Sloane and best friend Cameron, all the while trying to outwit his wily school principal and fed-up sister.
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For another thing, while skipping school is exhilarating, I'd have much rather seen the same situation applied to an adult, the way Yves Robert did in ''A Very Happy Alexander" (1969), which had Phillipe Noiret shocking his neighbors by taking to bed after his wife dies and staying there, and as Stuart Rosenberg did in "The April Fools" (also '69), in which Jack Lemmon forsakes his suburban home and family and flies off to Paris with Catherine Deneuve.
In the span of only three years, from 1984 to 1987, John Hughes directed and/or wrote six movies that resulted in his becoming known as the reigning king of the Hollywood teen movie, a genre that had seen a massive resurgence in the 1980s after being largely dormant since the “teenpics” of the 1950s and ’60s (George Lucas’s American Graffiti notwithstanding).
However, unlike other filmmakers who saw the world of teenagers as an excuse to exploit the adolescent obsessions with booze, drugs, and sex, Hughes was fascinated by the complex social and emotional terrain of middle-class teenagerdom, and he treated his characters with a degree of sympathy and good-natured humor that was largely absent from a genre glutted with movies like Private Lesson (1981), Porky’s (1981), and Zapped (1982).
For example, Cameron’s confidence-building act of destroying the thing his dad loves best, his Ferrari, is straight out of “Risky Business.”
Chicago has rarely looked more radiant than it does in Tak Fujimoto's cinematography, but otherwise this 1986 comedy is standard John Hughes, with a few plot elements on loan from The Blues Brothers and Risky Business.
This is the new teen banality in all its spoiled splendor--it's "Risky Business" without any of the irony (though with an unsettlingly similar plot device involving a fancy car).
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"Ferris Bueller" was directed by John Hughes , the philosopher of adolescence, whose credits include " Sixteen Candles ," " The Breakfast Club " and "Pretty In Pink."
June 10, 1986 | With movies such as Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, writer-director John Hughes earned big bucks by pandering to teenage audiences with gross-out gags, pop culture cross-references, anti-authoritarian pot shots, and fawning sympathy for self-pitying adolescents.
Hughes achieved that credential with such sensitive and commercial hits as "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club."
Writer-director John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink) has come up with another snappy and thought-provoking film about adolescence.
This being a John Hughes film ("Sixteen Candles," "Pretty in Pink"), the lead character is a high-school student and the usual affluent one at that.
In some ways, it feels like a summing-up moment: the comic broadness of Vacation ; rifling between plots in a manner that, of all his work, most recalls Sixteen Candles ; a climactic speech transplanted from The Breakfast Club.
Chicago has rarely looked more radiant than it does in Tak Fujimoto's cinematography, but otherwise this 1986 comedy is standard John Hughes, with a few plot elements on loan from The Blues Brothers and Risky Business.