Not now.
::looks around; whistles and listens to the echo::
Yo yo yo yo, anybody here ere ere ere?
Hmmmm. Guess not.
Veb
Whoops. Kind of ironic, considering the title. Anyway. I just looked at the December issue of Premiere magazine, which has an in-depth article on the making of The Breakfast Club. I’ve mentioned before, I despise that film. I can’t understand why no one else saw in it what I see in it; that it’s a primer for abusers and their victims. Everyone sees Judd Nelson’s character as the hero and Molly Ringwald’s character as the villain, and I see it as the complete opposite. She is never given a chance to speak for herself. Her only offense is being somewhat uppity, which is not a capital crime. She is treated as brutally as a murderer or rapist, when in fact, what we have is a popular girl with nice clothes, who knows who Moliere is, and for reasons that she is not allowed to state, wants to preserve her virginity. Put her in front of a firing squad.
The message seems to be, if you’re white trash, abuse someone better off than you and blame them for your problems. I say, if you hate your life, do something about it. Or live the way you want to live, but let other people live their way.
Also, I’ve never met a black person who likes this film much, and I know one black guy who actively dislikes Nelson’s character. The character broods about being disadvantaged, but he has one big advantage: the color of his skin. If he wanted to apply for a straight job, he could get a haircut and a shirt and tie, and he could pass. Jamal from South Central can’t do that. Basically, a straight white male is going to have a hard time convincing me that his situation is hopeless.
So how did so many people gloss over the cruelty and misogynism in this film? I think John Hughes is going to the same place OJ’s going.
Remember, I’m pulling for you; we’re all in this together.
—Red Green
Er…
It’s just a movie.
The only thing that annoyed me about it is that Anthony Michael Hall spends the entire movie charming and mooning over Ally Sheedy, and yet she walks off with frickin Emilio Estevez!
Well, ain’t that just the story of my life?
-PIGEONMAN-
Returning Soon!
The Legend Of PigeonMan - Watch this space…! Great things are afoot!
Actually, I took it more as the character…“brooding”…about things like being abused…
All right, well, I’ll step up to defend it.
I didn’t think of any of the students in terms of villains or heroes. Some characters were more inherently likeable than others, but isn’t that real life? And as for the misogyny, personally I found Alison the most sympathetic character, maybe that’s just me…
I thought we saw the good and bad sides of all the characters. Bender may be witty and clever but the scene where he gets x more weeks of suspension because he can’t back down to the principal (or whatever) shows how much of it is just bluster. Claire may be rich and snotty but when she talks about her family you see how her popularity at school makes a poor substitute for the dysfunction in her home life. Etc. They were five stereotypes turned into human beings… in most teen films, I think, it’s the other way around.
Not saying it’s high art or anything but I did find it thoughtful and insightful and all that, and as a high-schooler at the time of its release, I identified with it. And I can’t think of many other films I could have said that about.
OK, the pairing up at the end of the movie bothered me, too, but…not for the same reason as Rilch.
Molly Ringwald’s character is using Judd Nelson’s to get at her parents. SHE’S USING HIM! He’s a pain in the ass, to be sure, but he’s not a user. She is.
Ally Sheedy/Emelio Estevez bothered me, too. She was beautiful, and interesting before Ringwald’s character gives her that makeover at the end. At which point she’s … not. THEN Emelio notices her! How bloody shallow can you get? And bad taste to boot!
Then Anthony Micheal Hall gets left all alone. ::Grumble::
Eschew Obfuscation
Mmm…are you sure? He’s the one who obliquely said, “You know how your parents use you to get back at each other?..Wouldn’t I be outstanding at that?” But she didn’t answer. I thought it was just a case of a girl being attracted to a guy who treated her like shit. Or maybe, even though his character was harsh beyond all reasonable bounds, she was able to feel his pain, and decided he needed to be shown kindness. So now she’s going to save him…:::rolls eyes:::
Hughes says in the article I read: “I didn’t have any fondness for Claire as I wrote that character. It’s fairly difficult to find sympathy for a character that in high school would basically have poked me in the forehead and said, ‘Get lost!’” Well, it’s difficult to find sympathy for a guy who tortures another guy in a locker room, but he managed to do that. The attacks against Ringwald are just way out of line. You’d think prom queens were the root of all evil. So he wrote this to get back at every girl who dissed him in high school. I guess he also wanted to send the message that being a gangbanger is the way to go.
Initially, I didn’t like that either, but later I saw it as a metaphor. She shed her protective covering, and allowed someone to touch her, literally and figuratively. And Estevez had already noticed her. He was the one who went after her when she stormed away, while Hall was sneering, “The girl is an island…”
Well, I didn’t like that either, but the character as written was given absolutely no dignity. FYI, did you know that Hall was cast for the part well before shooting, but before production started, he gained his full height and got buffed out? That’s why he’s wearing that baggy sweatshirt and khakis, instead of something more collegiate, as originally planned. A lot of the blocking was structured around that too, so he wouldn’t be seen to tower over the other two guys.
Remember, I’m pulling for you; we’re all in this together.
—Red Green
Except, she spent most of the movie reaching out, basically saying ‘Notice me! I’m here!’ There was no ‘protective covering’, she spent the whole time striving to be noticed.
Guilt, since he was partially responsible for her hurt feelings. All that proves is he isn’t a total jerk.
All just the way I see it, of course.
(Guess which characters I identified with…)
Nope, didn’t know that. Neat. ::Files in ‘neat factoids’ section of his brain.::
Eschew Obfuscation
I liked the movie, what can I say. Mostly I just found Judd Nelson to be really sexy. I agree that the makeover thing was lame, she looked cheesy afterward, and I totally did not understand what she saw in Emelio’s character… he was a loser.
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Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
“Meat flaps, yellow!” - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
I liked Ally Sheedy better with the black shit on her eyes.
so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts? Tori Amos
Never saw the movie.
Ally Sheedy? Hmmmmm… “Nice Software!”
“Fix me a turkey pot pot, bitch!”
Butter, Cap’n Crunch and Pixie Stix sandwiches – yum, yum!
I still like the movie. Like certain songs, it reminds me of where I was at the time it was released.
Trouble is I mix it up with Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink.
I hate the fact that when I was looking for the band “the Breakfast Club” I always ended up just finding info on the movie “the Breakfast Club”
Opal, sometimes, I think you’re “the other me.” Course, I think Judd Nelson’s yummy in everything, but that’s neither here nor there.
I don’t think that Claire was using Bender. The way I saw it was that she was tired of her “princess” facade, y’know? She was the Homecoming Queen because that’s what her family and friends expected, and despite the fact that all she really wanted to do was break out of that and be herself, she knew that the people who were “close” to her wouldn’t have supported her, and she was scared to be alone. By getting together with John, she was finally saying, “Fuck you all and your standards, I’m tired of keeping up appearances.”
“Fester, fester, fester…rot, rot, rot.”
I personally liked the Breakfast Club, I was in my mid teens at the time of it’s release and I felt it was a fairly accurate description of all the different “cliques”;
the jocks,popular rich kids,the loners(basket case), the delinquents and the geeks.
I think they may have been extreme examples of each group but at the same time I was able to relate to or recognize them in my own life…but that’s just my opinion…
Smile…people will wonder what your up to! 
I don’t think I really identified with anyone in that movie. Maybe Ally Sheedy’s character more than anyone else. The pairings at the end were by far the most messed-up part. I get tired of boy-girl ratios in movies where there always have to be more boys than girls, so that we can fill all the gender roles: alpha males, beta males, and females. So just in case you hadn’t noticed that Anthony Hall’s character was the beta male, they make sure he doesn’t have a chick at the end so it’ll be obvious.
Basically, it tried to make a bunch of stereotypes into humans and didn’t make it very far. It was very convenient for the loner girl to be good-looking under all the drab exterior, which of course says nothing to all the loners who are drab looking under all their drab exteriors. Take a bunch of fashion-model actors, hide their typical good looks under a bunch of high school costumes, strip off the costumes, and expect them to seem like real people?
No, I didn’t think the movie was terrible. Parts of it were funny, although I can’t what they were now.
That which does not kill me just makes me really irritable
Um Im not sure what county in the south this poster is from, but try being a college educated white male in California, and then see how disadvantaged you are.
Everyone believes that the meager existence you recieve that they call pay is more than enough to make up for all the “gifts” given to all others. Please, dont make me angry. Just say that some people may be disadvantaged more than others, but dont say us white guys with college have it better, we are just the most picked on as of late.
I had observed that Claire was being berated for not telling whether or not she was a virgin, not for actually being one. She certainly was honest about not seeking friendships with the other students outside of the detention atmosphere.
I thought that the movie was brilliant, within it’s genre. It’s a beautiful, non-existent, high school fantasy world where the most popular girl in the school wants to make-up the resident wacko, the jock winds up respecting the geek, etc. It was also well-written, keeps a good pace, has a good soundtrack and displays excellent character development. I still like to watch this movie.
At the time, I really liked the fact that they showed the popular kids smoking pot and destroying school property (okay, so I was a high school punk rock anarchist - not so many of us in those days).
Unfortunately, the flouting-the-class-barrier formula failed in “Some Kind of Wonderful” when John Hughes tried it again. Only the punk-rockers were amusing in that film and the rest of it was totally convoluted and annoying.
Some mornings, it’s just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
– Emo Phillips
I think there is a problem with how people approach this movie. Questions like “Who’s the hero?” and “Who’s the villain?” are meaningless. This is a character study, nothing else. What’s more (and here is the important part) it’s a character study about teenagers!
Is Claire “using” Bender? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably a little of both. Who among us can say that our motives are pure as the driven snow? Should’ve Hall’s character got “paired up” at the end? It would have made a nice ending for a fairy tale. The fact that he ended up alone was much more realistic. Was Estevez’s character shallow for not realizing what a beauty Alison was until after the make over? Yeah, probably. But I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard people tell me “Boy, you sure clean up nice!”
People are like that, particularly teenagers. I thought it was an excellent film, considering it’s target audience. Anyone who comes away talking about disliking certain charcters is missing the point.