About 40 years after it was first released, I just saw “Sixteen Candles.” I was expecting something light and charming, if perhaps a little dated.
Boy, was I disappointed. IMHO, by today’s standards it was pretty terrible. Things that no doubt were just fine in the early 1980s (mocking the disabled, stereotyping Asians, and finding humor in a guy invading a girl’s personal space and a female too inebriated to make good decisions about sex) now seem off-putting.
Beyond that, much of the story line seemed implausible unless the move was an outright comedy or otherwise purposely over the top. (The entire family, including two sets of grandparents, forgetting Sam’s 16th birthday; the completely disorganized approach to wedding planning; the weirdly sexual remarks about Sam’s body made by one grandmother; Molly Ringwald’s stunningly perfect makeup at all times). However, I got the sense that the movie was intended to be taken pretty much at face value as a somewhat lighthearted teen angst drama.
Not to say it was completely terrible; there were some good lines between Michael Hall and the character who was Sam’s love interest Jake.
I understand that times are much different now, and I am seeing the movie through a lens that didn’t even exist when it was made. Still, I’m a bit surprised it was such a big hit. Did the movie not strike people as kinda mediocre, even at the time?
Thank you Kimstu, that was a most heartening link. I want to marry that review and have its babies. Lindy West beautifully explains exactly what is wrong with that movie.
Paul Dooley is one of my favorite underrated actors. Only recently did I learn that he was also one of the co-creators of the PBS educational TV series The Electric Company.
To the OP: at the time that it came out, I was in college; at that time, I thought that Sixteen Candles was pretty funny, though it clearly had a lot of over-the-top humor, and it wasn’t as good as some of John Hughes’ other movies. But, yeah, now, looking back, there was an awful lot about it that, through modern eyes, is very cringe-worthy.
I saw it once, the first time it was on broadcast TV, in maybe 1980 or 1981, and I remember really enjoying it. I’ve been meaning to watch it again sometime.
You can also check out Molly Ringwald’s ambivalent take that she wrote for the New Yorker in 2018.
I remember thinking it was hilarious in 1984 when it came out (I was sixteen). Then I remember cringing a bit when I re-watched it a decade or so later. It aged poorly, probably the worst out of all of Hughes’ oeuvre.
Looks great, but more about “The Breakfast Club” than “Sixteen Candles.”
Nonetheless relevant and interesting, for me at least. There is a reference early in the linked article to a “This American Life” episode in which Ringwald talks about watching “The Breakfast Club” with her ten-year-old daughter. As it happens, listening to that podcast is what sparked my interest in viewing “Sixteen Candles.”
So, it’s all connected. I will say, based on my incomplete review and understanding of everything, Ringwald seems like a pretty cool person.
The movie reflected the view of the world teenagers at the time often perceived. What’s wrong with it is what was wrong with society at the time. The same problem exists for movies made for a teen audience now or an audience of older people recalling their own youth.
Yes, sometimes you cringe because you are supposed to cringe. And sometimes there were things that were cringey then and are still so, and othes that are cringey in hindsight.
(And to be be fair, to a teenager much of life is awkward cringe on the best day. )
Also, this was Hughes’ first directorial outing and the first of his coming-of-age scripts (and half his scripts so far had been National Lampoon productions) so I can see him not getting his footing quite right.
When I was closer to that age, I liked the movie. But I did some (probably) awful things in the name of humor when i was that age. Not mean, but clueless. Insensitive. More like “you’re not looking at the joke from the other person’s perspective”. If no one gets hurt, I thought it was funny. Trouble was, at that age, you don’t appreciate the different kinds of hurt you can inflict.
Kind of like how these days I side with Dean Wormer instead of the Deltas.
I’m not sure if all of this is in this interview but I remember one with him and other cast members talking bout how open John Hughes was about adapting and changing the script if things didn’t feel right when filming. Dooley definitely improved one key scene in the movie that he talks about on this interview.
Sixteen Candles just happens to have chosen to get a laugh out of almost every specific thing that would NOT have aged well. It’s as if the writers got in a time machine, came to 2023, said “Alright, what will age really badly?” and then went back to the 80s and wrote a script deliberately designed to hit those points.
This was, remember, a cheap teen comedy. In terms of filmmaking craft it isn’t any worse than, say, The Karate Kid, Police Academy, Bachelor Party, or Nightmare on Elm Street, all of which were relatively cheap productions from the same year. It just happened to absolutely crush the bingo card for jokes that now seem amazingly insensitive and crude. That said, it wasn’t the worst of 1984 in this regard; “Revenge of the Nerds” is unwatchable now.
Most movies don’t age well, to be honest; 1984 gave us way more stuff like the aforementioned films, or CHUD or whatever, than it did films like Amadeus or more imaginative and innovative popular movies like the Terminator and Last Starfighter.
I was 23 when it came out. First, I will agree that all the things you cite as inappropriate, offensive or cringeworthy are indeed so—when I consider them now. When the movie came out my wife (then-girlfriend) and I both thought it was terrific, especially Farmer Ted.
There was literally none of it where we reacted, “Whoa! They really thought they could get away with that?” Interesting how one’s perspective changes. That said, we recognized even then that the movie was deliberately silly and over-the-top in the characters and situations, and we thought they pulled it off.