I’ve got you beat, but not by a lot (just shy of 1000). We need to get together over a bottle of good Scotch and compare to see what we can trade.
“I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” – Michael Caine, speaking of Jaws: The Revenge, but this could have been about nearly any film he was in from the period starting 1978 through the end of 1987, with the exception of Educating Rita. Hey, actors have to eat like everyone else.
It’s one of the very few movies I’ve seen multiple times. I’m not going to call it the best, by a long shot, but I like it. Yeah, looking at it with a critical eye, it’s got unlikeable characters, but I love it nonetheless. (It helps that I like unlikeable characters, whether they are intentionally unlikeable or not.) It’s just a fun, quintessential 80s movie, which I understand for a lot of people automatically makes it suck. I put it up there with The Blues Brothers for my favorite iconic movies set in Chicago.
Dear Minnie, you may indeed call me Happy. You don’t even need to be like me, but it’s a nice touch.
And to all the Ferris haters, did you even *watch *the links I posted? Come on!
He thinks if you watch them over and over again, somehow a miracle will occur and it will suddenly become a great movie. Ditto for people who love on Pretty Woman, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, and American Beauty.
Well for a couple of guys who dislike “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” as much as you say you do, you sure spend a lot of time in this thread. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I suppose.
While I agree that Ferris is an unflawed character, I totally disagree that he’s trying to scam everyone he knows. And Cameron is far from his only friend. To quote Grace the secretary, “Well, he’s very popular, Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads — They all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.”
Yeah. Ferris is basically a psychopath. He lies to his parent (who obviously love him) manipulates his best friend, and then when he trashes said friend’s father’s most prized possession, he shrugs and walks off. Best part: he actually says he’s doing him a favor, because now he’ll finally have to confront his father love for him (or some such bullshit.)
It’s true he’s charming. They say psychopaths usually are.
They could have made a sequel where he cheated his way through college and then got a job on Wall-Street only to eventually end up in prison because of a Bernie Madoff type conviction but that movie was never made for some reason.
A lot of you who claim you don’t like the movie seem to know a lot about it and the psychologist profiles of the characters. That is rare for any movie so I think that is a point in its favor. Have you ever considered it from different angles (not the superficial ones)? It may work better that way.
Granted, it isn’t even the best 1980’s high school movie ever. That title goes to Heathers with The Breakfast Club in 2nd place but Ferris Bueler is an easy 3rd.
I’ve seen the film three times in three different decades. My opinion of it has declined each time. There are films in which I can enjoy erecting a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead style background story, e.g. Ilsa’s slick manipulation of the unfortunate dupe Rick in Casablanca, which I think may even enhance the film, but Ferris Bueller is just an almost unwatchable film of characters that aren’t really very interesting and really don’t have any existence beyond the scope of the film; that is, they exist purely to drive some element of the plot, such as Principal Rooney, who is too absurdly obsessed with “getting” Ferris, to the point of actually leaving the school in the middle of the day to track him down. It’s not just that it is unrealistic that a principal, who has many different constant demands throughout his day, would be able to flit out for hours tracking down a single truant student, but that someone capable of even attaining that position would be so obsessed with nailing one wise ass kid. It goes beyond just being unrealistic; it doesn’t even make sense in the context of the movie except that Ferris needs some kind of foil to complicate his day of scamping around, else it would just be a completely unchallenging movie with no payoff by having him “beat” Rooney and like Darth Vader, turn his sister to the dark side.
Let’s compare this film to another movie steeped in absurdity and with unlikeable, exaggerated characters: The Big Lebowski. This film works–and it works brilliantly–because while the characters are completely absurd, they also have quirks and issues that we see in the people around us. Sure, John Turturro’s “Don’t fuck with The Jesus”, licking-his-bowling-ball schtick is completely over the top and fundamentally irrelevant to the rest of the movie, but we all know someone who is obsessive about some activity or sport to the point of being creepy and unsociable, and the cutaway showing him having to go door to door to tell his neighbors that he is a registered sex offender gives him the external context to ground the character, i.e. he’s actually a sick, pathetic loser who only shines on the bowling lane. Or John Goodman’s buddy/asshole Walter; we all know someone who just doesn’t know when to let go and has completely unreasonable ideas about how to respond to conflict. Hopefully none of them pull out a 1911 and rack the slide just because another bowler had a toe over then line, but after all, it’s a league game. “Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules? Mark it zero!” All of these characters can and do exist (in the viewers mind) outside of the portion of their lives we see on screen, and just come together to give us this incomprehensible mystery about what happened to Bunny Lebowski and how that rug really tied the room together.
Ferris Bueller doesn’t do that. Not even a little bit. The parents, the girlfriend, the principal, the wacked out secretary, and even Ferris himself, are all pasteboard characters who would wilt in the first dramatic rainstorm. The only character with any depth at all is Cameron, and he just isn’t interesting enough to carry the movie by himself.
