Yeah? Yeah? Well, all you who don’t like The Breakfast Club are all neo-maxi-zoom-dweebies. 
I can’t believe I got to be the first to say it!
I went to high school in the '90s, and I love Breakfast Club. It was pretty representative of my big high school. Sorry, but when a teen drama can make an episode in 1998 entirely as an homage to Breakfast Club - figuring that some of the teens watching hadn’t been born yet when BC was out and still got the reference - I think it’s here to stay. 
Hey I liked Ferris.
But Breakfast Club is a terrible movie.
What I hated the most about it was the cheesy, double cheesy with cheese in the crust ‘happy ending’.
That essay that is written by the geek, of course they make him do the actual work, and then they all realize that they are all the same. RIGHT!
You? Are my new hero.
And I agree. If they keep this up, they’re gonna be like … totaled.
Conclusion: Not everybody’s high school was like the one in TBC, but some people’s were. It seems that the enjoyment of this movie is in proportion to ones identification with it. I knew kids like this (even though our library looked nothing like that), but didn’t think that “my*” type was represented.
*the quiet underachiever.
That’s right. Two hits: me hitting them, them hitting the floor. 
BC has DVD commentary? Add it to my Amazon wish list!
I have to admit that I LOVED The Breakfast Club. I had just graduated from high school, which was probably 90% white, 9% Asian and 1% “other.” I was working at a movie theater part time and going to community college. I got no work done the day this movie opened. I kept sneaking in the back to watch it, then running back to the box office to see if there was anything I’d missed.
Okay, so it is stereotyped and pretentious, but that was how I saw my life. I can definitely see how viewing it now it wouldn’t be quite as topical, but that was my life. Then.
I was four or five years older than the characters n '85, and agreed with the principal character for the most part, but do have to give props to one great line.
Q to the Nerd: Why do you have a fake ID?
NERD: (perfectly matter of fact, as if it should be obvious to God and everybody): So I can vote.
I still laugh at that line.
Nowadays, I get anoyed at the movie’s earnestness and turn it off, or sit there annoyed that Judd Nelson’s hair grows/shrinks about two inches every other scene.
Sir Rhosis
Quoth adam yax:
Hey, now, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Weird Science were great! Well, yeah, they were campy, but what’s wrong with that? I have no beef with Huges, just Breakfast Club.
FWIW, the film was made in 1984. Sheedy and Estavez would have been 22. Nelson was 25. Hall and Ringwald were 16. Its certainly not uncommon for 22 year olds to portray 17 and 18 year olds on film.
I found Nelson slightly unbelivable - but not terribly as his “type” always seemed a lot older in high school. Sheedy and Estavez were very believable. I was still getting carded for rated R movies at 24 - so I always looked young for my age (still do - generally cause doubletakes when people at work discover my age). My sister, however, has looked middle aged since highschool. Kids do “age” at very different rates - especially right around then.
I graduated from a suburban Midwest high school in 1984 with NO black people in my graduating class - and no Asians either. With an income disparity that had some kids driving nice cars their junior year, and other kids having parents who didn’t own cars. I thought it spot on. I didn’t find the ending particularly happy - its pretty obvious that these kids won’t rediscover what they learned that day for years - yet its also pretty obvious that one day they’ll all look back on that day as seminal.
[QUOTE=adam yax]
[list][li]Sixteen Candles (1984),[/li][li]Breakfast Club, The (1985),[/li][li]Weird Science (1985),[/li][li]Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986),.[/li][/QUOTE]
Excuse me? Are you out of your freakin’ mind? I can understand not like Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, but Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?
I graduated from a high school in the northern suburbs (i.e. North Shore) of Chicago in 1986. The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and even Risky Business all seemed directed right at me. (In fact, Cerri, I saw all three of these movies at the theater in Northbrook Court. )
My high school also had students who came from money, and got brand-new cars on their 16th birthday, and students who had nothing.
Okay, but was it the fault of the students who got cars, that other students had nothing? That’s what hasn’t been brought up here yet. I don’t care how great the disparity is between Bender’s situation and Claire’s. She didn’t cause it, and she does not deserve his tirades.
Whoa, I never noticed what kind of car Allison’s parents had! Good catch. I suck at recognizing cars. 
I guess I got a lower income vibe from her intensely pathetic lunch, which (before she added the handfuls of Cap’n Crunch & Pixie Stix) consisted of one slice of mystery meat on bread. (I also figured maybe her family was too poor to buy dandruff shampoo.)
Who said it was anyone’s fault, or that Claire deserved his tirades? She didn’t. Nor did he deserve Claire’s nasty comment early in the film about “you don’t matter in this school. You could disappear tomorrow and no one would care.”
In any event, I still don’t see why you’re focusing only on Claire – hey, Bender was a shithead to everyone! I totally agree with the poster who calls Bender a misanthrope, not a misogynist*. He’s obnoxious and angry and foulmouthed, but (naturally, this was the premiere 80s teen angst film) also has a lot of hurt behind all the crap.
They all start out insular, dismissive, whiny and insensitive to the reality of each others’ lives. They’re melodramatic, self-absorbed, self-pitying characters – in other words, normal teenagers no different from many of us at that age. Later in the film they get somewhat more understanding of one another’s situations, and realize that appearances are deceiving. In short, they grow up a tiny bit. The wisdom probably won’t last until Monday, but that’s beyond the scope of the movie.
Nope, TBC isn’t a “classic” at all, and if I wasn’t sick with the Flu and bored right now I wouldn’t be overanalyzing it like I am. But I do think that whatever its fans or critics may say of the film, it was an important deviation from the sex farces and gross-out flicks that comprised the teenage movie genre at that point (and, sadly, still do). It was almost unheard of for a film to focus on kids who are just sitting around, talking about their feelings. Hughes respected his teen characters enough to let us just listen to them.
She didn’t say that; Andy did. And he said it because Bender was being a dick from the moment he walked in.
Okay, so he was. I don’t like any of it. But I focus on Claire because he did. Hughes said in an interview that he “really didn’t have any sympathy towards Claire”. She was a conduit for his resentment, and boy does it show.
He was pretty cruel to Brian too, and Brian didn’t have the comfort of knowing that there were plenty of other people at the school who liked him even if Bender didn’t. He didn’t have someone like Andrew to defend him, either. And on top of that the poor guy was suicidal already!
Bender did direct more of his attention towards Claire, but I’m inclined to think that this was because she was more willing and able to stand up for herself than Brian was. (Although I couldn’t say whether this would be because he thought Claire could handle it better, or because it’s less fun poking at someone who doesn’t fight back.) Although Claire was obviously upset by the things Bender said to her, I don’t think she was afraid of him and she had a pretty good grasp of what was based in truth and what was just cruelty.
I guess the sympathy I feel for the character must come from Ringwald’s performance, then. I can’t say I’d particularly want to spend time with Claire, and I do think she was planning to use Bender towards her own ends, but she doesn’t really come across as such a bad sort. She seems reasonably self-aware, and she did go out of her way to be nice to Alison. That this niceness took the form of a makeover is a bit annoying to me, but Claire was helping her in the best way she knew how.
Fair enough. I guess I’ve blocked the Brian-related stuff out of my mind.
This whole movie just stirs up a lot of bad feeling in me. And the hell of it is, I would have been able to forget about it years ago, had I not had a college roommate who insisted it was the greatest movie ever! and played it ad nauseum. So it’s burned into my brain, mostly. Except, as I said, the scenes I’ve managed to block out.
Well, as JohnT says, it has a lot to do with how well you can identify. When I was in high school, the girls who gave me grief were either super-happy-on-the-surface-bitchy-shallowness-underneath types, or they were just plain thugs. My female friends were, in fact, a lot like Claire. Not trendy, but stylish in a sophisticated way, ladylike, cultured, and as I said earlier, forward-looking. Their whole lives weren’t centered on high school; they had ambition.
I never got the “prom queen” vibe from Claire; she seemed to me like my friends, who would have thought getting a non-academic recognition was too plebian to worry about. They didn’t want to be Queen of Whatever; they wanted art scholarships.
Claire wasn’t in the original script; the character was “Cathy”, a sweater-wearing rah-rah type. Why Hughes changed it, I don’t know, unless he thought there’d already been enough “cheerleaders” in teen films. Maybe so, but I thought it kind of left Claire hanging in space. She didn’t seem to me to be steeped in high school culture; I honestly thought she was more like a college freshman.