Posted on 06/14/2011 7:15:36 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Twenty-five years after its release, John Hughes's most-loved work doesn't hold up
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which hit theaters 25 years ago this week and will soon be re-released on Blu-Ray and DVD, inspires a special kind of reverence in suburbia. "Today you'd be hard-pressed to find an American high-school yearbook that doesn't quote somewhere in its pages Ferris Bueller's view on existence," author Susannah Gora writes in her book You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, And Their Impact on a Generation. Before going with a bromidic Bob Dylan lyric, I almost made my own senior quote, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." In hindsight, it seems about as profound as a fortune cookie. I guess being 17 is a good excuse for banality.
Adults, on the other hand, should know better. Yet they too remain fixated on Ferris, a role that earned Matthew Broderick a Golden Globe nomination. The line, "Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?", delivered by Ben Stein's monotonic economics teacher, is American educators' go-to, passive-aggressive rallying cry. References can also be found outside the classroom. This February, Baseball Prospectus writer Larry Granillo dedicated two blog posts to determining the precise Cubs game Ferris and his pals attended while playing hooky. An episode of the FOX medical drama House that aired in March centered on a homeless guy who called himself Ferris Bueller. "I think," Juno director Jason Reitman says in Don't You Forget About Me, a 2009 documentary about the late Hughes, "Ferris Bueller's a perfect movie."
A quarter century after its release, the explanation for why Ferris Bueller's Day Off remains a pop-culture touchstone is simple.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
LOL!
Absolutely! I spent many an evening over at a friends house doing exactly that. The 80's were a fantastic time to come of age. I graduated from high school in 86 and college in 90. Fantastic times.
I went into this movie expecting big things. My wife and I had both heard good things about it. For the first half of the movie, I tried..... REALLY tried to get into it. I wanted so much to get on board. But I couldn’t. Ferris was a pretentious, spoiled rich kid with stupid parents with everything going for him yet pretending to be some counter-establishment rebel. The film had no message and very little plot. Just a series of vignettes of Ferris making idiots out of every adult he encounters (and many of his peers). The principle is a caricature and no suspension of disbelief could justify his holding down a job in any high school in America. (Showing up at a kids house and looking in the windows? Come on.) Ferris’ superficial philosophising and breaking the fourth wall wasn’t funny the first time he did it and just got irritating as the movie went on.
I can tell you the exact moment that I gave up trying and just decided that this movie sucked - When Ferris brought all of downtown Chicago to its feet, dancing to his rendition of “Twist and Shout”, I leaned over to my wife and whispered, “This is idiotic.” She agreed.
Liked the old lady driving the car at the end, though. That was laugh out loud funny.
There’s a lot of good, fresh music being made now. Just like in the 80s, you have to search a bit and ignore the junk.
Mr. Reed drinks something like 5 gallons of milk a week, too.
Fascinating! :)
Wow, we’ve found the one person in the world who roots for Tracy Flick.
We watched a completely clean version with our 5 year old son. He loved it, but was utterly confused as to why Ferris chose to drive the Ferrari and not the Model T car (or whatever that old car was) from Cameron’s dad’s collection.
Hand cranking a car and chugging along at 15 miles per hour into Chicago would have made for a completely different movie I think.
Danke schoen!
Pardon my French... but you’re an a**hole
Pandora is your friend.
My favorites right now: Go Betty Go, Damone, Dollyrots, Paramore, Sahara Hotnights, and those are just the chick punk bands.
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. “Voodoo” economics.
The only posts I ever see by you are declarations of ignorance.
i think movies are productions of stupidity and their only reason for existance is to keep people from being productive.
So what?
Make movies and sports illegal!
“What country do you think this is?”
Shadow....it wasn’t real. It is fantasy. We all KNOW the things that happened in the movie were fantasy.
But, like a lot of entertainment, they took a “normal” situation and extended it to the extreme. You have to just let go and have some fun.
I appreciate that everyone does not have the same taste. But, in this case I think you expected it to be real, not fantasy.
And to keep us from paying attention to our spell check.
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