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August 6, 2009

mdeals's thoughts: No way i never forget you... ... >>

John Hughes, For Grownups

Filmmaker John Hughes passed away today, too young at 58. In the 1980s, Hughes had an astonishing run of iconic teen comedies that, almost a quarter century later, hold up as honest-to-goodness movies: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

My generation (I was born in 1979) was too young to see these movies in the theater, and too old for the kiddie comedies Hughes wrote (but didn't direct) in the 1990s. We ate these movies up on VHS and basic cable, badly cut (to protect US) for broadcast TV, but seeing in them our older brothers, sisters, and cousins, and later, ourselves.

However, since everyone's talking about these four movies, I want to single out the one great comedy Hughes made for and featuring grownups - Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I saw this movie just last week - and it's terrific. What's more, it shows that the world Hughes created in his films, of humiliation and catastrophes offset by unlikely friendships, isn't just a sympathetic take on kids in fictional midwestern high schools, but a distinct comic take on the world itself. And every buddy comedy from the 1990s just follows this movie's playbook, with half the brains, a third of the timing, and a quarter of the heart.

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Posted August 6, 2009 at 6:14 | Comments (3) | Permasnark
File under: Movies

August 5, 2009

The Aliens Within

Tim says,

I hadn't really been following much news behind the Peter Jackson/Neill Blomkamp project District 9, but this is intriguing:

When its extraterrestrial passengers emerge, they are sequestered to a sprawling shantytown and shunned by even the lowest strata of human society. Amid an effort to relocate the creatures to a new camp, a corporate bureaucrat (played by Sharlto Copley) is infected with a virus that begins turning him into an alien, forcing him to confront his prejudices and his loyalties while he runs for his life.

If it all sounds like a science-fiction parable for South Africa