I Love the '80s

Film: Back to the Future; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Format: DVD from NetFlix (Back to the Future) and recorded video from DVR (Ferris Bueller) on rockin’ flatscreen.

When you watch Back to the Future, there are a few rules that are important to remember. The first one is to remember that this is a film from 1985. The bad guys here are Libyans. There was a short period of time when Libya was one of the major foes of Western style democracy. That, and a few of the jokes (“Gimme a Pepsi Free”) were funny at the time but fall flat now. The second, much more important rule to follow is that you can’t think too hard when you watch Back to the Future. This film goes to some very weird, oedipal places as well as contains some significant temporal paradoxes. The way to handle this is to ignore those parts of the film. Enjoy what’s here for what’s here and don’t worry about the places where it gets creepy. Doing this is the difference between enjoying a fun classic and losing sleep over the implications.

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a fairly average movie teen with movie-issue problems. His father George (Crispin Glover) is a loser who gets bullied by a co-worker named Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson). His mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is dumpy and unpleasant, as are both of his siblings. His family is made up of losers. Despite having an attractive girlfriend named Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells), Marty has no self-confidence, in part because he comes from a family of known losers. Even his association with local crazy scientist Doc Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) is a source of friction.

The Most Important Meal of the Day

Film: The Breakfast Club
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

There are films that define particular generations at particular moments in their history. For my generation, the 1980s were defined by the films of John Hughes, and of these, none more perfectly encapsulated that generation than The Breakfast Club. This is not a film that I have any ability to discuss with anything like dispassion or objectivity. I’d guess that anyone within five years of my age will comment similarly: this more than any other film defined who we were, how we thought, and how we wanted to be at our disaffected, semi-rebellious best. I’d go so far as to suggest that almost everyone of my generation has a character in the film that he or she identifies with immediately, and if they watch it again today, they’ll likely identify themselves in the same way. The Breakfast Club told us who we were (mine isn’t that hard to guess).

Five kids are sentenced to a Saturday detention in their high school. The five represent completely different cliques in the school. There is the princess, Claire (Molly Ringwald); the jock, Andrew (Emilio Estevez); the burnout John (Judd Nelson); the brain, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall); and the basket case, Allison (Ally Sheedy). Their day starts at 7:00 in the library under the direction of vice principal Dick Vernon (Paul Gleason), and they will be released at 4:00. They aren’t supposed to talk to each other or leave their seats, and Vernon has given them the additional task of writing a 1,000 word essay on who they think they are. From that premise, the five kids actually spend the day discovering who they are, what makes them who they are, and the many, many ways they are actually alike. That’s really it—it’s a character study times five, with the added bonus of a bit of character study on Dick Vernon, too.