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.
