Thanks for the Memories

Since the most recent celebrity death is the first I've actually really cared about, I thought I should say something. (Honestly, I thought Farrah was sad and I watched in utter fascination at the spectacle that followed Michael Jackson's death.) I didn't think about John Hughes the person, but the work of John Hughes has had a big influence on me. I haven't seen a lot of his movies, I was born too late to catch a lot of them when they were big, but I love the ones I have seen.

I vividly remember the first time I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off, I was on a boat and I was about eleven or twelve. It was hilarious. A lot of the humor I was way too young for, but I still found so much that made me laugh. It gave me this idea of what I wanted from high school, this sort of nebulous feeling or concept, which I never found, but it made thinking about it in middle school a lot less scary. And I've always kind of secretly wanted to be Ferris Bueller, just to be that cool. I was never cool in high school. Sort of like I've always wanted to be Humphrey Bogart. Not a serious aspiration, just a passing fancy.

My parents brought home The Breakfast Club. It's really because of them I've seen all the "important" movies I've seen. They had a mental list of films they thought I "should" see. It's good. When I was younger I had horrible taste in film. Well, not horrible, just more adventurous. I would see anything if I liked the back of the box enough. I saw some weird stuff. Anyway, The Breakfast Club was one of the ones they thought I "should" see. I'm glad they did. I loved it. It's a big talking movie, and we don't have enough of those. For an art form that came from the theater (I presume) we have remarkably little talking in our movies. And this was a movie that talked about all the hard things. I'd never seen that in a movie before. It made everything so much more real. I was fascinated.

That one, especially, made me want to write movies. I wanted to write things like that. Maybe I will some day. It was one of the first times I'd ever wanted anything to do with that profession, up till then I'd always wanted to be an ornithologist. So I'm sad about John Hughes because his movies have meant so much to me.