Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Apparently Scribe and I are in the midst of a summer lull in posting reviews to the blog, for which I apologize. The following review was not originally scheduled but written as a result of the sudden death of writer/producer/director John Hughes at the young age of 59.

I had a nice review going that was almost complete when blogger ate it. So here goes again. Perhaps scribe-o will throw his review in here too at some point, though I know he's not a fan of John Hughes...

GREEN'S "I'LL BET YOU NEVER SMELLED A REAL SCHOOL BUS BEFORE" REVIEW:

On a beautiful spring/early summer day, uber-slacker Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) decides to skip a day of high school, bringing along his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and best friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck). They spend a very memorable day touring downtown Chicago, including eating at an extremely upper crusty restaurant, seeing a Cubs game, visiting an art museum and watching Ferris' impromptu singing performance in some parade. Meanwhile Ferris' sister Jeanne (Jennifer Grey) is upset because her brother gets away with everything and never gets caught. School principal Edward Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) knows Ferris is ditching school and goes on a personal vendetta to try and catch him this time.

This film was released in 1986, as I was finishing my junior year of high school and working at the local General Cinema in the mall, at that time a small four screen theater. I have a fondness for many of the movies that were playing at that time because I could see any movie I wanted at any time for nothin'. And I did! Because of that there are scenes in this film that I've seen hundreds of times, like the parade float scene to name one. And let's face it, there were some of us who thought high school was a bit ridiculous at times and would have loved to skip school, even for a day. I would have gotten caught however. Karma, if you believe in that, doesn't run my way too often.

Writer/director John Hughes does an excellent job bringing out the talents of then relatively unknown actors. Overall the casting was excellent, even the bit parts, like Ferris' happily clueless parents, Rooney's ditsy secretary and the snooty restaurant maitre'd. The film has many funny moments and many quotable lines. Plus, all his other accomplishments aside, this is the film that made Ben Stein famous.

You may think that Hughes' films are cheesy and I, for the most part, will agree with you. There definitely is an element of undeniable cheesiness to Hughes' films, but to me that's one of the reasons why they are so much fun. Every film can't be an Oscar-caliber dramatic masterpiece, and Hughes' films don't pretend to be. However, if you say Hughes was a talentless hack, I'll have to disagree. In my mind a hack is someone who copies the work of others, who really has little or nothing of value to add to a genre. What makes Hughes' films memorable, and thus why they helped define the decade of the 1980's, is that no one really made films about high school and that whole experience, up until that point. At least none that I can think of.

I think this film was great and one of Hughes best, among the many memorable movies that he wrote/produced/directed. I hadn't watched this film in a while but enjoyed it tremendously all the same.

****½ out of *****

SCRIBE'S "SO THAT'S HOW IT IS IN THAT FAMILY" REVIEW:

I titled my review that because it's the only funny part of this overrated mess of a film. The opening scene where Ferris gets his buddy Cameron to impersonate his girlfriend's dad is the first and final inspired portion of a film that never seems to know what it wants to be. It's almost as if Hughes tried to throw everything that was successful from his previous efforts into a fantasy about a mysteriously popular kid skipping school for the day. Nobody skipped school better than me at this time so I could relate to the idea of not wanting to go in. But that's about all I could relate to.

Without getting too sociopolitical on your asses, Hughes' films were a study in whitebread suburban Eighties life. I couldn't relate to the characters in his films, nor the experiences they had, nor the incessant whining so often associated with the spoiled characters. In my circles, people who treated their parents like they were idiots still had to pay for it. For me, watching this film was like studying a foreign culture and realizing I didn't like them very much.

For one thing, the impossibility of Bueller's popularity is an enormous stumbling block. Green, like I, remembers the Eighties. What distinguished that decade from the others was that there were so many cliques and so much segregation that it was unlikely that some guy wearing a varsity jacket who doesn't play sports and sounds like a neurotic New York Jew in Chicago would have been popular with every single clique in his high school. Another thing, there really isn't anything cool about Bueller. He's kind of a smarmy nerd. We would have kicked his ass in my high school...well, actually I would've just watched like I always did.

Hughes came near to brilliance with "The Breakfast Club," an admittedly stock character filled two-act play type of film that tapped beautifully into suburban and adolescent angst like no other film before it. The success of that movie seemed to convince him that he needed to start creating whitebread fantasies instead of gritty realism and that's what we have here.

There isn't a single laugh in the film after the first scene and the "story" meanders until the incredibly contrived moment with Cameron's parents' car flying through the garage.

If anything, this was the beginning of Hughes' descent into utter garbage which culminated with the "Home Alone" series.

0 out of *****

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986, PG-13, 103 minutes), starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones and Jennifer Grey. The film was written, produced and directed by John Hughes.