I've heard or read a few times in recent months people complaining that John Hughes is an overrated writer/director, that his work is just too sappy, sentimental and overly idealistic.
True, most of his movies ended happily. But there was rarely a neat little bow on them. It was, as it so often is in real life, less of a happy ending than the possibility for a happy beginning. It wasn't idealism so much as hope. Add to that the fact that the characters he wrote, especially the teenagers, were some of the most realistic, three-dimensional kids ever to grace the screen and his legacy is unquestionable. He understood them in a way that teen movies hadn't before and haven't since, making them people, rather than just some caricature of a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, or a criminal.
How many people in my generation didn't secretly kind of want to end up in Saturday detention after The Breakfast Club? How many didn't feel, every time they went out with friends, that maybe, just maybe, they could have the kind of time that Ferris, Cameron and Sloane did? And maybe it made it a little easier for some of us, most of us, who were burdened with things like poverty, abusive, overbearing or absentee parents and the stress of society's seemingly overwhelming expectations.
So yeah, perhaps they were a bit sappy. Maybe they were idealistic. But you know what they made? A generation of idealists, of people who question authority, empathize, don't necessarily take someone at face value and try, even if we sometimes fail, to understand the world and one another a little better. That seems to me like more than enough to validate his reputation.
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