Sixteen Candles

[osprey_archer]

I went to see Sixteen Candles, and HOLY CONSENT ISSUES, BATMAN. They were showing this at the ArtCraft and I do like seeing movies there, even though eighties teen movies and I often don’t get along, so I went to see this and good Lord. You know, we complain about the current crop of umpteen thousand dystopias, but at least they don’t include the male lead complaining that his current girlfriend is passed out drunk in the bedroom and he could totally go violate her, but he’s just not attracted to her now that he’s noticed Molly Ringwald.

He actually uses the word violate and no one is like "Hey, maybe you shouldn't violate people, like, just as a policy, whether you're attracted to them or not."

Instead this sterling gentleman sends his girlfriend home with a guy he barely knows (a geeky freshman who has already tried to initiate sex with Molly Ringwald by climbing on top of her. Twice. The second time is after she's all GET OFF ME), and of course they totally end up having sex, which neither of them can remember afterward! But it’s totally okay because they both kind of think that it was good.

There is also a minor recurring character with a neck brace, which keeps getting in the way of her attempt to use drinking fountains, which I originally thought was a poignant comment on something or other about high school, but on second thought I think the director just included it for physical comedy.

There’s also a Chinese exchange student named Long Duk Dong, and the movie uses his name exactly how you might expect.

I also hated The Breakfast Club when I saw it. Maybe I should just steer clear of John Hughes movies forever after.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Rape jokes were considered funny in the 80s - or at least complaining about rape jokes was widely treated as prudish killjoying. Of course today there are still plenty of people who find rape jokes funny, but it was much more a feature of mainstream entertainment twenty or thirty years ago.

I think John Hughes has the reputation he has because he was less mean-spirited than the majority of "teen movies" being made at the time, which tended to be either cruel sex comedies or horror films in which groups of teenagers were chased down and slaughtered. That's Roger Ebert's picture, I don't know how accurate it is, but he was a big booster for John Hughes (and also some other movies about teenagers that came out around the same time, Say Anything and Mask are two that I remember) because he'd been watching a lot of really terrible movies about teenagers made by people who apparently hated teenagers, and next to them John Hughes seemed warm and compassionate and to have a comparatively healthy attitude toward sex and toward people who happen to be young.

Again, I have no idea how accurate that picture of the 1980s teen-cinema landscape is. But I can believe that John Hughes movies were among the best of a bad lot.

ETA This isn't an attempt to convince you to like John Hughes! I don't like John Hughes either, if being bored by The Breakfast Club twenty years ago is sufficient reason to say I don't like a director.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I have always had the impression that teen movies in the 1980s were a helscape, so I guess in that circumstance John Hughes would look comparatively benign. He is sympathetic to his characters, and they don't end up dying terribly while the audience shouts "DON'T SPLIT UP WHEN THERE'S A MONSTER IN THE HOUSE, YOU IDIOTS!"

You know, we complain about how the press these days is so mean about millennials, but compared to the eighties it seems positively benign. Teenagers these days may be lambasted for being oversensitive, but teenagers in the eighties seem generally to have been seen as helldemons, so.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

In my day (the 90s) teenagers were either oversensitive or callous, brain-dead slackers or hopelessly naive bleeding hearts or shallow fashion punks and pseudohippies aping the older and better social movements - and I forget what all. Also, TV and video games had fried our brains and made us unthinkingly violent, and we sat around in basements all day sniffing glue and never went outside. And when we did go outside, it was just to scrawl graffiti all over everything. Also our self-esteem was too high and we had too many piercings. The one thing we never got shit for, to my knowledge, was taking too many pictures of ourselves, though like every single other generation we took exactly as many pictures of ourselves as technology and economy allowed.

I can't tell whether the press is less mean now about Kids These Days than it used to be, because I've been avoiding that kind of article for at least ten years now. So it might very well be. Certainly it feels like the media landscape has gotten better in a lot of ways - not all, but some. But that is just an uninformed impression.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Honestly I try to avoid Kids These Days articles nowadays too; I think the specific complaints in these articles change over time (I actually saw an article complaining that Millennials don't have enough sex. That may be a first in human history), but people are just always going to complain about the up and coming young whippersnappers. Maybe it's because us older people feel bitter about getting old.

[ladyherenya]

If it is a case of best of a bad lot, that explains much. I've only seen The Breakfast Club and maybe a third of Sixteen Candles, but neither were what I was expecting, based on (the impression I'd been given of) their reputation...

[littlerhymes]

Sixteen Candles is one of the John Hughes movies I haven't seen but yeah, I agree on the rape joke thing being much more unremarked upon in the 80s. (FYI don't ever watch Revenge of the Nerds. ...though it might be possible to write an interesting paper on the changing position of the nerd in society from 80s through to now esp in view of gamergate etc. But I digress.

Perhaps it's a generational thing. I find the teen movies and tv shows of my time (i.e. the 90s) FAR SUPERIOR to everything that came before and after. Obviously, it's not that I'm out of touch - it is the children and the olds that are wrong.

Out of Hughes' teen movies, the one I'd rec without hesitation would be Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink I can take or leave as movies, though as cultural touchstones they're worth examining.

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

i was about to warn you not to watch Revenge of teh Nerds with multiple, multiple rapes that are celebrated.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I never really kept up with teen movies/TV (although Veronica Mars is clearly the best teen show ever. EVER), but I read looooots of YA novels in my day and now I look at today's YA shelves with horror and dismay. Of course there are occasional gems, but most of it looks so samey.

Probably this is my fault for judging books by their covers, though.

[littlerhymes]

But the covers are so boring, and samey!

Idk if it's an optical illusion or not but I definitely feel like YA was more - IDK. It wasn't as intensely genre-bound as it is today. So many things feel like a high concept summed up as "x meets y!" with a side of dystopian vampire romance.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I feel like a lot of modern YA is the unholy lovechild of Twilight and the Hunger Games, and I guess if dystopian romance is your thing that's probably amazing, but it's not mine.

I also feel like YA has become ever more insistent that every book has to have a romance, and I realize that this is a large part of a lot of teenagers' lives and doubtless they want to read about it, but at the same time there are some books that just don't need it. I'm still a bit bitter about the romance shoehorned into The Scorpio Races. Man-eating water horses were more than enough to sustain the book!

[ladyherenya]

I started watching Sixteen Candles and gave up partway through. This makes me very glad I didn't stick with it.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

A good movie to quit, I think! Life is too short to fill it with things you don't like.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yup, I started watching this and it sent me screaming for the hills. NOOOOOOOOOO. Awful.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

This is the one problem with seeing movies in theaters with a whole group of other people. Even as it becomes clear that everything is going downhill fast, you're totally stuck.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yeah--that's a nightmare.

(I had that with Harold and Maude, where everyone in the theater was laughing at Harold's suicide attempt that opens the movie. I felt like I was trapped in an awful mirror universe where horrible things were funny and funny things were horrible.)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I have noticed that if something is presented as funny, most of the audience will just accept that it is. Critical watching/listening/reading skills are harder to acquire than I might have thought, I guess.

[silverusagi]

All I know about this movie is that is the favorite movie of Mary Ann from The Babysitter's Club. That detail was mentioned like every other book.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

NO MARY ANN. WHY.

Maybe she identified with Molly Ringwald's shyness. I can see the rest of the issues flying right after a teenager's head.