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.
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Date: 2017-01-14 04:01 pm (UTC)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.