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

[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.