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We went to a museum. We saw priceless works of art. We ate pancreas!
Brief notes on Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1987), the midnight showing of which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I just got back from. Matthew Broderick is extraordinarily charming; the film wouldn't function without him. Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye is marvelous and reminded me bizarrely of Joe E. Brown. The fourth-wall-breaking never wears out its welcome.1 I am not the target audience for '80's teen comedies. The jokes that were funniest to me were either the perfectly timed punch lines ("If you say 'Ferris Bueller,' you lose a testicle."–"Oh, you know him?") or the total left field moments, like the parking garage attendants and the Star Wars music. Whenever the film is focusing on its three teenage protagonists having what they think is an adult and sophisticated day—driving a classy car, eating at a fancy restaurant, visiting an art museum; crashing a parade float—it really works. Ferris' blithe magical realism coexists successfully with Cameron's depressive hypochondria; Mia Sara's Sloan turns out to be as effective a trickster in a tight spot as the boy she loves. Jennifer Grey's Jeannie is sympathetic even before she gets her heel face turn: I can't imagine living with a brother with the apparent power to bend reality to suit his slacking-off, either. Excepting the magnificent Edie McClurg, almost anything involving the adult characters falls cartoonishly flat. It's not really possible for Ferris to be caught and punished in this kind of movie, so the melodramatic suspense is broadly coy rather than clever; the comedy of authority figures running around behaving like buffoons has nowhere to go. The demolition of Rooney eventually started to remind me of how much I hated Home Alone (1990). So half the film is hilarious; the other half is just kind of there. I know how I would have rewritten the script, but I am not John Hughes and I've known that since I bounced off The Breakfast Club (1985). I want to rewatch WarGames (1983) now.
1. Ferris is a more benign manipulator, but the frequent addresses to the audience made me want to pair this movie with Ian McKellen's Richard III (1995). In any case, I can see exactly how a Broadway director could have remembered this film and thought of Broderick as How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying's J. Pierrepont Finch. It's that curling little cat-smile that is never smug; complacency would have been fatal to the character. His monologues are adorable. He's terrible at philosophy, but he is eighteen years old.
derspatchel and I just got back from. Matthew Broderick is extraordinarily charming; the film wouldn't function without him. Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye is marvelous and reminded me bizarrely of Joe E. Brown. The fourth-wall-breaking never wears out its welcome.1 I am not the target audience for '80's teen comedies. The jokes that were funniest to me were either the perfectly timed punch lines ("If you say 'Ferris Bueller,' you lose a testicle."–"Oh, you know him?") or the total left field moments, like the parking garage attendants and the Star Wars music. Whenever the film is focusing on its three teenage protagonists having what they think is an adult and sophisticated day—driving a classy car, eating at a fancy restaurant, visiting an art museum; crashing a parade float—it really works. Ferris' blithe magical realism coexists successfully with Cameron's depressive hypochondria; Mia Sara's Sloan turns out to be as effective a trickster in a tight spot as the boy she loves. Jennifer Grey's Jeannie is sympathetic even before she gets her heel face turn: I can't imagine living with a brother with the apparent power to bend reality to suit his slacking-off, either. Excepting the magnificent Edie McClurg, almost anything involving the adult characters falls cartoonishly flat. It's not really possible for Ferris to be caught and punished in this kind of movie, so the melodramatic suspense is broadly coy rather than clever; the comedy of authority figures running around behaving like buffoons has nowhere to go. The demolition of Rooney eventually started to remind me of how much I hated Home Alone (1990). So half the film is hilarious; the other half is just kind of there. I know how I would have rewritten the script, but I am not John Hughes and I've known that since I bounced off The Breakfast Club (1985). I want to rewatch WarGames (1983) now.1. Ferris is a more benign manipulator, but the frequent addresses to the audience made me want to pair this movie with Ian McKellen's Richard III (1995). In any case, I can see exactly how a Broadway director could have remembered this film and thought of Broderick as How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying's J. Pierrepont Finch. It's that curling little cat-smile that is never smug; complacency would have been fatal to the character. His monologues are adorable. He's terrible at philosophy, but he is eighteen years old.
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As is not the case with most other pop-cultural touchstones of the '80's, I actually saw WarGames as a child and remembered it fondly into adulthood, at which point I rewatched it and was delighted to find it was still great. I had imprinted very heavily on John Wood's Stephen Falken. Years later I met someone who looked exactly like him and lived in the Pacific Northwest and it was confusing.
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Oh man, I can imagine.
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Seriously, if you have a mental picture of Stephen Falken, search for photos of George Dyson: I met him about a dozen years ago and it really felt unfair. He's a science writer from a family of scientists and mathematicians (Freeman Dyson is his father) and at one point in the '70's he lived in a tree and designed kayaks. He may still design kayaks, for all I know. He's pretty awesome.
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