The sound of waves in a pool of water…
…I’m drowing in my nostalgia.
–David Sylvain
Okay, so tonight AMC ran The Breakfast Club and a half-hour documentary on the making of the film. So I thought one or two of you might like to read something I wrote about six years ago, my list of “Top High School Nostalgia Movies.”
I still stand by much of this list, though Some Kind Of Wonderful was on TV late the other night and it hasn’t held up well. Okay, the rest is me in 1998:
The following are the movies that Got It Right-movies that send me back to what High School life was really like, at least for me.
Not necessarily in order of greatness of acheivement:
Just One Of The Guys. Mainly for a painfully high-verbal performance in the part of the lead character’s younger brother: A sex obsessed wiseass who acts like more of a jerk than he really is. Nothing to do with me in my teens, dear me no.
The Breakfast Club. Brace yourselves-John Hughes is all over this list. I did go to High School in the mid-to late 80’s, you know. I like to think anybody who’s seen this mentally figures out which character is “them”. For those who desperately need to know, I was the Anthony Michael Hall character, with a touch of the Ally Sheedy.
Some Kind Of Wonderful. Or as we in the jet set call it, Pretty In Pink Done Right.
Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. The reason John Hughes made the best High School movies of the 80’s (and therefore, of all time) is that he knew how to mix the way our lives were with the way we desperately wished they would be. We were all Cameron. We all wanted to be Ferris.
Heathers. If the other movies on this list followed real teenage conventions of the time, Heathers set them. Nobody in my peer group talked anything like our supposed counterparts in this one…until it came out. Then, you couldn’t walk on a campus without hearing the use of the word “Very” as the end of a sentence (“It’ll be very.”) or the charming retort “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw!”
Weird Science. The way we were. The way we wanted to be. The artifice of the monied kids up against the sensitivity of the middle class (Actually, virtually no one is really poor in a John Huges movie unless it’s a vital part of their identity, as in Some Kind Of Wonderful). It plays like the two guys in it wrote the screenplay, which may be a clue to the kind of kid Hughes was.
Summer School. Underrated comedy, especially if your best friend freshman year was a horror movie fan like the pair of incepient cinema geeks in this one.
Can’t Buy Me Love. After Some Kind Of Wonderful, the most convicing High School Movie romance of my youth. Only problem: You have to accept that Patrick Dempsy won’t realize that Amanda Peterson has fallen for him at a key moment, for no other reason other than to further the plot.
Those, for better or for worse, are the movies I’d rent if-god knows why-I wanted to completely wallow in melancholy nostalgia for paths I can’t take.
