James Sims hasn't figured out what's more entertaining, Hollywood buzz or Broadway chatter. So he's decided to start blogging about both. Sofa Snark is an entertainment biz blog covering everything from prime-time TV to Broadway reviews. If you can figure out anything that falls in between, he's bound to have an opinion about that too. As a Senior Editor at BroadwayWorld.com, and with gigs at "Entertainment Tonight" and the Hollywood Reporter under his belt, he's ready to unleash his wit on the world, one blog at a time.
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Director John Hughes hadn’t been on my mind for quite some time. My insanely large DVD collection is stocked with his complete collection of films, and I never hesitate to tune in whenever a Brat Pack movie comes on HBO or Showtime, but I haven’t brought up his name for a while. Then I saw the news wire spit out a headline stating Hughes had died yesterday. My heart skipped a beat. It wasn’t that he was only 59 years old — far too young — rather it was a sense that the rug had been pulled out from underneath my childhood.
Like any true-blooded American that grew up in the 1980’s can attest, films like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off set the standard for sentimental teenage fare. Surprisingly Hughes only directed eight films, the last being Curly Sue in 1991, but he wrote many more, including the popular Vacation films, Weird Science, Uncle Buck and Home Alone. All of these are must-watch movies for film buffs. The stand-out, for me, has to be his 1987 movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles as my father worked with Hughes on that production. He still considers Hughes a “cool guy.”
Deservedly, Hughes is remembered today by many journalists and film critics across the world. Here are a few highlights:
David Kamp, Vanity Fair
As huge and as popular as he got, Hughes never became cool; the '80s arthouse crowd, besotted with the deadpan Jim Jarmusch and Alex Cox, tittered condescendingly at Judd Nelson's nostrilly pathos and Molly Ringwald's dewy exasperation. But Hughes made good, emotive mainstream movies. If you were alive and of a certain age when they first came out, they got to you… More
Gregg Kilday, The Hollywood Reporter
Although embraced by fans, Hughes remained something of an outsider to the film industry, which sometimes regarded him as difficult and demanding and didn’t shower him with awards. One of his few honors was a Producer of the Year award he picked up at ShoWest in 1991. While he worked within the studio system, he avoided Hollywood and raised his family in the Chicago area, where he also set and shot many of his films… More
David Hinkley, New York’s Daily News
In contrast to raucous 1980s teen comedies like the “Porky’s” series, Hughes films were sweet, often sentimental. Their heroes and heroines, who started out feeling like misfits, were rewarded for the basic virtues of good hearts and decency. He kept them from being simply throwbacks to some romanticized earlier age by effective use of realistic teen dialogue… More
Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times
Of all of his films, there are two that will forever be quintessentially Hughes for me: “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” absolutely swimming in attitude, which captured brilliantly and irritatingly the kind of cockiness that you envy as a teen, hate as an adult, recognize no matter what age you are, and “The Breakfast Club,” life deconstructed in high school detention, the archetypes and the anxiety playing out in real time. I will light 16 candles and remember… More
