The Skeptic Vs. Gen X Nostalgia

Truth be told I've never seen Pee-Wee's Big Adventure in its entirety. I tried watching it a few years back and just couldn't do it, I had no idea what the hell I was watching. I know there are a lot of huge fans of this movie but it just didn't do it for me from scene 1.

Skeptic Vs. Gen X Nostalgia: Round 8 – Pretty In Pink (1986)


Most of the movies I’m watching for this “Skeptic Vs. Gen X” series are movies that were targeted as Generation X kids who would have been about eight to twelve at the time of the films’ release, but I’ve made this one exception because no collection of over-rated stuff from the 80s would truly be complete without a little John Hughes. Now, I don’t hate John Hughes exactly but I’ve always been on the outside looking in on the cult that seems to surround him. There’s a whole generation of teenager that seems to view him as their bard and they will go on and on about how “universal” his films are and how much “everyone” relates to them. Most of Hughes’ movies could be said to be “good” but they’re not as innovative as people make them out to be. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a fun romp for the most part and The Breakfast Club is a decent enough exercise even if it is, as Pauline Kael put it, a movie “about a bunch of stereotypes who complain that other people see them as stereotypes.” Sixteen Candles, on the other hand, has held up very poorly and I’ve never got much out of Weird Science either. If people kept these movies in perspective instead of trying to sell them as “classics” or get them places in the Criterion Collection I wouldn’t have much beef with them but I think they’re widely oversold. That brings me to the film at hand, which is the most famous film bearing the John Hughes name that I’ve yet to see: Pretty in Pink.

Now, Pretty in Pink was written but not actually directed by John Hughes, which is a technicality that smartasses will be eager to tell you, often in the same breath where they’ll try to blow your mind by telling you that Jason didn’t actually show up in the Friday the 13th series until Part II. The actual director here is a guy named Howard Deutch who appears to be quite the hack. Deutch’s first three movies were adaptations of John Hughes screenplays and it’s mostly been downhill for him since then. His biggest credits since 1992 were Grumpier Old Men (not the original, the quickie sequel) and The Whole Ten Yards (again, not the original, the quickie sequel). But Deutch really isn’t a problem here, in fact the film’s direction is basically indistinguishable from that of a real John Hughes movie to the point where I think it’s fair to view Hughes as the real auteur behind this thing. The film has less of a high concept than Hughes’ most famous films and is probably most comparable to Sixteen Candles, which also starred Molly Ringwald as an awkward and disaffected teen girl and the film also features John Cryer in a role that was almost certainly meant for Anthony Michael Hall (who apparently turned it down in an attempt to avoid typecasting).

One of the things that has always kind of galled me about the notion of John Hughes movies being “universal” is that they’re really only “universal” if you grew up in the suburbs. He was considered bold for making movies about people who were sort of on the outside of the in-crowd, but there was really nothing all that novel about that approach: teen movies from time immemorial have been about the underdogs and I think one of the reasons Ferris Beuler’s Day Off stands out as much as it did was because damn near the only one of these movies that actually was about the popular kid. The star of Pretty in Pink is mostly considered the underdog because he looks a bit homely but also because she isn’t one of “the rich kids.” Now that right there is a good example of John Hughes movies being less universal than they claim to be: what kind of public school has both exceedingly wealthy students and students who appear to be one rung above living in a trailer? Maybe that happens more in the suburbs but the students at the public school I went to ranged from being “ghetto” to being just barely middle class, and those “barely middle class” students were not necessarily the cool kids who ran the place and certainly weren’t going around bragging about their relative wealth. Maybe this was a special situation where Ringwald had a scholarship to some special Academy, but still, this dynamic does not seem natural to me.

The basic story of Pretty in Pink is simple to the point of almost being boring. It’s basically the Cinderella story: the downtrodden maiden catches the eye of a prince, they get separated, then come back together at the end. There’s not a lot to it outside of the trappings, and the “John Hughes” trappings were starting to feel kind of familiar by 1986 as well. I normally think of John Hughes as having owned the teen genre throughout the 80s but looking at his output now I’m realizing that his “golden period” was basically confined to three years. He made his first teen movie (Sixteen Candles) in 1984, put out The Breakfast Club and Weird Science in 1985, then put out Ferris Bueler’s Day Off in 1986 and outsourced Pretty in Pink the same year before basically moving on to other things for the rest of his career and never looked back. He spent all of the 90s writing and producing but never directing lame movies for little kids like Home Alone and Beethoven and was basically M.I.A. during the 2000s before tragically dying of a heart attack in 2009. I’m not sure why he more or less gave up on the genre he’s most known for, maybe he just assumed he wasn’t going to be able to connect with the same generation of teenagers or maybe he just got addicted to those sweet Home Alone checks, but maybe he was right to cash in his chips when he did because I think his brand of teen movie were on the track to start getting a bit stale if he kept going.

To the Scorecard:

This is an interesting one to score because I don’t think this is really a “bad” movie so much as I think it’s an exceedingly average one. But scoring for this series isn’t just about whether something is “good” or “bad,” it’s about whether or not the nostalgia surrounding a movie is justified. For instance, I thought the movie Labyrinth was not very good but I gave it a win because I got why people thought it was fun and remembered it fondly. Pretty in Pink, by contrast, isn’t bad but it feels like a million other movies and just didn’t seem overly memorable to me.

If I had to guess, they have a decent shot in rounds nine and twelve, eleven is a bit of a toss-up, and I'm still deciding what's going in ten.

Well, some of us had to settle.

Skeptic Vs. Gen X Nostalgia: Round 9 – WarGames (1983)

A couple of installments back I saw the movie Short Circuit, which was directed by a guy named John Badham. Badham is not a guy most people will know by name, and probably for good reason, but he has had an interesting career as a Hollywood journeyman and made a number of films that people remember pretty well. The son of a U.S. Army General from Alabama and a British actress that he met overseas, the Badham family got an odd entrance to the entertainment industry when his sister was cast as Scout in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Much later Badham would work in television and make one small film before suddenly scoring a breakout hit film when he found himself making Saturday Night Fever and followed that up with the big budget Frank Langella starring adaptation of Dracula and the well-remembered thriller Blue Thunder. From there though he started to become more of a director of family films. Had I known ahead of time that the same guy who made Short Circuit also made WarGames I may have waited until I saw the latter before seeing the former, though that probably would have set me up for disappointment because Badham’s earlier film is plainly better than Short Circuit.

If there’s a common thread between WarGames and Short Circuit it’s that both films share a certain skepticism about shady military experiments. WarGames is meant to be something of a cautionary tale along the lines of The China Syndrome or Fail-Safe but made for a more family friendly post-E.T. Hollywood. But unlike Short Circuit, which was even more entrenched in a Spielbergian brand of cinema, there’s still a bit of that gritty brand of 70s paranoia to be found in WarGames. It’s telling that the movie doesn’t start with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy but instead begins in NORAD with generals and scientists talking in geopolitical technobabble that probably isn’t entirely authentic but certainly doesn’t seem to have been dumbed down too much for kids. The mere fact that concepts like mutually assured destruction and early web hacking are being discussed here feels a lot more confident than what you’d usually get from PG rated fare today. Of course the more family oriented material with Broderick and Sheedy isn’t half bad either. Broderick’s character is interesting in that most movies of this era would make a computer geek like this into a total nerd with pocket protectors and shit but here this hacker is depicted as a slightly awkward but mostly normal teenager and Ally Sheedy’s character is fairly compelling if slightly lacking in things to do in the film. The film is probably at its weakest when it wants us to believe that this kid can escape from military custody like he was John McClane or something, but for the most part the characters work.

WarGames was more than likely inspired, at least in part, by a 1979 incident in which NORAD detected that a Soviet missile attack was inbound, leading to the president to be alerted and asked to make a decision to retaliate within 3 to 7 minutes. Fortunately for everyone it was determined within those 3 to 7 minutes that a training simulation had accidently been loaded into an active computer and that the whole thing was a false alarm and nuclear war was averted. Unbeknownst to audiences that saw the film a similar close call actually happened on the Soviet side in 1983 because their computers misread an unusual weather pattern and crisis was only averted that time because a Soviet Air Defense officer named Stanislav Petrov went against protocol and disregarded the computer detection of incoming missiles. No one in the west would learn about that near-apocalypse until the 90s but it still underscores that the kind of scenario found in the film was not entirely fantastical and helps explain why the film was actually taken pretty seriously despite its trappings back in 1983. Ronald Reagan is said to have seen a screening of the film and is said to have put forward a presidential directive on computer security because of it.

To the Scorecard

I was surprised to learn while researching the film that it was pretty well respected by critics at the time of its release. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and the film earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay. I’m not sure that’s I’d praise it that much, but it’s definitely a good movie and it’s certainly better than its reputation as a mere nostalgia piece.

Not much of a boxing fan eh phantom?

He's be "right" 6 times and "they" 3 times. 

Gen X needs to pull two rabbits out of its hat to tie this bitch up.

Skeptic Vs. Gen X Nostalgia: Round 11 – A Christmas Story

A Christmas Story would seem to be a more appropriate movie for my December round of the series than the November round what with its yuletide theme, and it is, but I’m hoping to do something a bit more epic for the final round so the Christmas movie will have to be looked at a month early. This is also a little different from the other movies that have populated this review series in that it’s not really a Spielberg influenced blockbuster attempt and also because it was more of a cult hit that would become more famous long after the 80s were over. That isn’t to say that it was a bomb when it came out in 1983, it made twenty million dollars on a three million dollar budget and that’s a decent return, but it didn’t exactly take the world by storm. The film’s rise to fame was actually not dissimilar from that of The Shawshank Redemption in that it sort of came and went in theaters but really became famous when for whatever reason basic cable got its hands on it and people started catching on. Actually TV programers seem to have had a lot of influence over what movies become “holiday classics,” a similar thing happened to It’s a Wonderful Life as it was adopted as cheap Christmas programing on PBS stations. According to A Christmas Story’s Wikipedia page (which has a rather detailed account of the film’s broadcast history), the Turner networks didn’t really get their hands on the movie until the mid-90s when I would have been about eight and neither I nor my parents must have been privy its increasing audience because it never became a Christmas tradition in my house, which is part of why I never gave it a shot until now.

Another part of why I hadn’t really seen the movie up to now is that I kind of hate Christmas movies… which is probably an extension of the fact that I think Christmas as a holiday is a load of humbug. It’s a holiday that’s fun when you’re a kid and you need your parents to get you the coolest toys but once you’re old enough to buy your own shit it immediately becomes a complete waste of time. The fact that Christmas has become this three month marketing extravaganza with its own music and movies dedicated to it becomes more and more annoying to me every year. I don’t get it. Fortunately this movie doesn’t seem wildly invested in the season’s cornier aspects either. It seems to realize that kids are only really interested in Christmas for the most materialistic of reasons, that it’s often a complete pain in the ass for their parents, and that mall Santas are often just cranky old minimum wage earning slobs. So there’s certainly an attitude here I can vibe with, but I wasn’t so into was the film’s sense of humor. The film is in many ways the creation of a guy named Jean Shepherd, who has been described as a “storyteller” and radio personality who made a career of telling mildly funny stories about his childhood… so he was basically the David Sedaris of the 80s. Shepherd’s appeal seems to be in his folksy observations about his hometown and family and yet the film keeps leaning towards some oddly broad gags like the father’s strange pride in a novelty sexy lamp, which I find more weird than funny.

Ultimately what fuels A Christmas Story is probably nostalgia, although it is somewhat curious that it’s a nostalgia for a time period that was pretty far back. The usual expectation is that nostalgia is supposed to exist on a 20 year cycle. The 1970s was supposed to be nostalgic for the 50s (American Graffiti) and the 1990s was supposed to be nostalgic for the 70s (Dazed and Confused), but the 1980s was supposed to be nostalgic for the 60s but this is set in the early 1940s. People who were Ralphie’s age during the time this was set would have been in their 50s in 1983, and people in their 50s generally aren’t the target market for Hollywood films. However, even audiences that don’t remember Little Orphan Annie decoder rings and Red Ryder air rifles they probably do remember the disappointment of having bought some other ripoff or some other toy they absolutely had to have. The movie doesn’t necessarily hit this nostalgia wave in an overly profound or critical way, and at times it just kind of feels like a series of sketches, but I do more or less see the appeal. I don’t know that I’ll be returning to this in any future Christmases, but it’s pretty alright.

To the Scorecard
Does this movie live up to the hype? Not exactly, or at least I certainly don’t see much of a reason that this thing deserves to have ever been broadcast for 24 hours straight by a cable network when other Christmas movies of similar quality are readily available. That said, the movie is cute and entertaining for the most part and I get why people would mostly like it.

Did you really avoid seeing it your whole life?

I think it's great but it's like sublime. Just have seen it way too much. I fucking loved santareia when it came out but then you heard it every single fucking day on the way to high school... So you hated it. Then your freshman year of college a buncha theater nerds finally heard sublime for the first time and you couldn't avoid it for the next 2.5 years.

I hate it now and won't watch it but I admire it's strong points and think it's well made and I don't begrduge anyone for enjoying it.

... I think I also discovered Sublime in college.  I think I'm starting to get why people would dislike that band, but whatever, it reminds me of good times.

But yeah, I have for real avoided the movie this whole time.  I think the fact that large family Christmas gatherings have not been a big part of my life has helped me keep out of touch with a lot of movies like this, I've also generally refused to watch much of anything on basic cable since I learned how aspect ratios worked.  These are just not movies I have much need to seek out.