30 years after THE BREAKFAST CLUB--re-evaluating the John Hughes humor/angst canon.

Last week, Universal reissued John Hughes' high school detention/encounter group film THE BREAKFAST CLUB on Blu-ray/DVD (on its own and bundled with SIXTEEN CANDLES and WEIRD SCIENCE).

Nowadays, the Paramount Pictures period of Hughes' career seems to yield more repeat-viewing experiences than much of his Universal output (WEIRD SCIENCE and THE GREAT OUTDOORS are hard-to-sit-through nadirs).  PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES and (up to a point) SHE'S HAVING A BABY are good adult films; SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL is Hughes' best, least self-sorrowing teen film (and, consequently, the most forgotten today).

THE BREAKFAST CLUB must still be considered seminal by admirers due to its outcasts-marginalized-by-authority-and-peer-pressure dynamic.  Ally Sheedy's socially-averse proto-Goth, Judd Nelson's blustering (sort of an ancestor to T.J. Miller's character Erlich on Mike Judge's SILICON VALLEY) and Anthony Michael Hall's repressed A-student still resonate with me, as does Paul Gleason's sharp-tongued, you-don't-matter-to-me principal.

But, as adolescent films are concerned, it doesn't come close in quality to genuine classics of the genre such as Nicholas Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and John Frankenheimer's THE YOUNG STRANGER.

New poem ILLINOIS

Here in the land of Lincoln where the rivers are wide, The suburban homes are two-story Colonial, Where teenagers play lacrosse without shame, Meanwhile in the former city of Sandburg and Daley, Mayor Rahm gets ready to roll out the unwelcome mat For those who still think protest is American And I go through a series of revolving doors And come out somewhere between the Wrigley building, the Trump monument to the Trump ego, And the Marina condos immortalized In separate decades by both Steve McQueen And the band Wilco. There is little wind in the Windy City, Only bright sun, heat And office workers consuming fast Vegan lunches Before finishing the afternoon's work To take the Metra train home For quaint boutique shopping In stores with posters of John Hughes movies Plastered on their back walls.

John Hughes, comedy auteur, RIP.

From the John Hughes canon, there are a few films which are keepers for me: NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION, THE BREAKFAST CLUB, SHE'S HAVING A BABY (which, in the Hughes canon, is the equivalent of Judd Apatow's FUNNY PEOPLE), SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL, PLANES TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES and, yes, HOME ALONE.

Hughes, using his Repetitive Formula Machine, also cranked out a lot of underachieving junk--some of which (DUTCH, the inexplicably-beloved WEIRD SCIENCE and FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF, THE GREAT OUTDOORS, CAREER OPPORTUNITIES, the live-action remake of 101 DALMATIANS) that I saw and some (DENNIS THE MENACE, BABY'S DAY OUT) I instinctively knew to avoid.

An irony (which Hughes obituaries will probably ignore) is that one-time Hughes ally Chris Columbus recently had a flop with the 80's-teencom homage I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER--a film I also avoided. From the trailer, it was obvious that BETH COOPER offered some shoutouts to earlier Hughes fare such as WEIRD SCIENCE and FERRIS BUELLER (with Alan Ruck cast as a parent).

But there will be a run on DVD copies of SIXTEEN CANDLES, THE BREAKFAST CLUB, WEIRD SCIENCE, PRETTY IN PINK, FERRIS BUELLER, PLANES TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES, UNCLE BUCK and the first two HOME ALONEs later today as thirty-and-fortysomething adults express a desire to relive their lost middle-to-upper-middle-class suburban youth watching Hughes' movies in shoebox multiplexes.