skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off in 1986 along with everybody else, and thought it was very funny. And then I didn't see it again for twenty-five years. I figured a comedy about a rebellious high school student wouldn't resonate much in my middle aged brain. Boy, was I wrong. It's actually a very mature film with lessons that apply no matter what your age.
And it's still very funny.
1986 was a big year for writer-director John Hughes who had hits with both Bueller and Pretty in Pink. The latter features a fine performance by Molly Ringwald just before gravity plucked her career off the end of a table, but is otherwise marred by the casting choice of Jon Cryer as the boy who pines for her. The screenplay originally had Ringwald rejecting rich pretty boy Andrew McCarthy in favor of the true blue Cryer, but as you might expect, test audiences barfed and Hughes rewrote the final scene.
Cryer went on to an award-winning career playing Charlie Sheen's hapless little brother on Two and a Half Men; Hughes recycled the original ending (with the genders flipped) in Some Kind of Wonderful.
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Platoon (prod. Arnold Kopelson)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Hannah And Her Sisters (prod. Robert Greenhut)
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (Manon of the Spring) (prod. Pierre Grunstein and Alain Poiré)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Bob Hoskins (Mona Lisa)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller's Day Off)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Sigourney Weaver (Aliens)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Molly Ringwald (Pretty in Pink)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Oliver Stone (Platoon)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Dennis Hopper (Blue Velvet and Hoosiers)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Dianne Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters)
SCREENPLAY
winner: John Hughes (Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Pretty in Pink)
I don't know about you, but I love Thanksgiving. Always have, always will. To me, it's like Christmas only better, an excuse to hang out with the people you love and eat obscene amounts of food without the hassle of buying more junk nobody needs.
But clearly that's just me.
Anyway, there aren't a lot of good Thanksgiving-related movies out there, but here are my picks as the five best:
Miracle On 34th Street (the 1947 version, please)—This is the one Katie-Bar-The-Door and I watch every year as we're sleeping off lunch. The charming story of how Santa Claus came to town and wound up on trial for his sanity, Miracle on 34th Street starts at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and is a great way to kick off the Christmas season (assuming that, like the Monkey, you refuse to acknowledge those decorations that have been up since Columbus Day).
Serve with warm pecan pie straight from the oven.
Hannah And Her Sisters (1986)—Woody Allen's surprisingly warm tale of three neurotic sisters and their equally neurotic love lives, bookended by sumptuous Thanksgiving celebrations straight out of a Martha Stewart wet dream. As a bonus, Woody learns life is worth living while watching the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup.
Serve with a nice Bordeaux aged in Anton Chekhov's wine cellar.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)—Roger Ebert's favorite Thanksgiving Day movie, it's a classic odd couple comedy from John Hughes, starring an uptight Steve Martin and the slovenly salt of the earth John Candy as two men desperately trying to get home for the holidays. "How do they know which way we're going?" Tart and funny with all the sugar backloaded to the last five minutes.
Serve with all the trimmings.
Home For The Holidays (1995)—My literary agent, Jill, thinks this is the best Thanksgiving movie ever. It's a comedy filled with hostility, anxiety, irrational grievances and all the unfulfilled familial expectations you could ever want. Not to mention someone gets a turkey dumped in their lap. In other words, it's a documentary of the typical American Thanksgiving dinner.
Serve with bile and battery acid.
The Ice Storm (1997)—Alcoholism, wife swapping, teenage sex—and the best Thanksgiving toast ever. If you grew up in a lunatic asylum or are simply nostalgic for the free-love Seventies, this is the movie for you. Stars Joan Allen and Kevin Kline (sans moustache, and you know what that means).
Serve with cocaine and quaaludes.
Posts
