Streaming Nostalgia: The Breakfast Club

by Baby Clyde

From Rydell to Ridgemont and The High School of Performing Arts nothing seemed more exciting to a British tween in the 80’s than going to school in America. They had jocks and cafeterias and grade point averages. We had cricket and Spam Fritters and mock exams. There were no proms in the UK. No leather jacketed bad boys or Homecoming Queens. Nobody drove their own cars to school (Their own CARS!!!). It was blazers, morning prayers and the occasional coach rip to Hever Castle if you were lucky. We had Grange Hill. They had The Breakfast Club.

It's hard to explain just how cool the American education system seemed to us as kids back then. We thought that all US teens lived in their own John Hughes movie the same way the rest of the world thinks that we Brits attended Hogwarts. For that you can mostly blame The Brain, The Athlete, The Basketcase, The Princess and The Criminal...

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How Had I Never Seen..."Planes, Trains and Automobiles"

By Ben Miller

There isn't a long list of well-regarded Thanksgiving films, but John Hughes' 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles is defintely near the top of it.  It took me 30 years to catch up, but I finally have!. Featuring two pitch-perfect performances from stars Steve Martin and John Candy, the film continues to elicit laughter after all these years.

Neil Page (Martin) is an advertising executive on a business trip to New York City.  Eager to return to his family in Chicago for Thanksgiving, he attempts to hail a cab to the airport.  After losing a cab to Jake Briggs (Kevin Bacon from Hughes' She's Having a Baby) and getting extorted by a lawyer, his cab is inadvertently stolen by Del Griffith (Candy)...

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Bathroom Break with "The Breakfast Club"

Chris here. The days of deleted scenes providing much intrigue have long since past, ever since they became par for the course on DVD extras and overspeculation fodder for message board. Seldom does long-buried footage emerge that really screams "gimmie!" but the Criterion Collection has just that and it's coming very soon: nearly an hour of extra scenes for The Breakfast Club... 

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Soundtracking: "The Breakfast Club"

The 1985 Smackdown is coming, so Chris looks at that year's iconic track from The Breakfast Club...

Is there a better era for films defined by a single song (and vice versa) than the 80s, particularly those from John Hughes? Hughes was more than a master of understanding the teenage disposition, and music was always a part of his equation. But the pillar of this kind of definitive relationship of song and subject in his films is The Breakfast Club and “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds. You can’t separate one from the other: hear the song and suddenly you’re monologuing an “athlete, basket case, princess, etc.” piece; see its iconic poster and you’ll hear a “hey hey hey HEY” in your head.

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Pixie Sticks and Cap'n Crunch. Holla.

It's Back to School Month at TFE

Hello, lovelies. Beau here, fixating on a tiny moment from one of my favorite films.

John Hughes was a Godsend to me growing up. From the ages of 14 through 17, hardly a weekend went by where I wasn't revisiting one of his key entries over the span of a twenty year career. These viewings alternated between Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club. It's remarkable to me that we've managed to survive over ten years of remakes and rehashes, and no one has dared  touch any of his material.

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