After having a pretty boring couple of days I decided to watch another classic from John Hughes. Most people probably know his work, I mean, Home Alone is the number one Christmas movie in Estonia – probably one of the favorites among Americans as well. It is my childhood and Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club should have been my teenage years. I guess I am a late bloomer. Anyway, next to Sixteen Candles, I find the later addition to Hughes work (TBC) a little better but to be totally honest, Sixteen Candles is better than any teenage romance story nowadays!
Molly Ringwald portrays Samantha Baker, a girl who just turned 16 but is faced with a situation were her whole family has forgotten it due to her sister’s wedding. She does not overreact to this and just feels betrayed but continues to do things she had planned – like going to the school dance. The plot is really simple at this point – she just likes this popular older boy Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) who is shown as a parallel story. I liked how the story evolved with the help of a quite the character called The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall) – seriously, IMDb shows his name as The Geek! (His friend is actually portrayed by John Cusack and when he is there, his sister Joan is there with him!)
The teen-comedy from 84 is just as valid in the concept of nowadays, minus the electronics and the Internet which I think makes the movie even better. It is just so simple – I can’t explain it any better but the idea of romance is just stripped down and made so sweet in a way. And after watching this I wanted to watch The Breakfast Club so bad but I held myself back because I have so many other things planned. But these two, and other Hughes movies are definitely among my forever list cause they are simply classics you can not live without. Sixteen Candles now belongs among those classics.
- 4 out of 5 – teenage romance has never been sweeter than in Sixteen Candles.
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