Ha ha and houndcakes, it’s Burl here to
review the famous teenage shenani-comedy Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off! It’s a movie beloved by many and reviled by nearly as
many, and its central character is a figure of controversy even today! Is he a
charming rogue kicking against the pricks, or an entitled, kick-worthy prick?
Is he an attention-seeking rich boy? A clever dweeb with a romantic soul? A
sprightly free spirit? A natural-born leader of men? A whiny, spoiled bully-brat?
Is he all of the above and therefore surprisingly realistic in his
complexities, or a cartoon cardboard cutout cliché the likes of which has
never actually walked the earth?
Matthew Broderick, the open-faced actor we may remember
from Godzilla, plays this
multifarious figure, this Puck for the 1980s, this insidious, ism-allergic exemplar
of Reagan-era privilege! He decides to take a day off from school one fine
morning, and neatly fools his gullible parents with well-rehearsed sickboy
routines! His sister, a psychotically resentful lunatic three times filled and
running over with hate and spite and poison, is irritated at this! So is the
“Dean of Students,” (whatever that is; we never had one at my school!), played
by Jeffrey Jones, whom we know from The Hunt for Red October and also from mug shots!
Ha ha! John Hughes, whose directorial touches
graced Weird Science and Uncle Buck, put this thing
together, and by garr, I say he did a good job! He certainly hired the right
people: Tak Fujimoto’s photography is top-notch, and Paul Hirsch edits the picture
in exactly the way it needed to be edited! Whether the characters rub you the
wrong or the right way, we must admit the performances are good across the
board, with Alan Ruck in particular nailing the anxious, psychosomatically sickly
sidekick role! Plus there’s a whole gallery of welcome faces in the supporting
cast, like Richard Edson from Stranger
Than Paradise, Kristy Swanson from Deadly Friend, Del Close from The Blob,
Larry ‘Flash’ Jenkins from Armed and Dangerous, Max Perlich from Cliffhanger,
and Cindy Pickett from DeepStar Six! And of course Charlie Sheen from No Man's Land shows up in a scene-stealing police station cameo!
But what’s old Burl’s opinion of the
picture, you may well ask? Ha ha, well, my relationship with it is slightly
complicated: I can’t watch the movie without kind of hating Ferris and his life
of privilege and his whining about getting a computer instead of a car for his
birthday! Wah wah wah! Ideologically, I’m predisposed to hate the picture! At
the same time, by dint of timing and circumstance, I can’t help but love it a
lot too! Not only was I was about the right age for it, but when it came out I
had just returned from a very eventful school trip to Chicago, where we had
gone to museums and a ball game, and ascended the Sears Tower, and had
essentially enjoyed the city in the same way Ferris and his friends do on their
day off; and there were romances and shenanigans and the evading of teachers and a general building of character along the way! Inviolable synaptic connections were thus formed at the outset, so on
some primal level the simple fact is that I will never be able to quit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off!
So there it is, and I hope you’ll all take
this review in the proper spirit and with the appropriate grains of salt! Ha
ha! And I’ll end this review by asking an open question of my American readers:
are all American high schools as strict as this, with their truant-hunting
deans and so forth? Between this picture and The Breakfast Club, John Hughes gives the impression that high
schools, at least in the greater Chicago area, were something of a penitentiary
experience for the students! Canadian schools were a lot more laid back, ha ha!
Anyway, for technical skills and undeniable charm and a hold that just won’t
let go, I’m going to give Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off three nice stretch jobs with a TV and a bar! Ha ha, how
about that?
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