Burl reviews Ferris Bueller's Day Off! (1986)

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?

Burl reviews Planes, Trains & Automobiles! (1987)

Ha ha and best of Thanksgivings to my Yankee Doodle friends! Yes, here for you is one of the quintessential American Turkey Day movies, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which has no particular holiday resonance for me, being Canadian as I am, but is a perfectly enjoyable picture simply on its own merits! I like it better than Uncle Buck, anyway, ha ha!

Anyway, a viewer looking for Canadian content need look no further than John Candy, who alone provides a great deal of content, ha ha! This beloved comedy star, admired for his appearances in pictures like Summer Rental and Armed and Dangerous, and of course that other holiday classic The Silent Partner, plays shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith, who travels around hawking his wares and making friends everywhere he goes! Meanwhile, uptight Chicago ad man Neal Page, in New York for a presentation, wants to get back to Chi-town to be with his picture-perfect family for the holiday! Neal is played by silver-domed Steve Martin, famed for roles in All of Me and ¡Three Amigos!

This picture is the story of their trouble-filled journey from Wichita, where foul weather forces them to land, to Chicago, and of course there are many delightful happenings along the way, and strong performances from both Martin and Candy! Ha ha, in fact, I think this may be Candy’s best work! Alongside the delights there are plenty of patented John Hughes moves, like the ascension of minor inconvenience to high tragedy when the victim is a white upper middle-class fellow; the absolute fealty to bourgeois family ritual; sudden sledgehammer blows of sentiment; and the use of horror movie tropes like musical stings and oblique cinematography to introduce working class characters, who are supposed to be naturally terrifying, I guess, unless they’re founts of wisdom like Carl the janitor in The Breakfast Club! Ha ha!

It’s a two man show for the most part, but Hughes sprinkles in plenty of cameos and familiar character faces! Kevin Bacon, well known for his appearance in Friday the 13th, shows up as a young businessman trying to get the same cab as Neal; Michael McKean from D.A.R.Y.L. turns up near the end as a highway patrolman; Larry Hankin from Escape From Alcatraz is Doobie the cabbie; Richard Herd from Summer Rental and Gary Riley from Summer School are in there too, along with plenty of others! There are even familiar voices, like that of Chino ‘Fats’ Williams, who is an unseen bus driver here, and was one of the old boys in the blues bar in Weird Science!

Anyway, we all know the story and we all know the jokes, and probably most people feel Planes, Trains & Automobiles is as much a comfy blanket to put on in a cold season as it is a movie! Ha ha! But it raises a lot of questions, too - things that are maybe explained by the rumoured four-and-a-half hour original cut, ha ha! I wonder if that wouldn’t have been a bit much? Anyway, I wonder how it works out after the concluding freeze frame on John Candy’s face: did Del stay for Thanksgiving dinner? Did the in-laws all accept him? Where did he go after that? Who paid for the destroyed rental car? Ha ha, I give editor Paul Hirsch a lot of credit for putting it all together and leaving room for all the comedy smash cuts Hughes was so fond of!

Well, it’s a solid little picture, not beloved by me, but I admit it has a comfy feeling to it! I saw it at the theatre, maybe on not exactly a date but one of those little co-ed gang outings that sometimes happened! Ha ha, I saw The Breakfast Club that way, too, which was apt! In any case, it gave me a fondness for both these Hughes works that I might not have otherwise, and so I give Planes, Trains & Automobiles two and a half pillows!

Burl reviews Some Kind of Wonderful! (1987)

Hello, and a good day to you – it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a movie that’s, curiously, quite close to my heart! That doesn’t mean I think it’s particularly good, or that I’d go so far as to recommend it to others, but I have a real soft spot for the thing! It’s a John Hughes picture – one he wrote and produced but did not direct, it should be noted – and it’s called Some Kind of Wonderful!

I recall seeing the picture on a double bill with something else, maybe that ape movie, Project X! I really should have been on a date to see that double feature, but I don’t think I was! Maybe I couldn’t think of a girl whose taste would encompass both movies; but that would have been a complete failure of imagination on my part, and a woeful underrating of the young ladies with whom I was schooled!

The main thing I loved about the picture was Mary Stuart Masterson, who may not have made a very convincing drummer, ha ha, but who looked terrific in a chauffeur suit! Heaven Help Us indeed! She plays Watts, presumably named after Charlie Watts, a young lady who speaks in goofy pseudo-epigrams (“Ha ha, don’t mistake paradise for a pair of long legs!”) and, judging from her drum head, is a Love & Rockets fan! In the 90s I knew and was powerfully attracted to a number of ladies with cropped, bleached-blonde hair, and I believe this character is to thank for that particular romantic avenue!

Anyway, if you’ve seen Pretty In Pink, the plot will seem familiar to you! (I hadn’t, and still haven’t seen that particular movie, so the repetition didn’t bother me!) There’s a young fellow, a working-class rapscallion named Keith, who has the aforementioned Watts for a best friend, but pines for a blowdry beauty called Miss Amanda Jones, just like in the Stones song, ha ha! The big twist is that, though Amanda moves among the rich and has a wealthy, perfidious boyfriend she herself lives in a literally wrong-side-of-the-tracks neighbourhood! Watts, meanwhile, secretly loves Keith, but he’s blind to that fact, and also to her infinite superiority to Miss Amanda Jones, to the point of seeming a little dull-witted!

Eric Stoltz, well known from The Wild Life, plays Keith, giving a strange, soft-spoken performance that’s out of place in a teen film, but welcome for precisely that reason! The twist with his character is that when he unveils his portrait of Miss Amanda Jones, it's hilariously misproportioned and generally terrible! Ha ha, I love Movie Art! John “Beverly Hills Cop” Ashton plays Keith’s dad, who’s obsessed with getting him into a business college, but Keith is more interested in being an artist than any post-secondary education! (Ha ha, art school seems never to have occurred to him!) The twist with his character is that he’s not on the whole a bad guy, and also that he doesn’t give up his pro-business school stance at the end of the picture!

The other thing I really liked about the picture was the soundtrack! Ha ha, plenty of great tunes, and a really great pennywhistle version of the Elvis standard “Can’t Help Falling In Love!” It was also quite nice to see the threatening thug characters led by Elias Koteas, who I suppose are meant to be punkrockers (a caste Hughes never successfully grappled with!), turn out to be extraordinarily helpful, nice guys! Ha ha, as an art-class punkrocker myself, I quite appreciated that!

Howard “Grumpier Old Men” Deutch was the director, and he manages to pull off a reasonable, if bland, simulacrum of the Hughes style! It might have been interesting to see a little more pep in the thing overall, but I guess you can’t have everything! It’s hardly a groundbreaking picture, but it hit me in the sweet spot back in my happy schooldays, and so I give Some Kind of Wonderful two and a half mongers!

Burl reviews Uncle Buck! (1989)

Hi, bananas! It’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a John Hughes picture I’d never seen before! I thought, ha ha, since I’ve enjoyed many of his other works, like Weird Science and so on, so forth, I should give this one a look too! Plus it has John “Armed & Dangerous” Candy as the titular avunculus, so hey, why not!

The important thing in setting up a high concept late-80s comedy like this is establishing the situation, however unlikely it might be! We have a family, and a well-to-do one it is from the look of their giant house! Presumably they live in Shermer, the same Chicago suburb wherein dwell Ferris Bueller, the Breakfast Club gang, the lady from Sixteen Candles and so forth!

But, ha ha, they have a problem! More of an inconvenience, really! The spectacularly unphotogenic mother’s father is ill, and they must go to whatever Midwestern backwater he lives in to offer succor, and for some reason both parents must make this trip, and for some other reason the teenage daughter can’t be relied on to provide care for the two younger children (quite reasonable, actually); and for some other reason entirely, adequate care cannot be found! Enter Uncle Buck, who’s meant to be a family black sheep but in reality is a dogmatic moralist who might give the sternest Puritan a run for his money!

The teenage daughter is a grim specimen indeed: she’s perpetually angry for no particular reason, much like the sister in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and she’s rude to poor Uncle Buck and mean to her little brother, who’s played by the kid from those Home Alone pictures! Macauley Conklin is his name!

Meanwhile Uncle Buck has his own problems, which revolve around his ladyfriend, Amy “Streets of Fire” Madigan! Ha ha, when will this oversized manchild finally grow up? It’s the dynamic we see in so many 1980s comedy pictures! But here, as wonderful as John Candy is – and he has many great moments – he never really convinces as a dyspeptic layabout! Ha ha, he’s just too upright of a fellow!

There’s not much of a plot here, and few jokes that are funny, and not much that sticks in the memory! For the first half of the thing, such was its polytetrafluoroethylene character that I wasn’t sure whether or not I'd even seen it before! It turns out I had not! And now that I have, I think there remains only one or two Hughes-directed pictures I haven’t watched, and at least one of them concerns a little girl and a grumpy TV star! Ha ha, I won’t be rushing out to find that one, I don’t think!

The picture has a few endearing cameos, principally that of Mike Starr, well known from The Money Pit and Funny Farm, in the role of Pooter the Clown! But beyond that, a good heart, and a few funny bits, there’s not much to recommend it! I watched it more out of a sense of obligation, as well as the Everestian “because it was there!” (Ha ha, I got it as part of a bulk VHS pawn shop score!) So on balance, and after much serious consideration, I’m going to give Uncle Buck one and a half giant pancakes!

Burl reviews Weird Science! (1985)

Fats, man, ha ha, it’s me, Burl! Yes, the picture I thought I’d review today is that gem in the John Hughes cineverse, Weird Science! Ha ha, a lot of people will tell you their favourite is Curly Sue, but not me! Of course, I’ve never seen Curly Sue, so who knows, maybe when I do I’ll think it’s just great!

But we are here to talk Weird Science, which is apparently facing a Full Metal Jacket-style soap-beating in the form of an impending remake! Ha ha, I know I’ve promised to review all the movies, but I’m not sure I’ll ever bring myself to watch that one! Not that the original is my most beloved picture ever or anything, but still, most anything enjoyable about it stems directly from either its 80s provenance or its performances!

Gary and Wyatt are two high school buddies in the Hughesian kingdom of Shermer, the fictional Chicago suburb in which most of his movies take place! Nobody likes these two geeks, and they’re pretty hopeless with the ladies! But they have a little sleepover and manage to use computer power, hocus-pocus and just a dash of weird science to create a full, life-sized lady, whom they name Lisa! And Lisa has magical powers in the bargain! Ha ha, not bad for a Friday night in Shermer!

Well, Lisa is played by the lady from Hard to Kill, and the first thing she does for these young hufnagels is to take them to a blues bar, the sort of club you only find in movies like this and, apparently, Adventures in Babysitting! (Ha ha, that’s a picture I’ve never seen! Should I give it a look, do you think?) There we suffer through a long, drawn out Old Bluesman impersonation from Anthony Michael Hall! Ha ha, crazy insane? Insane? Crazy? Answer: yes!

Well, the rest of the plot involves Gary and Wyatt suffering humiliations at the hands of Robert Downey Jr. from The Avengers and Due Date, and Robert Rusler from A Nightmare on Elm Street part 2 and Vamp, and then having a big party where they find their inner courage after a biker attack (ha ha, the terrific Michael Berryman shows up, of all people!) and learn it’s best to try and just be themselves! Blech, ha ha! They also defeat the mighty Chet, played by Bill Paxton! He’s pretty funny, and it’s nice to see those gun-toting jarhead type of guys get the treatment they deserve!

It’s an expensive looking picture because of all the crazy destruction that happens at the party, and the supernatural reversal of that destruction later on! Thanks to the cast it’s often very funny too, though not for the reasons it thinks! Downey get a ha ha from me just for saying “You do!” so brightly in response to a question from Lisa, and Paxton gets one for the line “What are they doing in there?!?!” It’s all in the delivery, ha ha! I also liked Gary’s explanation of his father’s profession!

There’s certainly not much to the movie, and it’s frequently very dumb, and not once does it come close to making any sense whatsoever! But ol’ Burl can roll with that, ha ha! I’ll always enjoy it for reasons that are entirely my own, and I guess that on reflection I’ll award Weird Science two and a half Rex Harrison hats!