From vanity plates to a Hughes cameo to a janitor’s glorious past, here’s some cool things most people overlook in this 80s teen classic.
1. John Hughes Is Mr. Johnson
At the end of the movie Anthony Michael Hall gets into a car being driven by the reclusive late director.
2-3. Vanity Plates
The nerd’s parents have the plate “EMC 2” referring to Einstein’s theory of relativity (duh!)
The truck dropping off and picking up the jock has “OHIOST” on its plate. This could either be the place he’s being forced to attend pending a scholarship, his mean ol’ dad’s alma mater, or both.
4. Torched Locker
While it’s easy to notice this, you probably didn’t realize what it was at the time. During the opening montage, we see a locker that’s been completely decimated by fire. Almost like a flare gun went of in it, right? (Yes, it did. That’s Brian Johnson’s locker.)
5. Carl Was One The Big Man On Campus
The wise and sassy janitor was Man of the Year in 1969. Now, 15 years later, he’s picking up after bratty little punks. Makes you wonder if one of the students in detention is also on the fast-track to a career in the custodial arts. (Bender is the obvious pick, but our guess is wrestler Andrew Clark. The scenario: His knee blows out during his freshman year of college, he loses his ride, and is forced to return home. With his glory days behind him and no discernible future—his dad disowned him for not being a winner—he’s greeted with open arms by Shermer High School and offered the job after Carl is fired for drinking on the job and blackmailing teachers.)
6. Hacking Was A Problem Back In 1984
Apparently so, or at least enough for the school to post a sign in the computer lab stating “Hackers Will Be Expelled.” This is most likely a nod to early 80s films like Tron and Wargames, which opened up a world of possibilities for h@X0rzing. Shall we play a game? You bet your sweet butt we shall.
7. The PS Gets A Shout-Out
The guidance counselor’s name—“Dr. R. Hashimoto”—is a nod to Breakfast Club production supervisor Richard Hashimoto. (Fun fact: He also worked on Wargames.)
8. Getting Streaky With It
Bender (Judd Nelson) has a bluish-silver streak in his hair, which is quite noticeable on Blu-ray. The streak doesn’t maintain continuity, and appears to either fade or disappear entirely at different points throughout the movie. Perhaps he took some time to touch it up prior to smoking pot or headbanging on that weird statue.
ONE THING YOU DEFINITELY NOTICED: Lockers Could Be Outrageously Offensive In The 80s
During the opening montage we see Bender’s locker with the phrase “Touch this locker…and you die, FAG!!!” in permanent marker. Tell the principal to eat your shorts or that he raids Barry Manilow’s wardrobe, you’re punished. Write one the most offensive words to the gay community on a locker in plain view of anyone walking down the hall and no one cares.
We’re well aware of the old canard “the book is better than the movie.” But every once in a while the movie wins. A clever screenwriter, an inspired director, and a pitch-perfect actor can interpret a book masterfully: streamlining stories, fleshing out characters, and cutting the fat.
10. Blade Runner
Based on Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ridley Scott’s atmospheric, cyberpunk noir takes a cerebral sci-fi landmark and turns it into a violent, visceral dirge about what it means to be human.
9. Fight Club
Chuck Palahnuik sly, slim mediation on modern identity is transformed by director David Fincher into a loony punk rock opera about machismo, starring a brilliant Brad Pitt as an unhinged id and a slack-jawed Ed Norton as an everyman on the edge.
8. The Shining
Stephen King famously trashed this Stanley Kubrick adaptation, but he shouldn’t have. Kubrick took a perfectly spooky ghost story and created a horror movie game changer. It’s an oft-copied, sinister, and hypnotic tale of one man’s descent into madness.
7. The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th Century prose can be a slog for contemporary readers, but it didn’t stop Michael Mann from dusting it off, and finding its pounding frontier heart. With the help of a superb cast, including a plausibly badass Daniel Day Lewis, this historical saga is the rare highbrow action film.
6. The Bridges of Madison County
This best-selling novel by Robert James Waller is a disciplined, if slim, tearjerker about an affair long dead. It seemed counterintuitive that Hollywood man’s man Clint Eastwood would take the Oprah’s Book of the Month Club Winner and with fellow icon Meryl Streep, transform it into a sweeping, bittersweet love letter to doomed romance.
5. The Godfather
Mario Puzo wrote of the great pulp gangster books of all time. Francis Ford Coppola made it into a movie as bleak, complex, and cathartic as a Shakespearean tragedy. It is not just a movie about the mafia, like the book. Instead, the movie is about the dark side of the American dream.
4. The Maltese Falcon
Sam Spade is one of crime fictions greatest gumshoes: a tough-talking private dick with a moral code, stuck in an amoral world. A great read, but then an icon like Humphrey Bogart shows up in the movie, and all bets are off. Not even the most sublime imagination could dream up such a righteous, world-weary hangdog.
3. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
Director Terry Gilliam gave Hunter S. Thompson’s surreal, drug-fueled stumble through Las Vegas what it needed: a little bit more of a narrative. The book reads like you’re in a haze, which is how it was written. Gilliam contextualizes the movie, placing it firmly during the death spasm of the hippie promise. His lead, Johnny Depp, becomes Hunter in an eerily satisfying performance that never feels like caricature.
2. American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis wrote a book about a serial killer that became infamous for its gratuitous violence and shocking sex. The book was vilified for it’s depictions of unspeakable horror. But director Mary Harron understood that Ellis’s only crime was being a little too subtle. She made it into the obviously grim satire most critics were too blind to recognize.
1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendary sword-and-sorcery tome has moments of brilliance punctuated by hundreds of pages of songs, Elvish genealogy, and exhaustive geographical Middle Earth detail. In making his modern cinematic classic, Peter Jackson just ignored such passages and focused on the story – a particularly human story about good, evil, and the power of friendship.
Have you ever felt bad for not liking a movie? Or tried to convince yourself that you like something more than you actually do? Liking something out of obligation isn’t the same as actually liking something. You might be a racist, anti-Semitic homophobe, but it’s not necessarily because of your taste in film.
Politics can teach movie studios a lot about marketing. If someone isn’t buying what you’re selling, simply brand ‘em unpatriotic! Or socialist! Or Hitler!
That’s the intolerance of intolerance, and nowhere is it more prevalent than in peoples’ tastes in film. Suggest that Gandhi is too long and you’re a monster. Call United 93 pandering and you hate America. With “Important Movies,” dissent is tantamount to treason, so you’re almost forced to like them. This couldn’t be further from reality and we whole-heartedly support your right to one-star any of the following films on your Netflix account.
SCHINDLER’S LIST
If You Don’t Like It… You hate Jews and are a Holocaust denier. You probably also have syphilis.
In Your Defense: Scholars, critics and other filmmakers have blasted the film for its oversimplified portrayals of Nazis and the Holocaust at large. Plus, nobody gets a hard time for hating Battlefield Earth and all of humanity get enslaved in that movie.
Same Goes For: Life is Beautiful, Defiance
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
If You Don’t Like It… You’re an imperialist lowlife who doesn’t care about poor foreigners. Are you going to finish that dolphin burger?
In Your Defense: The film’s very makers plucked its most beloved performers right from the merciless streets of Mumbai… and promptly dumped them back there after wrapping. Indians don’t even like this movie. Without its closing dance sequence, it’s Forrest Gupta.
Same Goes For: City of God
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
If You Don’t Like It… You’re a heathen dirt worshipper who may rightly be treated as a soldier in the war on Christmas.
In Your Defense: Legendary celluloid deity thrashings aside, it’s a one-note movie that suffers its own allegations of intolerance and anti-Semitism. Loving this movie doesn’t make you a good Christian, nor does trashing it make you a bad one.
Same Goes For: The Ten Commandments, It’s A Wonderful Life
BLOOD DIAMOND
If You Don’t Like It… You support genocide and cheap frippery. You might as well wear an Angolan child’s severed ear for a broach, you mountebank.
In Your Defense: Replace Leo DiCaprio with Owen Wilson and this movie is Behind Enemy Mines. Sure, it brought conflict diamonds to First-World attention, but so did Kanye West, only he was less preachy and predictable about it. Just ‘cause you don’t like this movie doesn’t mean you don’t care about black people.
Same Goes For: The Killing Fields, Hotel Rwanda
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
If You Don’t Like It… You’re a backwoods, gay-bashing homophobe. Which, if you ask any gay person, means you’re probably gay yourself.
In Your Defense: The movie’s main characters might not even be gay. Jake Gyllenhaal himself approached it as the story of “straight guys who fall in love.” Which really just makes it a plain, old boring love story like Shakespeare in Love, Atonement, and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down With a Sore Bum.
Same Goes For: Milk, Boys Don’t Cry, Philadelphia
THE HURT LOCKER
If You Don’t Like It… You hate the troops. Why don’t you just throw some rotten fruit at your local VFW, you ingrate?
In Your Defense: The film’s portrayal of a reckless madcap as the leader of a unit tasked with the most sensitive duty of the Iraq War is rubbish to vets. That the makers took such liberties and the movie was still boring to many folks deserves its own award. Feel free to display a yellow ribbon and trash this movie on Facebook.
Same Goes For: Saving Private Ryan, Platoon
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
If You Don’t Like It… You’re a tree mugger. You hate fluffy bunnies and transparent water and you poop smoldering coal.
In Your Defense: Who is this movie for? If you’re a champion of the environment, you already know this stuff. If you’re a climate-change infidel, you’ll never watch this stuff. Sort your recyclables and reuse a plastic bag and you can dump this from your Netflix queue with a clear conscience.
Same Goes For: Avatar, The Cove, Wall-E
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE
If You Don’t Like It… You’re a gun-humping cave patriot who never thinks of the children.
In Your Defense: Filmmaker Michael Moore is equal parts entertainer and documentarian, often bending insinuations to his chubby will. He even chastised a politically sympathetic, but factually dogmatic, Roger Ebert for saying so. You can abhor universal access to tank-piercing bullets and still duck this flick.
Same Goes For: Boyz n the Hood, Runaway Jury
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
If You Don’t Like It… You’re a cudgel-carrying member of the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club.
In Your Defense: In its effort to challenge repressive gender stereotypes, this picture boldly features 1. Madonna as a tramp, 2. Lori Petty as an insecure whiner and 3. Rosie O’Donnell as the annoying one. Plus, they’re all being controlled by a washed-up coach who won’t allow them to emote. (No crying in baseball? Apparently the writer of this film isn’t a Mets fan.)
Same Goes For: Thelma and Louise, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
JUNO
If You Don’t Like It… You’re a baby killer, the fifth horseman of the prenatal apocalypse.
In Your Defense: Someone actually wrote into this script the words “honest to blog.” Of all the things a woman’s decision to have a child or not may be—personal, emotional, agonizing—insufferably cute isn’t one of them. By all means, have a baby. Just don’t feel obligated to show her this movie.
Same Goes For: Waitress, Bella, Citizen Ruth
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
If You Don’t Like It… You derive perverse pleasure from the struggles of the disabled. You are the handi-Christ.
In Your Defense: The film posits that it’s not science that could make a deranged man sane, it’s the triumph of his will… or the love of a woman… or perhaps a particularly rousing musical montage. Trashing this movie makes you no more insensitive to the life of this schizophrenic than the filmmakers who whitewashed it.
Same Goes For: Murderball, Rain Man, My Left Foot
CRASH
If You Don’t Like It… You hate everyone.
In Your Defense: Have you seen everyone? They popularized Lady Gaga, made American Idol the most watched show on TV for half a decade, and put Red Bull on everything. In Crash, the prevailing racial stereotypes so crippling to our culture get the showcase they never got in Nazi Germany.
Same Goes For: Precious, Driving Miss Daisy, The Blind Side
