Molly Ringwald is a total fox in 'Sixteen Candles'. Leaning over her glittering birthday cake to kiss the weird slab-headed jock kid she represents the raw ache of teenage sexuality and the honey-haze of childhood innocence. This um dialectic is a big focus in John Hughes' movies until Home Alone when sex is forgotten in favour of snow and Xmas lights and the princely Culkin shooting the burglar in the face. Culkin later asserted his great lionlike libido in Harmony Korine's spaced-out Sehnsuchty slow-motion Sonic Youth video and art series The Bad Son which plays around with soft-core imagery as Mac sucks his teen wife's face and nods out in junky reverie.
John Hughes is no longer alive and this should will the stars to tears, particularly as Hughes in parallel with modern teen cinema is one of those Hyperion to a satyr situations. Perhaps Molly should have made one more film with him, an adaptation of Nabokov's Ada so she could dye her hair, eat pudding, smoke fags and fall in love with her brother (played by Anthony Michael Hall, duh). After all, Ada is the great teenage novel. They could film it in the kingdom of upper-class Chicago... we mourn John Hughes. Much as the bored and jet-lagged McCallisters watch It's A Wonderful Life (dubbed in French and then in Spanish) for comfort, we watch those great movies that make the yawnsome years of education bearable and keep adolescents warm around the television when so little else can or even wants to.
'We've got seventy dollars and a girl's underpants, we're safe as kittens.'
'Could you describe the ruckus, sir?'
Fade out, I guess.
Photographs taken from 'Sixteen Candles' and 'The Breakfast Club'. Directed by John Hughes. Watch his films and buy them to benefit yourself and others. No copyright infringement intended.
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nice hamlet reference there, I live for things like this.
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