The Breakfast Club

the 80's arent really a generation i identify with. Among the few memories I have are one of running to my neighbor's house to watch the spiderman cartoon in color and another of playing the emperor in emperor's new clothes without knowing how the tale ended.. embarrassment has a strange way of increasing long term memory. ok enough illustrated about how little i remember of the 80s. So when someone at work told me they could lend me The Breakfast Club(1985) , I wasn't really going for it till someone else told me it was by the same guy who made Ferris Bueller's Day Off - in my opinion one of the best Chicago-based movies ever.

The Breakfast Club was quite different from Ferris Bueller. It is not linear in the sense that there isn't a continuous storyline. There are 5 characters - high school students - who are forced to spend detention together in the school library on a Saturday. They represent the different subgroups in school and if left alone would have passed out of school without speaking to each other. what happens is a catharsis where each relates his/her thoughts about parents, their mistakes, their insecurities. If you adjust a little for the differences in societies , you have a picture of what every high school student goes through.

With a minimal cast (apart from the 5, only a janitor and the teacher have any real talk time) and some very well written conversations, writer/director john hughes(writer of Home Alone, for the 90's children) does an excellent job of representing the whole high school population with its myriad problems that seem to mysteriously vanish when something called "growing up" happens. the movie starts with the teacher confining them to the library asking them to write an essay about who they think they are. the essay never materialises on paper but you can see it on your tv screen if you care to rent it.