Hooray For Hollywood - Meagan Hale

One of my favorite directors of all times in John Hughes and The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off are two movies of his I love. Across the board, Hughes shows fairly ordinary events in his movies but the underlying messages are alway very meaningful. This is consistent in both The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

In The Breakfast Club, five kids are all stuck together in their high school's library for detention on a Saturday. Each student comes from their own world. As said in the movie they are a princess, brain, jock, basket case, and a criminal. This seemingly regular storyline may lose some but when watched, the audience starts to realize that there is more to this film than just detention. Their teacher tells the to use their time in detention to write an essay about who they are. Spending the entire day with each other helps them learn who they are and that they aren't just one thing but many things. Each of them have something in their life that bothers them whether it is abuse, pressure from parents, or being ignored by their family. Hughes turns an ordinary movie about kids in detention into a lesson of the importance of knowing who you are and that the world does not revolve around you.

Likewise, in Ferris Bueller's Day Off a kid fakes sick to miss school and then helps get his friends out of school so that they can run around Chicago doing basically whatever they want. Though this movie is full of humor its underlying purpose is much less humorous. Ferris has an arrogant mentality and with that mindset comes the illusion of being untouchable. Hughes shows his audience that there are always consequences for your actions and that your actions affect not only yourself but others around you. Luckily for Bueller and his friends everything works out for the most part in the end but a lot goes wrong along the way. We are responsible for our actions whether good or bad and this movie shows us this.