What's Your Favorite John Hughes Memory?

I have to agree about The Breakfast Club. After seeing it I was tempted to follow in Ally Sheedy's footsteps and just crash detention, but the movie I wanted to live in was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I mean who didn't want to cut school, steal a Ferrari and join the local parade.

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Don't you--forget about me. Don't don't don't don't you..forget about me. Will you stand above me? Look my way, never love me?
This song has a potent ability to trigger my memories and transport me back.

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I don't think I'd like to live it, but the scene in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" where Steve Martin calls John Candy a Chatty Kathy doll is one of my favorite moments EVER in a comedy. It goes from funny to sad to tragic in just seconds. Fantastic!

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Gotta be "Uncle Buck" where Buck whips out a hatchet and intimidateds Bug. "Bug, gnat, get it?". I die everytime I even think of that scene!

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At Juilliard, my composition teacher, Lawrence “Larry” Widdoes, walked in one day and started tearing away at “Holiday Road”, featured in “Vacation”, a John Hughes screenplay, starring Chevy Chase. For an hour Larry hacked away at the song, pounding the piano, offering up endless improvisational variations, all for the betterment of the song. Ostensibly Larry was trying to “improve” the ditty since, as he observed, it only had “two verses”. A chordal harmony repeating an imitation breve cycle of fifths in the chorus, introduced at the sub-dominant, progressing in order to the minor dominant-seventh, the dominant seventh of the sub-mediant, the sub-mediant, the re-ordered major dominant, the tonic, to the major dominant again, on to the tonic, where it was resolved. Or was the apparent tonic actually a dominant chord resolving into the renamed four chord, which was actually the real tonic, which entered into a re-named cycle of fifths, landing endlessly on fade on the unresolved dominant ?? Was “Holiday Road” like “Hey Jude”, featuring the same conundrum of un-resolution ? Larry flipped it forward, backward and upside down until the piano gave out it seemed. Finally he declared the song was “as good as anything Mozart ever wrote”, and Mozart never wrote a song which could be used as an “American anthem”, he opined. Larry is Chevy Chase’s step-dad, a fact Larry generously made clear with free tickets to Saturday Night Live. Thanks Larry ! And here’s to you, John Hughes !!

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To this day in the winter I will sometimes sport a long black overcoat, a fashion choice Judd Nelson managed to make seem immortally cool in The Breakfast Club. My favorite John Hughes moments are plentiful. His work was an embodiment of it's time each time. The soundtracks kick ass.

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When The Breakfast Club was in theaters, I was old enough to think it was a little hokey, a little artificial (but still fun -- I was only a little critical at 16).

For me, Hughes' Sixteen Candles was great at amping up teen issues into utter silliness, with ridiculous grandparents, unrequited crushes and crazed geeks starving to see some skinny girl's underwear. I remember watching it on cable now and again, just cause it was so easy to like as a teenager.

And I still quote to this day... "What are you cryin' about. You don't have to sleep under a guy named after a duck's dork."

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For me it will always be the "Twist and Shout" crescendo from the Parade scene in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" The most potent moment of pure joy ever put on film...seriously. I weep everytime...no matter what!

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When I was a teenager back in the mid 90s, one of my friends had returned from visiting his cousins in Arizona. He had raved about this movie he watched while he was there, so he and my other friends decided they would rent it. It was called The Breakfast Club and I, being the dumbass that I am, confused it with something akin to Breakfast at Tiffany's. Probably because I had never heard of it. Long story short, it was rented out at the video store but we ended up watching it some time soon after. And I loved it! My friend would do his Bender impersonation and would put us all in stitches. Not long after, I awoke one morning to find that my mom had bought me the Breakfast Club VHS from Sam's Club. Needless to say, it got a lot of play.

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He wrote "Baby's Day Out". The best Comedy since "The In-Laws".
The construction sight, the zoo and the modern version of The Three Stooges. Great acting and direction and a fantastic script.
A comedy you can watch comfortably with your children and enjoy.
They just don't make them like that anymore.

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Most children were probably watching "An American Tail" or "The Care Bears: Movie" over & over on VHS, but when I was 4 years old I could not stop watching "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". I was sold during the opening minutes when Ferris plays his parents and when Ferris breaks the 4th wall...he had me believing he was specifically talking to me. I didn't even understand half the jokes at the time (lump of coal into a diamond analogy, Grace (aka Ms. Poole) sniffing the white out, the nurse who likes to...) but I just remember thinking he was so cool and always in control, no matter the situation. I knew I wanted to be Ferris Bueller when I grew up. Of course, my day of cutting school was nothing like his and resulted in a 3 day suspension and a wonderful ass kicking by my parents, but to me it was all worth it.
I would also have to thank his movies for my adoration of "thee boobies" thanks to "Weird Science" & "Career Opportunities".
I also think "Dutch" is underrated.
John Hughes was a genius and I think a little part of our childhood died a that day.

R.I.P. John Hughes

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My favorite is definitely Some Kind of Wonderful, even though Hughes only wrote the screenplay for this one. My favorite scene is the Keith & Watts' kiss, it's a classic unrequited love tale that's still fresh to this day!

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