The Breakfast Club (1985)

Rating: 7.4/10

"We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all."

Shall we take a journey down to memory lane, when the hair were inexplicably large, the make-up as intense and bright as it could be and the disco beat in the music was a must?!?

A film swept from the mid 1980s, 'The Breakfast Club' is one of those cult classics that made their mark into the film history map, with its simplesness, its raw freshness and its brutal honesty of how things really are when you're in high school. Of course, there were many more high school films before this one out there, but they didn't really give you the one truth behind this wonderful myth of what high school really is about; TOUGH, MEAN & DIFFICULT!

'The Breakfast Club' was filled with 'the brat pack' at the time, a group of actors who would often work in films together or would be seen in one of the A-list party zones at the time. In this particular film the actors of the 'brat pack' were Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez, the pack's leader.

The films goes somewhat like this:"Five high school students, all different stereotypes, meet in detention, where they pour their hearts out to each other, and discover how they have a lot more in common than they thought." (www.imdb.com)

John Hughes didn't give out any gimmicks in his actors' performance. He let them roam about. Feel like 16-year-olds, thus making this film all the more truthful for the average-high school audience. Hughes managed to give a straight-edge truth on how things really are in high school, of how kids really feel about classes, their parents, themselves and ultimately about life. The script and the dialogue speaks for itself. Raw honesty. Nothing more, nothing else.

Although this film is set in the mid '80s, its transcendental themes still echo any high school student who feels an outcast, or a weirdo or different from the social circle; that's almost every teenage youth in the western world.

But I think what really stands out in this film are the actors. They don't beat-around-the-bush with their acting. They are what they are and they want you to listen to them, they need you to give them your respect to listen to what these characters go through and sympathize with their drama, as small-minded and unimportant as it may be, they would like you to see this as a statement for everyone who passed through high school and feeling alone and like they didn't belong. This is why this high-school film differentiates itself amongst so many other teen films; it speaks straight from the heart!

I will not bore you any more with filmmaking technicalities or trivia from the film, but simply say watch this cult statement, and try to empathize with the characters and realize that at any given moment of a person's life all the same feelings might have or will come rushing inside of you as well.

Happy screening...and..."Don't you forget about me".


The Breakfast Club (1985)