Breakfast Club (1985)

Review:

What happens when you place a jock, preppy, nerd, rebel and a weirdo in one room for a very long time? A deep and meaningful film about breaking stereotypes and becoming one body. John Hughes' Breakfast Club is a cult staple of the 1980's and so it should be, the deep and integral meaning intices me as a member of the audience to become enveloped within its colourful cast of characters. At its time, this film took new risks and tried to deliver its morales very differently from other films, its witty dialogue, simple linear structure and furnace of emotions set it apart from most other films at its time.

The film is interesting in many ways, Hughes' fascinating choice of direction magnifies its uniqueness, one good example of this is his choice to include and only focus on a very small cast of characters, but each exaggerated to separate each to their own. Of course, we have the main 5 teenagers, but it also includes a bully teacher and a complex janitor character, every one of them has a very different set of traits to set them apart, they also all have very different goals in mind and come from different backgrounds, throw that all in a blender and you get a meaningful film about being a teenager and the general problems and philosophies people face every day.

Another interesting choice made by Hughes is his idea to set it in only one location, a desolate, plain, white school, not that interesting when you first hear it? But Hughes jumps on the opportunity and brilliantly uses it during certain sequences, using every part of the school, from the library to the football field, each set piece is used brilliantly to convey meaning and emotion from each character.

The Breakfast Club is no normal teen film coming out around that time, unlike films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) or Sixteen Candles (1984), Breakfast Club tackles more complex and deep topics using stereotypes to attempt to pull in a wide range of audience members, it relates with everybody watching as we were all a teenager once, going through a rough spot, with acne, and school, and even a sense of hierarchy. This film could also be seen as a criticism of the American education system at that time, where we learn later on the effects that it has on young minds and the actions that some take in order to avoid or solve problems made by it.

	Overview:

The Breakfast Club, a simple concept on the outside, about 5 very different misfits, later turns out to be a story about how everybody is similar in certain ways, using stereotypes and simple versions of those stereotypes to drive home its overall message as a film about overcoming problems and facing society.