John Hughes: Remembering a True Cinema Icon
This has hit me hard. While most celebrity deaths don’t really hit home that much with me, the news of iconic director John Hughes dying from a heart attack while out walking in New York has had a profound effect on me. This man was the force behind the films that helped shape me as a person.
The pathos and integrity behind the laughs of films such as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful and all of the others of his main active period remains as powerful as it ever was, and with his passing we have lost a true great of the cinema.
The reclusive genius of John Hughes had also created other things such as the massively popular Home Alone movies, but it is that spate of brat pack classics that he will probably be most remembered for, and those films are a legacy that anyone would be proud of.
A generation of film fans and filmmakers were created by those films, each of them containing a magic that teen movies have never been able to recapture since then, no matter how hard they try.
Thinking that the man that brought us those five misfits The Breakfast Club, Duckie from Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller and all of those other classic characters from Sixteen Candles, Weird Science and so on is gone is heartbreaking.
Many fans were hoping that John Hughes would return to his roots and create something meaningful and beautiful, like those early films, instead of the string of Beethoven sequels and the like. Sadly this wasn’t to be.
It is always sad when someone dies, but when their body of work was so respected and adored, it breaks the heart. here was a man who had little controversy in his life, and after his massive 80s fame drew back from the limelight and became something of an urban legend.
He continued to work, but he never returned to what he did best, which was making people think and making people realize that life wasn’t quite as clean-cut as your parents may have you believe.
Here’s to you, John. You were, and remain, my hero. You got me through my troubled teenage years with those films and those characters, as you did for millions of other people. I would imagine a lot of other people are feeling the same right now. Rest in peace.