“Pardon my French, but Cameron is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond.”
If there’s one sure-fire way to sell a film to me, it’s the presence of a witty dialogue. It is for this reason that I consider John Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) one of my all-time favorite movies. Well - that and the fact that I also was (still is) a truant myself.
The thing about Ferris Bueller is that it is more than it appears to be. One on hand, Ferris, both the film and the person, can be seen as frivolous, shallow, and egocentric (to the degree that it might even be sociopathic), something that only middle-to-upper middle class white Americans can truly identify with: He skips school and drives to the city with his friends in a convertible. He watches a baseball game and eats lunch at a fancy restaurant. He doesn’t seem to have any troubles at all, financially or otherwise. But I remember thinking if I wanted to be friends with him or be him, and I realized that Ferris Bueller also represented a way of living that I wanted to adapt.
Unfortunately, growing up from a developing Asian country with strict Roman Catholic background definitely made me more like a Cameron. Some people want to be Luke Skywalker or Cher in Clueless. I wanted to be Ferris Bueller. I had never been so engrossed in a fictional character since Olive Penderghast in Easy A (2010).
I give Will Gluck’s Easy A, which I had seen before Ferris Bueller, the same high regard when it comes to dialogue. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s about a high school girl named Olive (Emma Stone) who becomes “the new school slut” after the lie she told her best friend about losing her virginity spreads to the entire school.
While Olive isn’t as carefree as Ferris, what I really admire about her is the indestructible humor she possesses which is manifested in the way she approaches her life. Even when dealing with the worst circumstances, she could always see things from a comical perspective. She is a homebody who constantly found ways to amuse herself. This attitude became very relevant to my life when my family first moved to America. When I started high school in a small town in Connecticut, I must have watched the film at least five times a week because I wanted to emulate Olive’s outlook. I was really (x1000) sad those first couple of years, and the only friends I had were people who lived in pages or behind screens. They, of course, include Ferris and Olive.
Interestingly enough, Gluck’s favorite movie is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In fact, he admits to being a huge fan of ‘80s movies and putting in about 20 references to John Hughes films in his second feature Easy A. One subtle way Gluck does this is using contemporary covers of songs such as Simple Minds' "Don’t You Forget About Me" (The Breakfast Club). Most of the obvious ones come from Ferris Bueller.
The entire film is an unmistakable allusion to the decade of sappy teenage comedies that are usually about high school or romance or both. Olive herself expresses a nostalgia for the chivalry that are often found in ‘80s movies.
Although I am positive that I have seen better and far more substantial films, my personal attachment to the protagonists in Ferris Bueller and Easy A makes them top my list of my go-to movies. In recent times my life has gotten insignificantly better, and I don't skip school as much, but watching these two films every few months or so always reminds me of what I went through those tough couple of years. The mere existence of these films allows me to never lose sight of how far I've come and how much I am able to overcome.
This is why I study film.
Sources:
This is why I study film.
Sources:
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