I've hinted and put it out there many times before but I can say I never got much out of high school. Sure, it wasn't unbearable but it was unlikable for me anyway I look at it. When your main hobbies are film studies, writing and attending as many hockey sporting events as possible, I came to expect to being alone on most nights. Sure, I had my fair share of friends but once my friends turned to drugs, I told myself I wasn't going down that road. Still, being that these friends were always close to me through junior high, I wasn't able to totally let them go. Basically my entire high school days were spent with drugs even though I never did drugs and alcohol during those four years.
I was a straight C student with my GPA always somewhere in the 2.5 range. Considering my high school was always top in the state of Michigan and too much focused on "excellence", my grades were probably below average compared to others. That could be because I do have a learning disability but at the same time, school was just not my thing. Being at a place for seven hours every day and just not being a people person made school difficult for me. It was me usually sitting in classrooms for six periods where my interest level was pretty low.
I can say that I found most of my senior year this past year to be kind of useless. I had achieved most of my credits for graduation years prior and I was stuck in an art class and material processing class because I needed classes to round out my schedule. I found it very ironic that I liked my business law class so much even though it was pretty hard and I even got an A in the class. Sure, my grades weren't hot for my senior year at times because I was really had no experience in drawing or doing woodwork but my grades were also low because was just at an end.
I also think having a girlfriend my senior year helped with me lot. It helped from an emotional standpoint and it was nice having a person who was willing to support me when a lot of people weren't. From my first car accident, midnight drives wandering around town and to the poor matinee movies we sat through, it seemed like my best times of high school were with her in an odd way.
The point I am trying to make is that everyone has high school memories and I could go much more in depth and give you a dozen more stories but this is enough.
To fit into more my point about high school, if there's genre in film that's more cliche and without so many deep issues, it's the high school genre. Yes, you have your classics from it like any other genre but you also see so much of the same thing. Still you can find a charm in a movie like The Breakfast Club which is really like no other.
Jonathan Bender (Judd Nelson), Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald), Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall), Andy Clark (Emilio Estevez) and Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) have all been served detention on a Saturday morning at Shermer High School. This film is a character study which goes into depth of many characters having deep conversations about the meaning of life and high school ideas in general, all set in a school library.
Sure I just gave you a brief plot synopsis of this but really it be would impossible to narrow it down to one thought. The Breakfast Club wants to tell you about the real world and wants to be honest. It's wants to talk about identity and how it doesn't matter who you are and that you should be who you want to be. It is a film that wants you to forget the high school issues you had even if you can't because they are all around. It even becomes dark in it's last act talking about a gun incident and suicide. It's plot is one you could write a term paper on, that is how thick it is.
Why this is such an accomplishment is because of the characters. Every one of these characters are given a background and thoughts. Andy is on the wrestling team and you can just tell at times he's just tired of being a jock. Andy wants to put himself in and talk about issues even though he shouldn't. Claire is the princess and let's her mouth get her into trouble most times. Brian is the brain who is facing too much pressure and more than he should. Bender is the rebel and who seems to find himself in Saturday dentition quite a bit. Ally is awkward, quirky and a wacko who's really all over the place. It's the Judd Nelson character who really leads this film in it's first acts but his cast-mates eventually step up near the close this film. These are characters that fit the role of people in high school. These are characters that are able to talk about things that have deep meaning for them. These are characters that are not normally in high school films or films in general.
This is a plot that's as different now as it was back then. A high school film that is set in one day and one setting. The Breakfast Club is brave and I don't see it ever being topped as the best high school film around. There's honestly too much positive to say about it.
5/5
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