John Hughes died yesterday. He was 59, which is a ridiculously young age to leave this earth, and he dropped dead from a heart attack while walking around Manhattan.
Listening to the news and talk shows today, one thing strikes me about Hughes.
John Hughes was underrated. Underrated by film critics and film-goers alike, underrated by me.
I lost track of whatever Hughes has been doing for the last decade or so. Let's face it, he was the scriptwriter for a lot of mediocre (and that's being generous) movies that quite often had numbers in their titles, like "Home Alone 4" and "Beethoven's 5th."
The flipside of that is that he also wrote and/or directed two of my favorite comedies of all time, "Mr. Mom," with the great Michael Keaton, and "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," with Steve Martin and the late and beloved John Candy. Hughes was also responsible for movies about teen-agers that I saw and enjoyed when I was a teen-ager, like "The Breakfast Club" and "Sixteen Candles." Or maybe it was "Pretty in Pink." Some of those Molly Ringwald movies were interchangeable.
Speaking of Molly Ringwald, a lot of actors got their starts or had their first big successes in John Hughes' films, like Macaulay Culkin and pretty much everyone in the Brat Pack.
Hughes never made any great dramas or action films, he apparently never aspired to make a "Citizen Kane" or a "Raging Bull," and maybe that's why he didn't necessarily receive more critical acclaim. John Hughes made comedies. They were light weight but well made and the comedy never had a mean spirit to it. His movies had a gentle, humane quality about them, and that's a quality sorely missing in a lot of today's entertainment.
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