In this week's Entertainment Weekly, writer Josh Rottenburg speaks to a number of stars from classic John Hughes fare (though not really any of the big stars of Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles) including John Cryer, Jeffrey Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off) and our favorite, Bill Paxton (Chet in Weird Science), who seems to have phoned in his blurb.

Notable to us was the intro to the piece, which like Molly Ringwald's NYT piece, placed the identification with Generation X front and center:

Before Generation X even had a name, John Hughes gave it a voice. For these kids of the Reagan era, the movies he wrote and directed in his ’80s heyday — Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — captured how it felt to be a teenager with an accuracy and sensitivity so uncanny, it often felt as though he’d jimmied the lock on your private diary.

We are a generation that, by some accounts, spans a mere 8 years (1968-1976), and the disaffected adolescence of white, middle-class, suburban Gen Xers has apparently come to define us via these hugely popular films.  Essentially, we are self-conscious, witty, prone to slackerdom, and no strangers to booze or pot. Also, we reject all authority. 

Oddly enough, though none of us are teenagers anymore, we'd argue that these very adolescent traits are still the ones that journalists continue to slap on Gen X today. We may be parents, and business leaders and we may run Hollywood now, but these movies have branded us as low on ambition and high on snark. 

Seeing as the Boomers have so royally fucked our national economy, maybe it's the 33- to 41-year-olds who took their adolescent cues from Ferris and Farmer Ted who will end up saving the world.