Molly Ringwald wrote an op-ed piece in the NYT yesterday about the man who made her famous. She and her old co-star, friend, and fellow fortysomething Anthony Michael Hall (who goes by Michael) sat on the phone for a while and waxed nostalgic about the heady brat pack days when they were cast as prototypical suburban Chicago teenagers in movies that ended up defining their generation. Hall turned down parts in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (would he have played Cameron?) and Pretty in Pink (Duck, obviously), and this apparently pissed Hughes off for years.

Molly then gets into how Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club were John at his purest, and everything that came after wasn't his best work:

[Movies like Home Alone and Weird Science] were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view. A darker spin can be gleaned from the words John put into the mouth of Allison in “The Breakfast Club”: “When you grow up ... your heart dies.”

Maybe we come from the more cynical end of Gen X when we say we really love Weird Science, and think there's plenty of vulnerability still there between the farce. But anyway. Whatever. Despite the title of this blog, we're not here to eulogize.

We're here to party.