Review of Don't You Forget About Me (2010) by Julianna S — 08 Mar 2010

Filmed in 2008, this affectionate fanboy tribute to the work of John Hughes suffers from an irksome framing device - it's the journey of four Canadians (all of whom look and speak like refugees from a chewing gum commercial) making their way to interview the reclusive director at his Chicago home, an ad hoc quest that leads to far too many production meetings being held on camera.

Still, the substance of the film is highly satisfying: wideranging interviews with many of the actors who made impressions in Hughes's teen movies (Nelson, LeBrock, Ruck, Sheedy, Gedde Watanabe, plus - brace yourselves, ladies - Andrew McCarthy); filmmakers who either worked with or were inspired by Hughes (Howard Deutch, Allan Moyle, Kevin Smith, Jason Reitman); and real-life teenagers who prove almost as gawkily photogenic and articulate as those Hughes's features made movie stars of.

Elsewhere, the film draws legitimate comparisons between the relatively innocent first wave of modern teen movies and their slicker, more packaged contemporary siblings... the documentary made me realise how one speech given to Edie McClurg's secretary in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" effectively set in stone the tribal characterisation adhered to in "Mean Girls", "She's the Man", "Glee", etc.

(It also raises a useful parallel between Molly Ringwald and Lindsay Lohan, the two pre-eminent redheads of two very different - and differently mediated - eras; for more than one reason, you conclude, Miss Lohan might do well to follow her predecessor in marrying a doctor and moving to France.

) It's a bit of a jumble, there are absentees (Ringwald, Matthew Broderick) and you might want at least one critical voice to address these films' essential conservatism, their comforting squareness, and how easily they sat within the mainstream: Hughes did, after all, give us Chris Columbus and "Pretty In Pink" rather than "Savage" Steve Holland and "Better Off Dead".

Still, that may just be the grown-up in me talking; as Sheedy's Allison puts it in "The Breakfast Club", "When you grow up, your heart dies", and "Don't You Forget About Me" bears out Hughes's reminders to hold on to your youth, because it's all downhill from there.

In the two years since the documentary's production, not only have we lost Hughes to a heart attack, but one of the doc's star witnesses, Roger Ebert - who describes Hughes as "a philosopher of adolescence" and "The Breakfast Club", rather wonderfully, as "The 'My Dinner With Andre' of teen movies" - has been left speechless by cancer, while Howard Deutch (who happily refers to himself as "the Salieri to John's Mozart") made the truly rancid "My Best Friend's Girl".

That sound you can hear is Hughes spinning - or perhaps still twisting and shouting - in his grave.