MY MOVIE SHELF: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 269  Days to go: 263

Movie #108: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

It seems unbelievable that I was only eleven when Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out, because it feels like it informed my entire adolescence. Then again, I had a sleepover birthday party one year (it must have been my twelfth), and we’d rented the movie from our local Mom & Pop video rental place (pretty sure this was before Blockbuster existed in my neck of the woods). All of us cracked up at the scene when the florist drops off a bouquet for Ferris with Mr. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) on Ferris’s front porch and departs with a friendly “shave and a haircut” horn honk, only to receive Rooney’s “two bits” middle finger, but my mother had her back turned so when we laughed she asked what happened. We were all frozen, except for this one girl who would of course go on to be super popular and eventually Prom Queen and definitely not friends with me anymore once we hit junior high. She just repeated the gesture for my mom like it was no big deal. I would never been that afraid and impressed in front of my mother in my later years (and like I said, that girl barely said two words to me the entire six years of school following that one — except the one time we both had detention and she was too busy being popular and hilarious on the bus home to get off at her stop, so she got off at mine and hung out with me in my room ’til her mom picked her up, all the while wondering what position, exactly, Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” was referencing), so it must’ve been when I was eleven that I first saw the film. Hell, maybe that’s why it informed my entire adolescence — at the nascent point of my transition from child to young adult, I was given a look at someone who was everything I ever could hope to be.

Between the ages of eleven and eighteen, there was no one in the world I held in higher esteem than Ferris Bueller. I honestly think that’s the truth. He got away with everything. He had all the friends in the world, a secure and loving family, a perfect girlfriend and a charmed life. He had no worries. He’s an all-around great guy. I truly believed there was nothing Ferris Bueller couldn’t do, and I wanted more than anything to be like him.

I never was as elaborate in my fake illnesses as Ferris (Matthew Broderick) was. I never could fake a fever anyway and my parents didn’t give a hoot about my clammy hands, so there was no point in licking my palms. But I did — especially by my senior year — come up with numerous and varied ways of getting out of class. My best friend and I were masters at it, and even when we didn’t cut out entirely, we still managed to take a super long lunch every day. We had that place wired. Of course there was never a dead grandmother, and we didn’t have our own phone lines so as to redirect the calls of school administrators, but we knew enough tricks to get away with a lot. I mean, really a lot. I’m pretty sure one of my friends is still angry with me for handing in a paper for ninth grade honors English over a week late with the flimsiest of excuses imaginable and still eking out a better grade than she got turning the thing in on time.

The problem is, however, that my work ethic was always more eagerly applied to planning and doing fun things than to actual, you know, work. I despised actually applying myself and hated and resented the entire bullshit experience of high school, so I consistently managed to do just enough. Just enough to get by, just enough to get grades that would keep my parents off my back and not make me feel like a dummy, just enough to skate through. I remember once hearing about a possible show or movie being developed about Ferris’s adulthood and I couldn’t help but think he’d maybe be in the position I found myself — not doing anything spectacular really, but doing just enough to pay the bills and have nice things and go on great vacations every once in a while. After all, a job is a job, but a  vacation is quality time. Then tonight I remembered that Ferris lives under some sort of lucky star, so he’s probably more like the guy who was plucked from obscurity on Twitter and given a job writing for Late Night with Seth Meyers. Actually, that guy is even from Illinois. Maybe he IS Ferris Bueller!

In addition to Ferris, I also desperately wanted to be Sloane (Mia Sara). She was beautiful and together and had an amazing boyfriend who loved and wanted to marry her. She had a great body and her own phone line and she was totally chill and “not embarrassed” when Cameron (Alan Ruck) saw her change out of her clothes to go swimming. In all my life, I have never met a teenage girl so comfortable with herself, and yet Ferris Bueller’s Day Off made me really think they existed. In truth, I was probably a lot more like Jeanie (Jennifer Grey), angry and snotty with everyone, thinking I was always getting shafted when really that’s not the case at all. I mean, if you notice, Jeanie spends no more time in class that day than Sloane does. So what’s she so pissed about? (“What a little asshole,” indeed, Grace (Edie McClurg), amirite?) But at the same time I was wearing my sarcasm like a defense shield à la Jeanie, I was also really internalizing the wisdom of Charlie Sheen’s drugged out guy (such a stretch for him): “Worry about yourself, not what your brother does.” This can be a hard lesson to learn, and I didn’t have it mastered back then at all, but as I grew older I really developed more of a “live and let live” philosophy — as long as no one’s getting hurt, it’s really none of my business how someone else chooses to live his or her life. I believe that intensely, and I try to teach my kids that you can’t control what other people do, but you can always take care of yourself and make sure you’re on the right path for you. In its own small way, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off planted that seed in me.

I loved every line of the movie (it might be the most well-produced film of John Hughes’s oeuvre), and still can recite the whole thing to this day, but it seeped into my DNA quite a bit as well. However, it wasn’t until years after I first saw it that I realized how important Cameron’s story line was as well. Cameron is the real focus of Ferris’s adventure — he states it clearly, though it can be easy to miss. He doesn’t think Cameron is a very happy guy, and he wants to bring him some happiness. He does more than that, though, he brings him strength. The Cameron that stands tall at the end of the movie, looking at the wreck of his father’s prized car, you know with certainty that whatever happens, he’s going to be okay. For as much as I got away with at school, there were many ways at home that I was not okay. It took me until I was about 21 to get the kind of strength Cameron achieves here, and I find that watching the movie now I empathize and connect much more with him than with anyone else. It’s astounding to me that throughout maybe a hundred viewings, maybe more, it never occurred to me that Cameron was the heart of the film, but he so clearly is. It makes me love the movie even more.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Ben Stein as the history teacher, because otherwise I would’ve never known what “voodoo economics” was. (Everything I know, I learned from a movie.)

“Anyone? Anyone?”

MY MOVIE SHELF: Beetlejuice

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #26: Beetlejuice

It occurred to me today, watching this for perhaps the thirtieth time, that I didn’t really understand this movie when it came out. I was thirteen, so I got the gist, but a lot of the darker references — and a lot of a jokes, to be honest — were lost on me. I thought it was great and hilarious, of course, but I suspect that came from the off-beat nature, the frenetic score and the unrestrained performance by Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse that all combined to make it a movie that seemed great and hilarious, even if you didn’t get all of it. (And I suspect I wasn’t the only one who didn’t quite get it, considering the Beetlejuice cartoon that ran from 1989-1991, featuring characters Beetlejuice and Lydia as friends.)

Over the years, though, my appreciation for the film has deepened significantly. It’s a tight, raucous comedy — a sort of controlled chaos. Even the opening is intentionally discordant. With the camera panning across the peaceful countryside of a small northern town, it could be mistaken for a much different film if not for the score — a frantic, jarring, jumping series of notes that practically made composer Danny Elfman a household name (at least among cinephiles). The score lets you know there is something unsettling about this sleepy scenery, and that feeling is confirmed when the camera stops on a large Victorian farmhouse and a giant, hairy spider — bigger than the windows — crawls over the roof. The perspective and tone shifts again to reveal the house and the town are all part of a scale model built by homeowner Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin, almost disquietingly thin as compared to his current self). He and his wife Barbara (Geena Davis) are taking the world’s first staycation, reveling in the chance to hang wallpaper and avoid friends. They make a quick run into town for supplies from their hardware store (an innocuous dog trotting through the edges of each scenic location change), then crash their car through a covered bridge and into the river below when trying to avoid the (same) dog that crosses their path. Within a few short minutes of the opening shot, the quiet, homebody Maitlands arrive home from their crash into the river to discover they’re dead — at least the third twist against the expected and the movie’s been on for maybe ten minutes.

The movie wastes very little time on exposition or unnecessary scenes, and saves itself from having to by making the nature of death and the dead a mystery the Maitlands don’t understand any better than the audience does. They sort of fumble through their new existence and when the urbanite Deetz family (Jeffrey Jones as the jittery Charles, the never not-perfect Catherine O’Hara as the style-conscious Delia, and teenaged Winona Ryder in her breakout role as proto-goth Lydia) moves into their home, they seek to haunt the interlopers out, with no success. The nefarious Betelgeuse is actually sort of tangential to all this. He tries to insert himself into the Maitlands’ dealings with the Deetzes, and Keaton’s performance just takes over from there. It’s so dynamic, in fact, I think most people forget the movie isn’t really about him at all. Still, his draw is undeniable, and he makes something dark and ultimately quite frightening in concept a comedic tour de force. It’s easily the most iconic role of Keaton’s life, even surpassing Batman.

The two calypso numbers are also iconic and fun, and the netherworld is full of visual gags. The bulk of the movie, in fact, is joke upon joke with barely a breath in between, on top of a rather simply constructed framework. I think that’s what makes it work so well, actually. Dealing with life and death, even comically, a film can get bogged down in its own mythology. Beetlejuice doesn’t, yet it still brings heft to Lydia’s loneliness and depression, to the Maitlands’ affection for her, and to the terror of the séance and final showdown (again, masterfully scored by Elfman at a terrifying, escalating pace). I didn’t get that at thirteen.

Awesomely, this movie has sort of grown up with me, in my own mind, experience and perspective. At sixteen, I could definitely relate to and understand Lydia better than I had at thirteen. I felt her disconnect from her parents and her longing for someone to nurture her. In my early twenties, it was Delia who caught my attention because I wanted to be stylish and expressive and understood artistically, while still believing I had all the answers. A few years ago, I could’ve been like Charles, actively looking for a way to relax and get away from all the stress in my life. And now I’m more like Barbara and Adam, happy to be at home spending time with my family. In that way the movie is universal and timeless. I look forward to experiencing it many more times.