“I did not achieve this position in life by having some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind!”
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I know of at least one person in the world who has not seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Just one. U.S. Congresswoman Michelle Bachman must never have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. On Tuesday of last week, Bachman pulled off a truly remarkable series of falsehoods and idiocies all within one sentence. She described the Hoot-Smalley act, enacted by FDR, and talked about the tremendous burden it placed on taxpayers, tarriff restrictions, trade barriers and such and such. Here were the falsehoods…first of all, the act was called Smoot-Hawley, not Hoot-Smalley. Secondly, it was enacted before FDR took office, several years before, by Republican president Herbert Hoover, and then overturned by FDR.
Why did I start this review with this seemingly unrelated factoid? Well, the reason I know this bizarrely obscure piece of American political economic trivia is that I just watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. You know that famous “Bueller…Bueller” scene? Well, the lesson economics teacher Ben Stein is teaching in that class is all about Hoot-Smalley. I mean, Smoot-Hawley. Just one of the many fascinating tidbits of information one can glean from a careful watching of this classic movie. If only Bachman had waited until this Tuesday to make her unfortunately stupid remarks, she could have watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on Blu-Ray, out May 5th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and perhaps she could have avoided coming off as a total doofus.
But Michelle Bachman aside, I think just about everyone, at least everyone around my age, has seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And now that it’s out in the ultimate format, Blu-Ray, it’s time to revisit this wonderful comedy. Blu-Ray does two things to Ferris Bueller. First, it accentuates the high production values applied to the film by director John Hughes. The movie comes alive even more than it usually does, and this is a movie that is very, very much alive. (I know, that doesn’t really mean anything. But you get what I’m saying, I think.)
The second thing the movie does is accentuate the yellow teeth of Alan Ruck, who plays Ferris’ best friend Cameron. Only in a couple of scenes, and only briefly, but enough to really distract me a few times. I guess this was before the teeth-capping craze swept through Hollywood. It was also before the boobs-and-vomit craze swept through Hollywood. Were Ferris Bueller to be made today, it would feature at least three gross-out scenes, where someone unwittingly ate pubes, or vomited in someone’s hair.
In that way, Ferris Bueller is a breath of fresh air, and a movie that makes me nostalgic for the 80s. Seriously. After watching this movie I was nostalgic for the cinema of the 80s! The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty In Pink, the 80s! OK, I guess that really means I am nostalgic for the movies of John Hughes. The charming yet subversive innocence of his central characters, the sweetly pleasant yet vaguely sociopathic people who star in these films, and the teenage mentality and the teenage brain shown in all it’s glorious simplicity and brazen foolishness.
Ok, I’m done waxing eloquent about John Hughes, and waxing nostalgic about the 80s. On to other things. Of course, there is a TON of terrifically quotable dialogue - some samples:
“The example he sets is a first-class ticket to nowhere!”
“Life moves pretty fast.”
“You can never go too far.”
“We saw priceless works of art! We ate pancreas!”
“Makes you look like an ass, is what he does, Ed.”
OK, that’s enough. Every character in this movie has at least one fantastically quotable line, and they all work. Even the cartoonish principal, obsessive and hell-bent on catching Ferris (Matthew Broderick) faking sick and skipping school, works. Of course, he is the one character we have seen in every movie since then, but he works in Ferris Bueller because he is the antithesis of Ferris himself. He cares about things TOO much. And as Ferris doesn’t care about anything, and everything goes right for him, the obsessive principal sees everything go totally, irreperably wrong for him.
But it’s the little touches that make Ferris Bueller worth watching. The scene where the principal, freaking out, sprints down the hall but pauses to walk calmly by the door of each classroom so he still appears to be in complete control is priceless. Noticing actors who later became big names, like Kristy Swanson and Charlie Sheen. But above all, Ferris Bueller remains an inspirational movie. I watched this and thought - I want to be Ferris Bueller! Wait - I am Ferris Bueller! You could do worse.
