If you want proof that John Hughes has still not been succeeded as teen movie king, take a look at the 2001 spoof Not Another Teen Movie, which references Hughes’ films more than any other, despite the fact that it’d been 14 years since the filmmaker had last given us one of his signature entries into the genre. Also see the marketing of last year’s American Teen, a documentary that was sold as a non-fiction version of The Breakfast Club, 23 years later.
There will likely never be another John Hughes, at least not in the way he defined a type of movie. And at the same time, as much as nearly every teen movie since his seminal six recognize his influence, few of today’s teen movies can even get away with or accomplish things his films did. It would be appropriate if we could name sixteen of these things present in Hughes’ early works that are absent from modern teen movies, but we’ve got half that number, and we’re hoping it’s enough to establish that his films were, for better or worse, of a certain time, despite the fact that they’re so timeless.
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Fox Searchlight’s latest pop-indie festival pickup, (500) Days of Summer, is promotionally packaged, as is typical for the distributor, with a hip soundtrack featuring multiple songs from The Smiths and Regina Spektor, as well as tunes from Feist, The Doves and the obligatory Simon and Garfunkel. Though heavily dependent on music, the movie is not a musical, yet like other Searchlight releases it has that one moment where the line between non-musical and musical is just barely crossed.
In the past we’ve seen this moment restricted to diegetic circumstances, whether a dance performance or an in-scene duet of a Moldy Peaches song. But this year Searchlight’s titles have been venturing even further, first with the non-diegetic, Bollywood-influenced song and dance in Slumdog Millionaire and now with an equally fantastical sequence in (500) Days, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt struts about to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams,” joined by a surplus of extras and an animated bluebird.
Musical numbers in non-musical movies can certainly work, as is evident in Citizen Kane and many David Lynch and Adam Sandler films, but there’s something very forced and cliché about the sequence in (500) Days. Never mind that it seems lifted out of Enchanted, a movie we very much despise, and never mind that we prefer our Zooey Deschanel movies to feature musical interludes performed by the singer-actress herself rather than lip-synced by her costars (director Marc Webb acknowledges the mistake of not including her in the scene); this number is just completely over-the-top and unoriginal.
In response to the scene, we’ve selected five of the worst musical numbers from non-musical films to show what kind of horrible company (500) Days of Summer is in.
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As a former fat guy, I have to salute actor Ron Lester, who went on the Today Show yesterday showing off his slim figure (see the segment here). You may remember Lester as the really, really fat high school football player “Billy Bob” from Varsity Blues, or his identical character from Not Another Teen Movie. Back in 2001, he lost 315lbs. — 43lbs. of it extra skin that had to be removed — and even lost 2 inches worth of height (thanks to the weight lost from his head). He did this by gastric bypass surgery and it was primarily for heath reasons, but damn if he doesn’t look much better, too.
The problem is, according to the person submitting this story to Fark.com, he may now be handsomer but he may also have cost himself his acting career. Obviously he had been employed in the past for his physique more than his acting talent, and now he’s missing that thing that guaranteed his being hired (his only significant movie post-surgery was Karate Dog). Certainly he’d rather be alive, though, than typecast. It’s not like he just went out and got plastic surgery thinking he’d be better off in an industry obsessed with good looks. But I did immediately think of Jennifer Grey and Meg Ryan as two prime examples of how physical changes, which were intended to be favorable, ended up more damaging career-wise. …Read more
