While most movie fans are satisfied building a collection of their favorite DVDs, Shane Scheel has gone miles beyond in his devotion to his favorite cinematic treasures.

As the co-creator and producer with Christopher Lloyd Bratten of the “For The Record” series of live events held at the Barre VT bar in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, he has paid tribute to the films of the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. The series features performers re-enacting the most iconic dialogue exchanges of those filmmakers’ features, as well as singing and dancing their way through the greatest tunes of their oeuvre.

But Scheel has topped himself big-time with his current show, “John Hughes: Holiday Road,” which plays Wednesday through Sunday nights before closing Dec. 30.

The two-hour extravaganza features an amazingly talented six-person cast and a five-piece rock band bringing the best of Hughes’ scenes and songs to life from his ‘80s films through “Home Alone.” Whether you’re a fan of Hughes’ high school movies (“Pretty in Pink” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) or the “Vacation” series and “Planes Trains and Automobiles,” the interactive cabaret-style show is one of the most entertaining nights of music and comedy you’ll ever experience.

Scheel spoke with Big Hollywood recently about how the “For The Record” series – which next takes on Baz Luhrmann’s films including “Moulin Rouge” – came about, and why he thinks Hughes’ films continue to resonate with American film fans.

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Desperately seeking attention to a Twitter feed that required 2862 follows in order to amass a mere 4663 followers, someone at the ridiculously irrelevant National Lampoon*, someone who finds AIDS fair game for “humor,” decided to gain a little attention by ripping into Andrew Breitbart today. Among those tweets came this witty zinger:

In other news, National Lampoon is still in business and somehow less relevant than “Saturday Night Live.”

But if I have their attention, if someone unworthy to even breathe the same air as The Mighty John Hughes and P.J. O’Rourke is reading this and has any kind of say in the film production side of their business, I’d like to offer a suggestion that might help with the credibility of their brand. Instead of naming your films, say, “National Lampoon’s Going the Distance”; title them this way: “Another Desperately Unfunny, Straight-to-Video Piece of Shit We’ve Called ‘Going the Distance.’”

You’ll sleep better. 

As a matter of fact, you might want to call your Twitter feed: “Another Desperately Unfunny Production from National Lampoon.” Really, this is the best you’ve got…?

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While surfing Facebook at work a couple weeks ago (ye who’s without that sin can cast the first stone), I found a status update from my 15 year old niece in Alabama that took me right back to my own awkward high school days. She had just experienced a particularly awful day on the school bus with her classmates, and I wished that I could find a way to help her.

But I was stuck at my desk at a newspaper in Los Angeles, and as I contemplated the moment I realized that, as a guy who defines big and tall (I’m 6 foot 3 and 300 pounds, but I carry it well! Or so I tell myself…), I was kind of like her “Uncle Buck.” So after making her feel better by writing that I’d bust some heads for her if I was in the same town, I asked her if she’d ever seen that John Candy/John Hughes comedy classic. To my amazement, she hadn’t, so I resolved to head down to Target and get her a copy.

It was while I was standing amid the video aisle that I remembered my own rough days as a 15-year-old suffering in an all-boys Catholic school in Little Rock, a small city I constantly yearned to get away from. And I remembered that while moping through a particularly tortuous unrequited love for a girl at the Catholic girls’ school a couple miles away, a different movie helped me feel better back then, like I wasn’t alone in the world.

That film was another John Hughes classic, “Pretty in Pink,” and in it the character of Duckie felt the awful pangs of love and rejection in such a direct and powerful way that I felt that Hughes r, had been secretly filming my life. I just couldn’t believe that a filmmaker could so thoroughly understand what I and other teens were going through.

I wrote Tina a note off my smartphone and asked her if she’d ever seen “Uncle Buck” or “Pretty in Pink.” She’d only “Ferris Bueller” out of all of Hughes’ iconic films, so I threw both those flicks in the basket and picked up “Sixteen Candles” and “Some Kind of Wonderful” to boot. I figured I’d save “Breakfast Club” until she was officially 17 so that my sister, her mom, wouldn’t shoot me for sending her an R-rated movie too early. (more…)

Ever since the late great John Hughes stopped cranking out classic high-school films like “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink” at the end of the 1980s, finding a teen movie with any true psychological depth has been a nearly impossible feat. But every once in a while, a filmmaker surprises audiences with a heartfelt, genuine effort – and “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” is a happy addition to that list.

Starring Keir Gilchrist (Showtime’s “United States of Tara”) as its unlikely central character, a depressed teenage boy named Craig, “Funny” follows the bittersweet dramedy that unfolds when Craig tries to check himself into the teen ward of a Brooklyn mental health clinic but accidentally winds up being placed on a five-day psychiatric lock-down in the facility’s adult wing.

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Craig’s problem is a broadly defined depression, a sense of melancholy towards the world around him that contradicts the seeming cheeriness of his supportive parents. Yet the mind is an inscrutable thing, and he feels the need to break out of an indefinable rut, so Craig makes the most of it even as he’s surrounded by longtime patients who have been locked away from the world for far longer than he can even imagine.

Along the way, Craig finds hope in two relationships: the friendship he finds with a dad in his late 30s named Bobby (Zach Galifianakis), and a tentative romance with a beautifully sad girl named Noelle (Emma Roberts). As they peel away the painful truths underlying their stays, Bobby must learn to lighten up a little, resulting in an affecting series of funny-sad life transformations that feel very real. (more…)

If you enjoy the halting, semi-detached, half-ironic, superior snark-enese spoken by that “endearingly off-beat” and shockingly pale woman who runs the Kubrick-ian retail store that serves as the set for those Progressive Insurance commercials, you might make it through “Easy A,” because that’s how most every character talks. Well, at least the ones whose semi-detached, half-ironic superiority we’re supposed to be impressed with.  I guess it was only a matter of time before Hollywood tried to save themselves from the difficult work of writing good dialogue by replacing it with attitude.

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Just as Amy Heckerling’s charming and timeless “Clueless” (1995) set Jane Austen’s “Emma” in a modern-day California high school and populated it with Valley Girls, “Easy A” is a much less successful comedic attempt to update “The Scarlett Letter.” And we know this because the movie Won’t. Stop. Telling. Us. This. In fact, as though it were a theme, the desperate act of self-referentialism is a constant presence. Worse still, you would think most everyone was aware that the first rule of smart films about teen angst is to Never Reference John Hughes. But this is not a smart film.

Like a more intelligent but less-damaged Lindsay Lohan, Emma Stone brings her considerable screen presence and phone-sex voice to the character of Olive, an “invisible girl” at an Ojai, California high school. Though she’s still a virgin, in a moment of weakness Olive makes up a story about a weekend spent with a college boy to impress her less-virginal friend, Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka). The sex-tastic fable is unfortunately overheard by Marianne (Amanda Bynes), the leader of a group of mean-spirited, evangelical Jesus freaks who hate loose women and gays (but this is a Hollywood film, so therefore I repeat myself — MEMO TO GUTLESS LIBERAL FILMMAKERS: right here) and within days Invisible Girl becomes School Skank. (more…)

It says plenty that “The Breakfast Club” may be director John Hughes’ most iconic slice of ‘80s-era filmmaking. The Hughes Decade also delivered “Pretty in Pink, “Sixteen Candles” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” but the director’s take on teen angst, detention style, stands as his hallmark achievement. No singing on floats, forgotten birthdays or Ducky. Just five teens talking about their bruised feelings for 90-plus minutes.

And you’ll hang on nearly every word while watching the new Blu-ray release of “The Breakfast Club: The 25th Anniversary Edition.”

The story’s setting strips matters down to the bare essentials. Five disparate teens are forced to spend time together in a Saturday detention hall. Each represents a high school stereotype, from the no-account thug (Judd Nelson) to the rosy-cheeked princess (Molly Ringwald).

Naturally, they bicker from the start, but their conversations wear down each others’ defenses. They poke and prod each other verbally, their faces registering every direct hit. (more…)

Some actors get famous for playing one unique type of character – Sylvester Stallone will always be   the monosyllabic tough guy, while Hugh Grant is the highly sensitive yet adorable British twit. And Michael Cera has made a name for himself as the ultimate high school nerd, awkwardly mumbling his way through one teen movie after another. 

If there was ever a need for a young actor to reinvent his image, it’s Cera – for the persona he’s been stuck in is so passive his characters barely seem to exist. He takes a big, bold and highly entertaining step in that direction with the new comedy “Youth in Revolt,” based on a novel by a writer named C.D. Payne that’s become a cult sensation since its publication in 1993 and has confounded filmmakers ever since.  

The reason why the novel has been so hard to adapt is two-fold: the book is a gigantic, 500-page tome written in the form of a journal composed by a fictional high-school student named Nick Twisp, and it’s packed with his randy sexual fantasies and frustrations. But screenwriter Gustin Nash and director Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl”) have solved the problem in astute fashion: cutting down the frequency of the sexual material resulting in a 90-minute confection that’s still risque enough to be rated-R without being overly offensive. “Youth in Revolt” stands up well against the classic canon of the late great John Hughes’ ’80s teen films.  (more…)

In this household, the Christmas season can’t officially begin until we hear those two magic words… “Shitter’s full.”

Once again screenwriter/producer John Hughes delivers the Christmas goods, this time with  Christmas Vacation, a masterpiece of a family holiday comedy (and the third of four “Vacation” films) with so many iconic scenes and pieces of quotable dialogue that it would take less time for you to watch the movie than for me to try and list them here. It’s the simplest of stories: Clark W. Griswold (Chevy Chase), a Chicago family man whose enthusiasm forces him to overdo everything, wants to throw his kith and kin a fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. But from the moment his parents and in-laws arrive all kinds of hell breaks loose including house fires, electrocuted cats, SWAT raids, and sewer gas explosions. 

What makes Christmas Vacation a must-see perennial (I’ve already watched it twice this season and the season’s not over) is that Hughes’s script expertly wrings every possible situation out of his concept, and first-time feature director Jeremiah Chechik does a beautiful job wrapping the whole production, even the more slapsticky and cruder moments, into an old-fashioned package that never loses the winning sincerity so crucial to the film’s success.  Not only is the look of the film much warmer than most comedies, but most impressively, Chechik controls the overall tone like a seasoned pro.  (more…)

His remake might have proved they can’t make ‘em like Miracle on 34th Street anymore, but nearly twenty years later, Home Alone proves they can’t make ‘em like John Hughes anymore. The Hughes canon increases in stature with each passing year and will long outlive the likes of today’s Judd Apatows because the Midwestern-raised Hughes was a genius at crafting the simplest of plots, keeping them moving, and dropping into them sympathetic and memorable characters we relate to. Characters who themselves were frequently the products  — not of lofty Manhattan or some other trendy city –  but Midwestern small towns and suburbs populated with ice rinks and churches and beautiful homes filled with good and decent people (not the Wheelers and Lester Burnham).

With an eye for physical comic comedy a Keaton or Chaplin could appreciate, Christopher Columbus does a fine job directing but this perennial holiday favorite and surprise box-office smash ($486 million domestic in today’s dollars) is through and through a John Hughes film. Not just in the sense that he produced and wrote the screenplay (which happens to be one of the best structured of the last two decades), but that his unique sensibility is all over it; from the perfect amount of sentiment to a genius understanding that no matter how big or small the role, a movie is always better for the presence of John Candy. (more…)

Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday.  Sure, Canada and a couple other nations have adopted their own weird versions of it too, but the notion of a nation setting aside a day to give thanks for its blessings could only arise in a nation that has been so abundantly blessed.  In its land, its people and its animating spirit, America has much to be thankful for even in a time of war, economic blight, and a government that too often seems to see its blessings as curses and its greatest strengths as flaws.

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But America’s abundance does not apply to movies about Thanksgiving.  Certainly some exist, but if you review a list of movies about Thanksgiving, the sad fact is that there are very few good ones.  Many are PC retellings of the original Thanksgiving story – one guess as to who the villains are (Hint:  It’s the dudes with buckles on their hats).  Others are tiresome melodramas about “quirky” families that reaffirm their bonds over plates of turkey, with “quirky” — meaning “annoying.”  (more…)

It happens all the time in Hollywood: A friend has a dream of making a movie and wants to hire his friends as cast and crew. But most of the time, those dreams stay dreams, as the money to fund those projects rarely materializes.

For South Pasadena-based actor Greg Sestero, however, the dream became reality when his friend Tommy Wiseau managed to raise $6 million to write, direct and star in a movie called “The Room.” Keeping a promise he made years before when the two thespians met in a San Francisco acting class, Wiseau hired Sestero to be his co-star.

That should have been a happy ending, with the film either fading into oblivion or rising out of Sundance-style film festivals to become an indie sensation. Instead, “The Room” became wildly popular for an entirely different reason: it’s regarded as one of the great camp classics of all time, a movie considered so bad it’s brilliant.

Its monthly midnight showings at the Laemmle Sunset 5 theater in West Hollywood routinely sell out all five of the theater’s screens simultaneously, with crowds that have turned the viewing experience into the craziest interactive movie party since “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” (more…)

In the well-known 1980’s film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Mr. Bueller famously says, “Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” That line could refer to the death of John Hughes who wrote and directed that film and who died last week at the young age of 59. However, that line could also refer to some of the themes from some of Hughes’ most well-known and iconic films that are still loved by many today.

Admittedly, I have not seen every John Hughes movie. Before his passing, though, I had seen only a few of his most well-known pictures like “The Breakfast Club,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and “Home Alone.”  Last weekend, after the death of Hughes, I watched two of his other well-known movies, “Pretty in Pink” and “Sixteen Candles,” for the first time in commemoration of his death and to see why these films had such an effect on the young people of the 1980’s.

Because I was not a teenager during the 80’s, I did not have the opportunity to watch Hughes’ movies during the decade that Hughes helped define for so many young moviegoers. I was a child of the “Home Alone” era, not a teenager of the “Breakfast Club.” (more…)

Without John Hughes, would there have been a 1980s? The filmmaker and screenwriter died of a heart attack while walking Thursday in Manhattan. For the uninitiated, he wrote National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off–directing several of those films as well.

Memories of Hughes’s films are as likely to be audio as visual: The Psychedelic Furs, The Smiths, and Simple Minds were among the acts introduced to a wider audience through Hughes’s sonically-savvy films. (more…)

1. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) - The hardest I have ever laughed in my life. There I was in the theater; bent over, my feet off the ground, convulsing and gasping for air. As a stand-alone, the scene’s funny, but Hughes meticulously uses everything that came before as a perfect set up to create an epic comedic moment. It’s so well-crafted that no matter how many times you watch, the laughs don’t diminish. A true classic in my book, alongside the Marx Brothers, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. (Runner up: “Those aren’t pillows!”)

P.S. I miss John Candy. (more…)

It’s odd to consider which celebrity death will hit you the hardest. Michael Jackson’s bizarre and untimely passing certainly floored people around the planet. But for me, it’s this morning’s passing of John Hughes while he was walking in New York City at the also-far-too-young age of 59 that has hit me like a ton of bricks. 

Just last night, I went through my DVD collection and stacked up all the movies I own of his, and was planning to spend the next week watching them whenever I had a spare moment. Just thinking of the titles brought back 25 years’ worth of memories, from “Sixteen Candles” to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and from the three Chevy Chase “Vacation” movies to the immortal holiday classic “Planes, Trains & Automobiles.” 

“Pretty in Pink”

These weren’t just movies to me, and to many others in my generation and the ones since. They were touchstones of our lives, that freeze-framed moments and memories both of the times we watched them and the amazing way in which they seemed to shine a light on our existence. And in particular, one character and one movie of John’s shaped my entire showbiz career ambitions. 

“Pretty in Pink” is the movie that made me want to write movies and led me to idolize John Hughes as a movie god ever since. Why? Well, I used to have a crush on Molly Ringwald but I got over that – especially when I met her for about two seconds last fall and she blatantly tried to keep it at two seconds. (Rude!)  (more…)

Iconic filmmaker John Hughes is dead of a heart attack at 59.

Anyone who came of age in the 80s and early 90s can’t help but remember the John Hughes era thanks to the many, many hours of warm, hilarious and unforgettable memories that sprung from the great man’s Midwestern mind.

John Hughes: 1950-2009

As producer, writer and director, Hughes created timeless stories that teenagers and parents alike will continue to discover a hundred years from now. Rich in universal theme, populated with lovable, relatable outcasts, and told by a creative genius who understood us and never talked down to us, John Hughes enjoyed nearly two decades of Hollywood success before retiring to private life in Chicago sometime in the 90s.

Long before today, we were missing John Hughes. (more…)

Whenever one of these teen comedies pop up, it’s always with an open and eager mind I go in search of a gem — something sexy, smart, bawdy, romantic, longing — something that rises above the expected to strike a deeper emotional chord.  Because we all went through the phase, the idea of coming of age is a universal one, making some of the genre’s post-John Hughes winners, “Dazed and Confused,” “American Pie,” “The Girl Next Door,” and to some extent, “17 Again,” as enjoyable for those of us looking wistfully back at high school as for those who still attend. Obviously there’s a lot of manure to sift through in search of this particular pony, and “I Love You, Beth Cooper” happens to be one of the manurey-est.

Charmless and seedy only begin to describe the flat, meandering story of Stanford-bound Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust), the nerdy high school valedictorian who uses the opportunity of his graduation speech to say out loud what is best left unspoken, including the film’s title. What comes next is the expected “wild night” where repressed Denis — and his mouthy best friend Rich (Jack T. Carpenter) — head off on a graduation-night romp with the aforementioned Beth Cooper (Hayden Pantierre) and her two cheerleader friends (Lauren Storm as a slutty dim-bulb and Lauren London as someone who registers no personality whatsoever). Chasing them is Beth’s psychotic, coked up Army boyfriend and his psychotic, coked up Army friends. They should’ve been called, “Convenient Plot-Movers I, II, and III.” (more…)

“Wax on, wax off.” “He slimed me.” “Fortune and Glory, kid.” “I’ll be back.” “Don’t get him wet. Keep him out of bright light. And never feed him after midnight.”

It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since that magical movie summer of 1984. The calender year of George Orwell’s dire dystopian nightmares had arrived, but instead of a nation writhing in servitude to Big Brother, America was delighting in the prosperity engineered by Big Gipper. Throughout the summer of ‘84, the greatest president of the twentieth century was cruising to the single largest electoral total ever amassed by a presidential candidate in our history, and “It’s Morning Again in America” commercials were playing on TV’s across the land to widespread approval. (more…)