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…)

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…)

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…)