Sixteen Candles
Director: John Hughes
Year Released: 1984
Rating: 2.5
Eighties staple that investigates the woes of a teenage girl (Molly Ringwald): her 'weird/embarrassing' family, her unfulfilled love life and her emotional insecurities. One of the reasons for its continued popularity is Ringwald, whose eye-rolling disgust and endless sighing could represent the 'standard' teenage girl's mood, yet she does remain a sympathetic figure - she acts like she's having a string of (really) bad days, but this persecution isn't imagined: she is having a string of (really) bad days. Slips in its last half-hour with an incredibly pat ending (even "Anthony Michael Hall as The Geek" gets his nut!), though the "controversial" laughs generated by Gedde Watanabe's party-hardy Asian ("Oooooh sexy girl-friend!") are arguably no worse than John Belushi's 'samurai' character's grunts on Saturday Night Live (though this is coming from a gaijin/American Barbarian).
