Please...Forget About Me.

So JC Penny has put out an homage, in the form of commercial, to The Breakfast Club. I will be straightforward. I never liked the Breakfast Club. I could never sit through it. I'm sorry that I was raised on films like Fletch and Ghostbusters, and didn't have time for pop trash. It also, in my opinion, portrays a generation to which I maintain no ties. I was in high school in the late 90s, with no emotional attachment to these hooligans that occupied Shermer High School 15 years prior, regardless of how badly marketers want me to shed tears and cash for their products.

Furthermore, the film suffers from a common plague of 80s cinema: fabricated teen-dom. John Hughes wrote the movie when he was in his 30s, a far cry from understanding the ins & outs of high school melodrama/fashion. I don't think I could even write about high school today, at the ripe age of twenty-four. Most of 80s cinema dealing with high school is rife with this disease. Just today, while watching the John Candy comedy, Summer Rental, I realized this egregious commonality. Kerri Green a.k.a. Andy from the Goonies, meets up with a young man, who shares her affinity for giant headphones. Together they tune into the same radio station (WHAM 104) and chill out to the sweet tunes of Kenny Loggins "Footloose." Together as one gyrating musical abomination, they shimmy into the movie theater. Until somebody with a time machine comes straight from 1985 and shows me two teens actually doing this within earshot and eyesight of other human beings, I will consider this poor re-enactment of teen-dom as just that - fabricated teen-dom. Breakfast Club is as much a culprit of this same crime. I am sure that very few people ever broke out into dance during detention, or poured an entire pixie stick on their sandwich.

Anyway, just watch the clip. JC Penny is obviously trying to tap into some vestige of 80s nostalgia with this blatant, yet competently filmed, commercial. In fact, I would suggest that this commercial is as stimulating and well-plotted as all of Breakfast Club.



The only redeeming glimmer of hope I can possibly muster in my jaded spirit is that perhaps JC Penny is marketing it exactly as they want to - only people who appreciate this rip-off and feel nostalgia towards it would wear their clothing. But I think I would be giving them too much credit.

Post-script: What bothers me most about my condemnations is that I maintain secret delights and appreciation for the campy trash that my generation produced - American Pie, Road Trip, Scream, etc. Maybe the argument, "you just had to be there," is stronger than quality and taste.

Post Post-script: When fruitlessly attempting to find that scene with Kerri Green and her boy-toy dancing to "Footlose," I found this little gem: