Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman

The main weakness of the book is that just as Freeman gets into the meat of an '80s movie, she throws in comparisons and commentary on a dizzying array of other movies and TV shows from recent years. This will either bemuse or annoy you, with one-liners and multiple footnotes that make you mentally hear a rimshot after reading. The teen scripts Hughes wrote contained a lot of his own life, Freeman says, and in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' Hughes seems to actually have split himself into two personalities onscreen: the guy he wanted to be (Matthew Broderick's hip, popular and bullet-proof Ferris), and the guy he felt he was (Alan Ruck's dour, depressed Cameron).įreeman uses a very chatty, fangirl style of writing. He rewrote (and refilmed) the end of 'Pretty in Pink' after test audiences hated the original ending, in which Ringwald's Sam ends up with Jon Cryer's oddball Duckie instead of Andrew McCarthy's nice rich guy Blane. Hughes penned 'Sixteen Candles' in two days specifically for Molly Ringwald after seeing just a photo of her. It was as if Hughes wrote characters and dialogue to work out his own still unresolved teen angst. Seemingly overseeing the whole tome like a patron saint is the late writer/director John Hughes, the king of '80s teen films, who could be as joyless and aloof in real life as his characters were alive and insightful onscreen.

Publisher, 000 pp., $00.00 See More Collapse

Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman