In issue 3 of the unfortunately short-lived UNCUT DVD, we ran a piece called The Curse Of The Mullets. It was a particularly funny account of the scandalous fall from grace of the Brat Pack actors and the whirl of sex-tapes, alcoholism, drug busts and straight-to-video hell that engulfed them following their mid-Eighties peak. As hilarious as the piece was, it feels somehow emblematic of the way these films, and their stars, have become viewed over the last quarter of a century. Which, sadly, detracts from the importance of those films and the achievements of the man behind them – John Hughes, who has just died at the age of 59. Hughes’ greatest accomplishment, perhaps, was that he took teenagers as seriously as they took themselves. Across five films, made in a three-year period between 1984 and 1987, Hughes’ established himself as Hollywood’s principal observer of adolescent angst. Crucially, this run of films (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Some Kind Of Wonderful) spoke directly and sympathetically to their audience. Hughes understood, with a depth of focus I can’t see in any other filmmaker’s work, the hormonal teenage mind. It’s perhaps no accident that Hughes’ simple yet genius idea of identifying his characters by stereotype – the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess and the criminal – helped make The Breakfast Club his most iconic and influential movie. The Breakfast Club is, indeed, an extraordinary film. John Robinson’s just brilliantly described it to me as “Waiting For Godot in a high school” – a film in which nothing of any note actually happens for a considerably long period of time while a bunch of characters sit around talking. The shadow The Breakfast Club casts is immense; every high school film owes it some kind of debt, from Heathers (surely the anti-John Hughes’ film) to Election (which starred Ferris Bueller’s Matthew Broderick) or Cruel Intentions. It became the cliché, but with good reason. On some fundamental level, it was true. But I suspect, perhaps, that part of the reason why Hughes’ films have become so derided in some quarters is because of the time they were made. Writing a few years ago in trade magazine Variety, Peter Bart described Hughes’ films as “perfectly crafted for the Reagan era.” Hughes was born in 1950, and saw his generation politicized by Vietnam, the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights movement. The subsequent wave of teenagers growing up in the Eighties had no such moral weight or sense of purpose; they crested a wave of prosperity, consumerism and big, big, big. A lot of this, you could say, is reflected in the off-screen antics of the Brat Pack themselves; Hollywood’s new alpha elite appeared to represent that generation’s crassest instincts for hubris, self-regard and excess. But that’s not to say this generation weren’t entitled to their own opinions, thoughts and feelings, of course. Which is what Hughes’ brilliantly captured. For every admittedly dated shot of the breakfast clubbers doing excruciating Eighties dancing to some wretched version of “We Got The Beat”, there’s Molly Ringwald’s Andie, struggling with her unemployed, depressed father (Harry Dean Stanton) in Pretty In Pink, or the sublime, wordless art gallery sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, elegantly sountracked by Dream Academy’s cover of The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”. In fact, music was a crucial part of those movies. Hughes, himself a massive Dylan and Clash fan, identified the phenomenal power of pop music as a marketing tool in the emergent MTV age. While we now consider, for good or ill, the blockbuster soundtrack tie-in to be part and parcel of the multi-media experience, Hughes was the innovator here. Think, after all, of Pretty In Pink: a song that became a film title that in turn then made the song an international hit. Until Hughes came along, teenagers had never been so well – or so directly – served in movies. The pre- and early teen audience had been reached with ET (1982), The Goonies (1985) and Stand By Me (1986), while Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High, from 1982, had found the slightly older end of the teen market. But the work Hughes did identified what’s subsequently become the core demographic for multiplex filmmakers. Isn’t Twilight, however bad a film it may be, simply The Breakfast Club with fangs..? The movies he made after – particularly the Home Alone series and Planes, Trains And Automobiles – saw Hughes move away from his teen audience. The results were certainly successful – the four Home Alone movies made over $900 million at the box office while Planes… is arguably the last funny film Steve Martin made. But Hughes’ five teen movies are pop culture touchstones. He not only caught the atypical combination of romance and cynicism, conventionality and rebellion that characterised the MTV generation. He put his brand on them, in the way Scorsese described mob movies or John Ford defined Westerns. Leave your comments about John Hughes, and his films here... Cheers, [pic: rex]

The reunion of Os Mutantes – minus Rita Lee, of course – a couple of years ago was one of the more unexpected in recent years, not least because, as legend has it, Arnaldo Baptista hasn’t been in the best of psychic health since the band originally split in the mid-‘70s. It’s even more of a surprise to discover a brand new album from the band, “Haih” – though calling it an Os Mutantes album might be a bit of a stretch, since only Sergio Dias Baptista now survives from the original trio (Dinho Leme, the band’s ‘70s era drummer, also provides a link with the past). Nevertheless, Sergio Dias has made a tremendous fist of recreating his band’s chaotic early sound. Unlike some of his fellow Tropicalistas, notably Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso (whose last album, “Zii e Zie”, was rather good, incidentally), Dias hasn’t tried too obviously to modernise Mutantes’ unique Brazilian take on psychedelia – and he hasn’t been tempted into using the talents of American fans like Devendra Banhart, who figured in some of the Mutantes reunion shows. Instead, Dias’ main collaborator on “Haih” is Tom Zé, the Tropicalia veteran whose taste for cultural cannibalism and haphazard collages was arguably stronger than any of his subversive contemporaries. Zé’s own various comebacks (often facilitated by David Byrne and Luaka Bop) have often embraced electronica, remixes and post-rock (the last time I saw him, his backing band was Tortoise). Zé also has a taste for clanking metallic percussion, and you can hear some of it knitted into the first track proper of “Haih”, “Querida Querida”. Much more noticeable, though, are the intricate horn and string arrangements (an evident homage to Mutantes’ original arranger, Rogerio Duprat) and Dias’ familiarly snaking fuzz guitar breaks. It’s a fantastic, and hugely reassuring opener, a looming and ornate anthem in the vein of “Panis Et Circenses” or “Algo Mais”. The fidelity to Mutantes’ first two albums is striking and satisfying; that smash-and-grab raid on both Anglo/American and Brazilian musical traditions, the vigorous satire that’s evident even to a non-Portugeuse speaker (check the jarring mention of Saddam Hussein in “Bagdad Blues”, or the self-explanatory “Samba Do Fidel”, which seems to examine relations between Brazil, Cuba and Argentina and includes the English refrain, “We would love you forever, little sister chikita banana”). All this playfulness, of course, cannot be entirely ascribed to Dias, and it’s clear the inquisitive quirkiness of Zé had a critical part to play on the album. But some songs like “Neurociencia De Amor” and especially “Nada Mou” seem like perfect fusions of Zé and the Authentic Mutantes sound. There are other nods to Tropicalia, too: a vague North African lilt to “Teclar” which recalls Gal Costa’s “Touareg”; and a Jorge Ben song, “O Careca”, which summons up the frantic grooviness of his own “Africa Brasil”. At times, the thought occurs that some of “Haih” might be almost a pastiche of a pastiche, but it’s generally far too exuberant and tuneful to be dismissed so sceptically. Dias plays wonderfully throughout, and even allowing for Mutantes’ traditional eccentricities, they’re still capable of a curveball: “O Mensageiro”, written by Dias on his own, is fulsome jangle pop that reminds me unaccountably of The La’s and “There She Goes”.