JOHN HUGHES: A EULOGY – HOME ALONE REVISITED

The king of the happily-ever-after-rites-de-passage-teen-movie, John Hughes, is dead. And unlike the death of Michael Jackson, which seems to be raising ever more ludicrous questions, there is really only one question to ask concerning Hughes: what was his greatest film?

Undoubtedly there are a number of great titles to choose from, but I’d like to stake a claim for a film that probably isn’t very high up on many peoples’ greatest ever Hughes films list. That film is Home Alone. Now, there are as many reasons to dislike this film as there are to like it. For every positive attribute – for every genuinely funny moment or great scene, there is a cringe-worthy slab of over-sentimental Americana. Ultimately though, this film, now twenty years old, is a success because of the three Johns – Hughes, who wrote it; Williams, who wrote the music; and Candy, who quite spectacularly steals the show in his handful of scenes.

Reason number one why this film isn’t perhaps top dog in the Hughes pantheon: Hughes didn’t direct it. When you think about the Holy Trinity of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (all of which Hughes wrote and directed) they have a distinct, one-man’s-vision, feel to them. It is clear that Hughes has written the lines, knows exactly how they should be delivered and tells the actors how to deliver them. Home Alone (in places) doesn’t have quite that same stylistic consistency and unmistakable John Hughes feel to it. However, it’s always worth remembering your target audience, something Hughes did in this film by appointing Chris Columbus as director. Columbus is a kids’ film director par excellence; before Home Alone, he’d had sizeable successes with The Goonies and Gremlins and has since cemented that reputation with the first two Harry Potter films. Had Home Alone been directed in the manner of The Breakfast Club, some of the endearing childishness of the film would most likely have been lost.

This brings us to the biggest potential problem with the film – its surface of saccharine, childish commerciality. However, looked at a bit deeper, Home Alone can be interpreted as a deliberate attempt at smashing to smithereens all the traditional hallmarks of the family holiday film; in HA the moral message is not so much spelled out for the audience as ceremonially dumped over them with a cement mixer.

GORDON GEKKO SAYS 'GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN''

It is easy to dismiss the 2005 Curtis Jackson film vehicle as another value-less part of the money-generating automaton that 50 Cent became (if he was ever anything else). However, ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’’ might deserve a very prompt re-assessment in light of current events.

Apart from defying most of the basic rules of good cinema and storytelling in general, it does offer some sort of reflection of popular culture in the last ten years and therefore some of the ideas that have gained currency in society as a whole, not least the self-centred short sightedness of personal greed and unrestrained capitalism.

With reports of the current financial crisis being rammed down our throats on a daily basis there have been calls for a new Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character from Oliver Stone’s eighties classic Wall Street. This has even resulted in the news that a Wall Street sequel is lined up so we can all utter the phrase “greed, for lack of a better word, is good” in a disparaging contemporary way at these bastard bankers and politicians. However, we seem to have missed the fact that a film that better summed up these times has already been made. Get Rich or Die Tryin’ was Wall Street 2, and for a new slogan to rival ‘greed is good’ just look at the bloody title. 50 Cent’s film neatly bundles all of our misplaced values into a tidy little package. We haven’t been seeking intrinsic value, only the monetary value we have created, and a generation of people aspire to nothing more than money. The archetypical hero du jour is, or at least should be, good old Fiddy, who in his biopic tells us how he got rich, while caring about very little else, and lacking any real discernible talent. Just don’t blame him, blame yourself for funding him.

The film tries to follow that all-too-familiar rags to riches storyline, popular since at least as far back as Dickens, coupled with all the usual clichés prevalent in all the weak hip hop biopics and those films that I will call ‘Nouvelle Vague Blaxploitation’ (in an effort to make myself sound intelligent; you know, young man struggling in the ghetto/it’s a hard knock life).

A young Curtis Jackson, who is fatherless, which is apparently the reason for his later misdemeanors, loses his mother, a part time prostitute/crack head/crack dealer/hoe bag. He attends the funeral. He does not cry. Curtis is then shipped off to live with his blue collar grandparents before falling into a life of gangs and street crime (although it just looks like petty drug deals to me). Understandably he pursues this life initially to fund the purchase of new trainers that he really really wants. He then embarks on a life of blow, money and gang rivalries. He gets shot lots of times. He does cry. He then fulfills his (apparently long standing) dream of becoming an MC and somewhere in the middle he gets a girl (by making a mix tape and rapping about ‘cuming in her hair’) and has a kid. There’s some internal gang politics in the mix as well.