Movie Club for May 11th: The Breakfast Club

Kong understands all that, but Kong still hates that stupid frickin' ending! GRaaGaaRawwahaRGRRrr!!!!!! From now on Kong will stop watching at the end of the epiphanic conversation.


Kong imagines that most video stores would have it....at least Kong hopes so. It isn't that old.

I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s thoughts on The Breakfast Club which is one of my all time favorite movies… and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is hilarious… anyone ever hear of Munchausen Syndrome… … anyway, it might be a little hard to find… I’ve looked for it here a few times without any luck…

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Now that would have been a disappointing ending!! I seem to be the only one that thinks the ending is ok. I like the fact that it's an open ending. That's probably one of the reasons to why we are discussing this movie on here. Maybe it's just me, but I think a too extreme feel-good ending would have destroyed the realism of the movie and the ability of the audience to identify with the characters.


I don't know why, but I seem to love the ending more and more!!


There is two (sad, I know) decent vido stores in my town and the first one didn't have it. We'll see about the other one...

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

Kong is quite happy that the movie didn't show anything beyond that one Saturday; at least that allows us some room to interpret things.

Finally the ape agrees with me...

Goth chicks, peircings, etc, all turn me on and all, and she did look more interesting and cool...but I'd rather have the make over sans massive dandruff, than snow in me lap.

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"Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

Hmmm... True. But we didn't see her wash her hair now, did we??

No, she used it all for her artwork.

Aah, right.

This movie was set on March 24th 1984, my 17th birthday. Since it was released in '85, I probably didn't see it in the theatre until I was 18 and a senior in high school. I was also a pretty well-off kid growing up in a wealthy suburb of a large city in the north east. So culturally, I WAS one of those kids portrayed in the movie and living at the exact same time period. The funny thing is, people don't realize that most of those kids WANTED their identities and the last thing they wanted was insight into their own tribalism, essentially Hughes' message. I remember at the time trying to figure out which group in the movie I belonged to most. I was most like Ringwald's character with a touch of nerd and a sprinkle of jock, but was delusional and thought I was both more of a jock and a nerd than I really was. The criminal and the basket case were completely foreign to me and were certainly not things I could relate to or would have considered part of my make-up. The summation of character and identity by Anthony Michael Hall's character at the end was completely lost on everyone I knew. It's actually an adult's analysis of identity and personality that only someone 10 years older would begin to understand. For that reason, the movie's ending was, and always will be, completely unrealistic and unbelievable. How do I know this for sure? My best friend at the time was the smartest kid in my grade and a first class nerd. He was nowhere near being able provide that kind of emotional insight into his own identity, never mind the kind of wisdom offered by the nerd at the end. There is actually great hypocrisy by Hughes who pontificates at the end that we're all much more similar than we appear and yet he perpetuated the massive stereotypes in the first place. I suspect the movie drew so well BECAUSE the stereotypes were so vivid and not because of the "we're all the same" ending. Most people WANT to be tribal and they want to be accepted as part of a larger group. Ignoring this fact is simply ignoring reality and is idealistic, if not delusional. A lot of people have it at the top of "greatest teen movie of all time" lists, but not me. Give me the exuberance of "American Graffiti" or the emotional complexity of "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" over "The Breakfast Club" any day.

The dandruff scene was quite creative though...

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