A couple months before he’s set to graduate, high school senior Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) ditches class, picks up girlfriend Simone (Mia Sara) and best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), and heads to Chicago in Cameron’s dad’s vintage Ferrari Spyder California. As Ferris and his companions enjoy the sights and sounds of the city and ruminate on their lives, Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), their school’s Dean of Students, and Jeanie (Jennifer Grey), Ferris’s petulant younger sister, attempt to hunt him down and expose him for the fraud he is.

CRITIQUE

I have come not to praise Ferris Bueller but to bury him. Okay, maybe not bury him, but I have come to knock him down a peg or two. I know, I know, people my age are supposed to love this movie. I know it should have changed my life, but it didn’t. I know I should slip quotes from it into polite conversation whenever possible, but I don’t.

I know I’m supposed to toe the line and treat it with reverence, but I don’t, nor will I here. I don’t love this movie; matter of fact, there’s a large chunk of it I absolutely hate. I also happen to think the title character is a self-centered prick who takes advantage of the people he claims to care about. So fire up the torches and sharpen the pitchforks if you like, but I’m sticking to my guns.

I was in junior high and high school during the heyday of writer/director John Hughes’s teen comedies, but I never really understood why so many of my peers--or Kevin Smith; Jersey Girl is still the worst John Hughes movie Hughes never made--thought these movies were the greatest thing since legalized birth control. (Dumbest thing I ever heard in my high school Trig class: “Y’all, I heard Some Kind of Wonderful is, like, the best movie ever.”)

I couldn’t relate to the characters or the situations (give me American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused), I found Hughes’s stylistics flat and uninteresting (unfortunately for Hughes, he came along just as I was discovering Kubrick and Scorsese), and I’ve always found the shifts between the comedic and dramatic elements of these movies to be clumsy and awkward.

Truth be told, the only John Hughes movie I ever want to see again (and I’m not counting National Lampoon’s Vacation, as that was a work-for-hire gig) is Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which I think is the only movie he ever really got right. Everything else you can pile together and bury in a landfill.

That’s not to say the movie is bad. Okay, half of it is bad, but the other half is actually pretty good.

The first fifty minutes or so are often fun and funny. It’s here that you get the famous Ben Stein scenes, the bit with the coma-inducing English teacher (who reminds me of my college Chemistry professor), and Edie McClurg’s very funny jibe at Grey’s character. But the moment Jones arrives at the Bueller home, the movie begins to unravel. Jones’s misadventures with the Rottweiler are ridiculous and unfunny, coming across as something Hughes extracted from an aborted early attempt at Home Alone.

And then Hughes shifts into philosophical mode, bogging the movie down in a morass of laughable self-importance. Of course, this is pretty much to be expected, as practically every Hughes flick begins as a straight comedy and then runs aground on a shore of half-assed profundity, tossing aside its initial premise and lurching along to a clichéd final act.

For all its purported insight into the life and mind of an ‘80s teenager, this is a very contrived, very one-dimensional movie. You’ve got a high school principal who has nothing better to do than tail one truant student all over a major metropolitan city, and adult characters who are too stupid for words. (You ever wonder what happens to Hughes’s teen characters when they reach adulthood? Do they wake up one day and find they’ve suddenly become idiots?)

And all of that stuff about Cameron’s relationship with his father is trite and heavy-handed. We get speech after speech about how Cameron’s dad loves that damned car more than anything else in the world (okay, John, we get it), and then we’re supposed to believe that father and son will somehow be brought closer together by the car’s destruction. Are you kidding me? (And who the hell parks classic cars in a glass garage that’s built on stilts at the edge of a wooded area? Anyone with a rock and a screwdriver could do some serious damage.)

You know why a sequel to this movie never appeared? Because Cameron’s dad came home, found the Ferrari at the bottom of that cliff and killed his son, while Ferris eventually married Simone, settled into a spirit-killing job, and ended up cheating on her with a coworker. That, unlike what is presented in this movie, is life (or a John Updike novel). And that’s why I have a hard time understanding why people think it’s so great.

Nostalgia is one thing, but reading more into this movie than is actually there is something else entirely. (Anyone whose life was changed by this movie likely also had their life changed by an episode of Saved by the Bell, because that’s really what this movie is: a really long episode of Saved by the Bell.) It would be a completely different story if Hughes were able to answer the complex questions he raises with something other than sitcom solutions, but he can’t. Hughes builds to an event he wants us to believe is monumentally important and life-changing and then denies us any sort of resolution, expecting us to believe everything is going to be okay simply because the characters say it will be. Hughes is either being lazy or he’s a charlatan--take your pick.

By far the best part of Ferris Bueller is its climax. Hughes sets the movie aright somewhat in the scene with Grey and Charlie Sheen (playing a punk busted for drugs; talk about a stretch), but he completely nails the sequence in which Ferris rushes through his neighborhood in a desperate attempt to beat his parents home.

I’d wager good money that Hughes dreamed up this sequence and then attempted to fashion a movie around it. I’d also wager good money that a lot of people are swayed by this sequence; cap a movie with a scene that good (and it is that good) and you leave people with a strong feeling of satisfaction, just as a misstep (even a perceived one) at the end can virtually ruin what is otherwise a great movie.

I’ll tell you what I find most notable about Ferris Bueller, and it’s something I didn’t realize until recently: It’s the only truly unique movie in the Hughes canon. He eventually recycled all of his other hits, but this one he never tried (although perhaps he tried and failed) to revamp, remake, re-imagine, or repackage. Not exactly a noteworthy accomplishment, I know, but you can’t expect too much from the man who gave us Baby’s Day Out.

THE VIDEO

The 2.40:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC--is slightly flat and slightly soft; in other words, it’s reminiscent of every previous home video incarnation.

Colors have no real pop; only Cameron’s hockey jersey and the Ferrari--both bright red--stand out. Hughes’s choice of Super35 photography results in a heavier grain structure, which causes a few hiccups (check out the final close-up of the painting).

Knowing that much of this is due to the original photographic conditions, I would cut the transfer some slack, but there are some shots here that look awful. For example, take a look at the inserts of the Bueller household Hughes cuts to while Jones is ringing the doorbell; they look like they’ve been culled from an old VHS tape.

THE AUDIO

Repurposed from the original stereo elements, the Dolby TrueHD 5.1 is a surround track pretty much in name only. Aside from a famous musical cue borrowed from a movie that did actually change my life, the rear channels are silent.

Bass action, even in the dated songs that comprise the soundtrack (Hughes couldn’t find anything better than The Dream Academy?), is nonexistent. Dialogue sounds okay, although at times it exhibits that uneven quality that characterizes remixed tracks of this vintage.

A French 2.0 Surround and Spanish mono tracks are also included. English, English SDH, French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Fans will undoubtedly remember that Paramount’s first DVD release of this movie (the one that didn’t sport a stupid moniker) sported a John Hughes commentary. The re-release from a couple years back dropped that commentary in favor of a selection of run-of-the-mill featurettes. Fans will undoubtedly be disappointed to learn that the extras on this Blu-ray disc are a direct port of that re-release; the commentary is once again nowhere to be found.

All of the extras here are presented in standard definition video:

Getting the Class Together: The Cast of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (28 minutes) is a retrospective featurette in which the principals discuss how they came to be involved with the movie, as well as its legacy, impact, etc.

The Making of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (15 minutes) is another retrospective piece, although this one focuses more on the actual production (whenever the participants aren’t stroking Hughes’s ego, that is).   

Who is Ferris Bueller? (9 minutes) offers more retrospective interviews, this time allowing Broderick’s costars to discuss their experiences working with the actor.

The World According to Ben Stein (11 minutes) is a retrospective interview with the former Nixon lackey, who discusses his time on the set and the debt his acting career owes the movie. 

Vintage Ferris Bueller: The Lost Tapes (10 minutes) is a collection of jokey faux interview segments shot during production.

Class Album is a collection of behind-the-scenes and promotional stills.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Cultural touchstone for many members of my generation it may be, but I still think Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is only half of a good movie. If that means I’m a grumpy old bastard who’s ready for an AARP card, so be it.