Sixteen Candles

Sixteen Candles is a 1984 American coming of age comedy starring Molly Ringwald, Michael Schoeffling and Anthony Michael Hall. It was written and directed by John Hughes.  John Hughes also directed The Breakfast Club and Ferris Buller's Day Off.  With the occasion all but overshadowed by her sister's upcoming wedding, teen angst-ridden Samantha (Molly Ringwald) faces her 16th birthday with typical adolescent dread.  She loathes her body, as it isn't like the popular girls, she loathes life, and is pretty much the typical American teen dealing with high school problems.  Samantha pines for studly older boy Jake (Michael Schoeffling), but worries that her chastity will be a turnoff for the popular senior.  She thinks that she is invisible to him, because to her, he's the definition of a god!  Meanwhile, Samantha must constantly rebuff the affections of nerdy Ted (Anthony Michael Hall), the only boy in the school, unfortunately, who seems to take an interest in her.  Which also does not help with her low-esteem and confidence. 

To our dear main character, Samantha, her life is going downhill fast. The soon to be 16-year-old has an impossible crush on the most popular boy in school, and the geekiest boy in school has a crush on her. Her sister's getting married, and with all the excitement the rest of her family forgets her birthday! This just puts the cherry on top of the sundae for her.  She feels even more invisible and unimportant than before.  Add all this to a pair of horrendously embarrassing grandparents who bring a foreign exchange student named Long Duc Dong to her sister's wedding.  He brings a lot of comic relief at different points of the movie, and experiences first hand fast American love and the party life of high school.  Other funny moments helped to make this movie so popular.  My personal favorite was when Sam gives dorky Ted her underwear to help him win a bet at the school dance. 

She attempts to get through all of these unfortunate events.  In the end, Sam has a heart to heart with her father, and in a twist of events, her crush, Jake, picks her up at the end of her sister's wedding to celebrate her birthday.  The movie concludes as they kiss over a cake with 16 candles.  In the end we get a hilarious movie on the journey of one quirky girl to womanhood! This is just a classic you can't pass up. 

Books vs movie scripts

Who has ever mentioned a movie and had a bystander reply: "The book was better." ?  Annoying right? On Thanksgiving my brothers and I were discussing books that were turned into movies and the pros and cons of the outcome.  One book I read and watched the movie of was "1984." This was my example of a movie that followed the book almost line for line, and the outcome was...TERRIBLE! (The book was GREAT) One of my brothers read the "Watchmen" graphic novel series and said a similar thing; the movie was so similar to the graphic novel frame-for-frame that you didn't even need to see it if you've read the book.

This is the distinct difference between books and movies... size. Books can be as long as they need to be in order to tell a story, but movies have to be condensed into 2hours or less.  This shows the format difference between the two mediums, and is why movie scripts have to be adjusted for the "big screen."  What works for one type of media doesn't directly transfer to another.  Drama and action have to be much more controlled and formulated to grab an audience's attention in film.  I feel this is an important point to tell book snobs. On that note, I'd really like to see a remake of "1984" with an actual movie script and today's technology!