Uncle Buck article for MUBI Notebook

a deep-ish dive into the film's opening shots

I wrote about the opening of Uncle Buck for MUBI Notebook’s series One Shot, focused on analysing individual shots in films. It’s an ode to John Hughes’s still-underrated directorial skill. A preview:

John Hughes’s 1980s were a perfect storm. He was incredibly productive—he wrote the first 50 pages of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) in a single sitting—at the exact moment when his personal vision dovetailed nicely with the studios’ commercial sensibilities. He became the quintessential teen-movie auteur, writing and genre-defining films like Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986), the first two of which he also directed. He didn’t mind making comedies about adult characters, too, particularly if they were played by John Candy. Many of Hughes’s films in this period were instantly beloved by audiences, but critics remained sniffy even in their praise. They estimated Hughes as, at best, a talented craftsman. He came to spend the 1990s as a writer-for-hire churning out increasingly bland and impersonal kids’ movies—including Dennis the Menace (1993) and the live-action 101 Dalmatians (1996)—unable to get his passion projects off the ground, before disappearing from public life altogether. 

John Hughes has gained cinephile credibility over the years, lauded by such filmmakers as Sofia Coppola and Greta Gerwig, and much of his work has endured as cultural touchstones of adolescence, speaking afresh to the growing pains of each new generation. But even this renewed appreciation has mostly focused on Hughes as a screenwriter, not a director. It’s true that some of his best-loved films were directed by other people—including Pretty in Pink (1986) and Home Alone (1990)—but it’s a mistake to neglect his directorial talent.

You can read the article here! I’m really proud of how it turned out.

parting recs

Watch: A Merchant-Ivory movie of your choice. Probably Maurice.

Listen: A Mountain Goats album of your choice. Probably Bleed Out.

Read: One of the Princess Diaries books. Would make sense to start with the first one, but you’ll be grand.

Check out otherwise: Limmy’s deconstruction of the Clive Anderson interview with the Bee Gees.

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