So...Be a Sport and Lie to Me, Okay?

Sixteen Candles is hands-down one of the worst movies I have ever made myself sit through.  It was made in 1984 and directed (and written) by John Hughes, who also directed The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off - great credentials.  The film stars Molly Ringwald as the hapless, half-popular sophomore.  Also in the film are Michael Schoeffling as the popular senior heartthrob and Anthony Michael Hall as the freshman Geek.

The movie starts on Samantha's (Ringwald) sixteenth birthday - which (completely realistically) everyone in her family forgets because her older sister is getting married the next day.  Not only does her family forget, but her day is filled with embarrassments too painful to recount (including the Geek deciding she's his true love and Jake [Schoeffling] finding a sex quiz she took about him).  We follow her through this excruciating farce of adolescence, and somehow end up also following the Geek's escapades as he tries to make himself into a stud, and Jake's experiences as he realizes (suddenly!) that Sam is the true love of HIS life.

Oh, please.

I have watched Hall in some of his more recent work - The Dead Zone (TV) - and know that he can act, and is totally believable.  If I were him, I would hate myself for this movie.  The geeks are stereotyped into being anti-social jerks who wear underwear on their heads for fun and lean in too close to poor Sam when she's asked out by them.  Any self-respecting geek I know would have cowered in a corner just praying for her to notice them, and that no one else would, not making themselves obvious in the least.  The geeks in this movie seem to embrace the tenuous stereotype of smart equaling bizarre to the extreme.

Also in this movie is a character called Long Duk Dong (played by Gedde Watanabe).  He is a Chinese foreign exchange student who is staying with Sam's grandparents.  He is also another stereotype in action - he has an overly thick accent, is ignorant of all American ways, and is accompanied by gongs every time he is on screen.  He even uses a spoon and fork as if they are chopsticks.  I would have believed that by the 80's we would have been past this kind of blatantly racist stereotyping, but then again, there's Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, so I guess we aren't.

The only genuine and beautiful, and I would venture to say even well-acted part in this movie is that of the father, played by Paul Dooley.  He has a heart-to-heart with Sam once it occurs to him (in the middle of the night - when one realizes anything important) that it was her birthday and they missed it.  At first, he's still a bit of a cad and is thinking that Sam is upset because of her sister's wedding and not because of her crush.  Finally, he gets the point and says sweetly, "That's why they call them 'crushes.'  If they were easy, they'd call 'em something else."  It was indeed a relief to have a comfortable, real-feeling scene in the middle of this mess.

I can see no reason why a person would wish to torment themselves with this film, unless for some misguided nostalgia.  As for me, I have gone running back into the arms of Spencer Tracy, but I'll leave that for another time.