Instead of packing my shit for the move to "Cali", I've been doing not much and also watching TV and movies. I may have stated earlier, but the Breakfast Club is almost wholly responsible for the creation of whatshouldmattwatch.com, and I finally just bought a copy and watched it. I feel that I will not be able to adequately review this movie because there is simply so much going on. To that point, I don't think a single watching is sufficient to really pick up on everything this movie has to offer. So, what I will do is offer my brief synopsis (as useful or not as it may be) and then muse about my thoughts on each character (hence the title of this post). Critical review really is not my forte and I don't want to try and pretend that I can.

Early one Saturday morning, five students find themselves stuck in detention for the remainder of the day. Seemingly, each person is of a different high school character archetype: the athlete, the criminal, the basket case, the brain, and the princess. Throughout the course of the day, each person gives up (willingly or not) details about their lives and all is not necessarily as it seems with the fronts they put up.

Before I go on a character break down escapade, I want to say that this is one hell of a movie. As stated above, there is simply so much happening that it's really hard to wrap your mind around all of it once. With the exception of a couple of random "action" scenes that, in my opinion weren't really necessary, this movie exists almost entirely as dialogue. It's a cerebral and psychological movie and certainly not as lighthearted as other Hughes films like Sixteen Candles or Ferris Bueller. Shit gets real in this movie.

Allison (The Basket Case) Allison, by nature of her shy and quiet demeanor, is probably the least complex character of the group. Or she might be the most complex. It's hard to tell because she admits to being a habitual liar, so we can't really know whether anything she's said in the movie (even the part about being a liar) is true or not. At one point she states that her parents ignore her, which would certainly give credence to developing such a trait in an attempt to get their attention. It would also lend to her eccentricities such as eating a Captain Crunch sandwich and her goth-ish appearance. I can't help but feel that every shy/quiet character ever created after 1985 is in some way modeled after her.

Claire (The Princess) Claire is supposed to be the super popular, rich bitch of the group, but she never really acts it. Probably because she's caught in the middle of a marital spat between her parents and really doesn't want to have anything to do with either. Once again, we have Molly Ringwold in a role that sees her lamenting her lack of sexual action, though it's again implied that this resolves itself at the end of the movie. I'm about to go off on a tangent.

This whole virginity as a negative stigma thing is quite possibly the most fucking retarded preconception of the human race. What does it matter if you've done the nasty? Does this somehow make you a better or more of a person than other people? When talking about adults, having had your V card punched is the norm. Is that it? Is it one of those "everybody's doing it and you're not therefore you're weird" things? I'll tell you that I consider myself pretty successful as a person in my personal, work, and social life without ever having verbed the adjective noun. I suppose people think that one's virginal state is a direct reflection upon their aptitude as a social being, but here's something mind blowing: it can be a choice just as much as it can be an inability.

Andrew (The Athlete) Andrew lives on the whims and decisions of his father whom he hates. He does this in an attempt to prove that he's not worthless. Despite being "the jock" of group, you can tell early on that beneath the facade that he probably actually cares about the well being of the others in the group as he's always the first to lend assistance in their troubles. Of course, he could just be white knighting, but I it could be an attempt at atonement for the actions that landed him in detention.

Brian (The Brain) Brian's early bits in the movie are cringe worthy. He pipes up in other people's conversations with his own quips without measuring the atmosphere just to feel involved. I sadly identify with this all too well, especially in my youth. Also, his name isn't fair; it's an anagram of "brain".

John [Bender] (The Criminal) God, I don't even know where to start with this one. John is by far the most complex and quite possibly the smartest and definitely the most biased of the group given his abusive upbringing. He's also the most entertaining with his lack of shits given attitude taken with everybody else. In a lot of respects, he reminded of Shawn Hunter from Boy Meets World.

So, there is my horribly inadequate attempt at organizing my thoughts into words on this movie. I will end by saying that I was not entirely happy with the ending. I'm not a fan of open endings, not at all Sam-I-Am. Maybe in Hollywood's never ending quest for sequels, we'll get one for this.

No. Please don't.