Special Appearances By
Jason Reitman! - Molly Ringwald!
Your favorite John Hughes characters- Duckie, Ferris, "The Geek," Jake Ryan, Samantha Baker, Kevin McCallister, Neal & Del-on the big screen, on one day!
On the anniversary of John Hughes’s untimely passing, we celebrate his eternal place in the pop-culture firmament. Like a kinder, gentler Holden Caulfield who never joined the ranks of the grown-up phonies, Hughes possessed an uncanny ability to speak to teens in their own voices, to access their hopes and fears and feelings of outsiderdom, and to reassure them that this thing called high school too shall pass. Our tribute includes both his directing and screenwriting work.
See five films for only $35 ($30 Students & Seniors/ $25 Members) with an All-Day Pass. Buy now >>
With more than $500 million at the worldwide box-office, Hughes’s biggest hit is a spring-loaded wind-up machine of comic mayhem starring 10-year-old newcomer Macaulay Culkin as the youngest member of a sprawling Chicago brood, who gets left behind when his parents and siblings jet off for a Christmas holiday in Paris. Soon, he finds himself defending the homestead against a couple of bungling burglars (played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). Culkin’s increasingly complex, Rube Goldberg-esque punishment delivery systems are a delight to behold, as are Hughes and director Chris Columbus’s many tips of their hats to The Three Stooges, Tom & Jerry, and other paragons of slapstick perfection.
Hughes’ directorial debut stars Molly Ringwald as one of his most beloved characters—Samantha, a modern-day Cinderella who discovers, first to her disbelief and then to her horror, that her family has forgotten her sixteenth birthday during the frantic preparations for her elder sister’s wedding. To make matters worse, she’s got a crush on an airbrushed jock who doesn’t know she exists, can’t evade the clumsy romantic overtures of classmate Farmer Ted a.k.a. The Geek (Hughes alter-ego Anthony Michael Hall), and is forced to attend a school dance in the company of goofy exchange student Long Duk Dong. But sometimes, Prince Charming is lurking where you least expect him.
In person Molly Ringwald! Q&A with Molly Ringwald following screening.
In addition to directing, Hughes left his unmistakable stamp through his extremely productive writing output. Class tensions, high school cliques, and New Wave fashion collide in Hughes’s female-driven story. Molly Ringwald stars as Andie, a shabby-chic record store clerk who is torn between her crush on one of the preppy boys at her high school and her equally scruffy bestie, Duckie. Hughes’s grasp of the high-school rush of pressures and emotions––particularly Andie’s final revelation of strength––makes this much more than a nostalgic classic.
Buy Tickets Sun Sep 19: 5:00* * Post-screening Q&A with Molly Ringwald
Ferris Bueller's Day Off John Hughes, 1986, USA; 103m
In person Jason Reitman! The screening will be introduced by Oscar-nominated director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air).
Hughes’s fondly quoted comedy is a pop anthem to playing hooky and a self-proclaimed “love letter to Chicago.” The adventures of impossibly confident wisenheimer Ferris (Matthew Broderick) play out the teenager’s outsized fantasy of independence. In Hughes’s hands, the school-skipping, the Ferrari (property of Ferris’s neurotic friend’s Dad...), and the unforgettable parade make for something sincerely and unabashedly fun, without losing the smart-aleck sarcasm that is Ferris’s stock in trade. Print courtesy of Academy Film Archive.
Buy Tickets Sun Sep 19: 7:30* *Introduced by Oscar-nominated director Jason Reitman
Planes, Trains & Automobiles John Hughes, 1987, USA; 93m
Steve Martin and John Candy star in Hughes’s uproarious trip through holiday traveling hell. After a blizzard preempts their arrival in Chicago, hapless shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith (Candy) and uptight marketing guy Neal Page (Martin) lead each other further astray from their families. Beyond being comedy gold, it’s also a rare take on average-guy travails that also achieves what innumerable odd-couple comedies continue to flub. With Kevin Bacon committing a classic urban no-no.
