CoolMovies-classics

old school.

If you've seen the classic tv re-run fare of Hitchcock (Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, etc.), then check out Strangers on a Train.

With Raymond Chandler on the screenwriting credits, you know you're in for something. It features some of Hitchcock's best cinematography in beautiful black and white, circa 1951. Robert Walker is superb as the quintessential Hitchcockian villain. Hold on for some of the best tension-building in Hitchcock's repertoire, with beautifully structured shot sequences and editing. Want to learn how to edit? Watch this film.

Bonus: Keep your eye out for Hitchcock's real-life daughter, Patricia who shows up again in Psycho.

new school.

Since the idea of the New School Classic is pretty broad, let's focus, for the moment, on the Golden Age of Teen Movies, 1982-1993. Don't try to hustle Scream around here--CoolMovies ain't buyin. We're talking about the likes of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Heathers, River's Edge, Better Off Dead, and most of all, Sixteen Candles.

Sixteen Candles (1984) was made at the zenith of John Hughes' career, in the same brilliant flash of creativity that produced National Lampoon's Vacation (co-writer, 1983), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)-- all undisputed New School Classics. Tragically for CoolMovies and for the entire moviegoing public, Hughes lost his touch in a big way by 1987, and since then has only given us incredible unwatchable dreck like Home Alone (1990), Curly Sue (1991), and Baby's Day Out (writer, 1994). How the mighty have fallen!

But, we digress.

Sixteen Candles is very much a teen movie, with the requisite doses of slapstick, silliness, and hormonal turbulence. But it is also fully realized with a genuine story to tell, and such honesty about high school hierarchies and family life that most of CoolMovies' generation gets Samantha Baker's high school sort of jumbled in memory with their own high school now and then.

Watch it again soon, and check for such classic and/or classic Hughes elements as interplanetary grandparents, hilarious racial stereotypes, furor over a girl's underpants, excessive alcohol consumption, Anthony Michael Hall, and--count 'em--both Cusacks.