Colby Cosh’s column about John Hughes:
It seems Hughes simply took our side, the side of the Boomers’ children, against his own. He saw that we had been thrust into a world like none before, wherein the existence of the family had been suddenly declared contingent, held hostage to whim.
It is no coincidence that Hughes’ most commercially fertile creation was Home Alone, a movie predicated on the most extreme of all his neglect scenarios: that a family could forget that one of its members existed long enough to board a transatlantic flight without him.
The revolution pretty much had nowhere else to go from there.
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And of course, there’s the forgotten birthday in Sixteen Candles, an exaggerated echo of all the times your estranged dad didn’t bother picking you up for his post-divorce Sunday visit.
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