FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF

dMYD DVD

Starring Matthew Broderick

Trailer

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Like any great piece of gibberish, Ferris Bueller is a weird flickering prism of a movie, almost begging to be watched in eighty-seven different ways. Here’s five of them, watch it five times.

1. THE SLOW DEATH OF WESTERN CAPITALISM

It’s a film about a boy who gets given a computer instead of a car, and acts up regarding this megaton-level injustice by ruining the lives of several of his elders and contemporaries. Three spoilt cumbags race around Chicago in a stolen car and philosophize about how brief life is whilst hoovering daddy’s money into their pampered nostrils and laughing at poor people. Watch it, and formulate your own endless demises for the accused including prostitution (Ferris), head-in-an-oven-marriage-break-up (Sloane) and auto-erotic-asphyxiation (Cameron). Death to Reaganism!

2. A MID-80s SEQUEL TO ‘THE BELLJAR’

Ah, Cameron. It’s a film about a boy who is so lonely and insular that he makes up an entirely fictional best-friend who he proceeds to follow around Chicago for a day with a bemused look on his face. Ferris isn’t real. Sloane isn’t real. Cameron is a squealing, demented fantasist with a face like Rodney Trotter overdosing on Vicodin, his only friend a puckish imaginary man-child who is thirty-six thousand times more confident and at home with the real world than he is. Honestly, watch it back, it’s all there; the heightened sense of reality, the dream-like coincidences, the fact that Cameron never really interacts with anyone other than Sloane or Ferris. IT’S NOT REAL.

3. THOMAS JEFFERSON’S POST-DEATH FREEDOM REPORT

Life is a series of intricate boxes that everyone places themselves into, knowingly or not. You’re a Democrat, you’re a Republican, you play games, you’re a school kid, a teacher, a son, an American, a boy, a girl. Ferris is pretty bored of this, so he’s taking a day off, taking his friends with him. And he has fun, and you watch and think… why don’t I do that? Oh, well, maybe not. Because…

4. LOONEY TUNES

It’s a fantasy film. Not in the sense of sweaty pale creatures beating each other with mystical lengths, but like a Capra movie or life when caned. Everything’s depicted as only slightly more askew than reality, more than Sixteen Candles but less than Top Gun, subtly getting more questionable and wonderful as the film goes on and being all the more enjoyable for it. IT’S NOT REAL.

5. PERVERT’S LENS VIII: THE LENGTHENING

Yes, he was a nearly-genius, but as anyone who’s seen Molly Ringwald’s teenage diary confessions will attest, John Hughes was a grimy, dirty old man who loved to cast girls less than half his age as idealistic love-puppets. Sloane’s the least developed character here but still stands as a doe-eyed beacon of boy-teen lust, a perfect girlfriend whose wonderfulness makes you forget that the actress is now over 40 and categorically not the fictional perfect you’ve fallen in love with. But it’s worse for girls; even The Breakfast Club had a pre-failure Judd Nelson to long for, but here you have the aforementioned stretch-faced freak Cameron and Matthew ‘Foot-Lover’ Broderick to goggle over. So, on a base level it’s a film for lonely teenage boys. From the 1980s.

But of course, the base level is only the base level. Funny, clever, light-hearted and endearing, Ferris Bueller’s Imaginary Fourth Wall Destruction Mia Sara Festival is a brilliant movie, one that’ll last forever barring the enslavement and cultural destruction of Western Society. It’s better than The Godfather. Oh go on, it is.