The Sunday of 6th Week saw a film milestone pass by with little fanfare in the British media: the 30^th anniversary of John Hughes’s teen classic The Breakfast Club.

The 1980s was a period in which the blockbuster, a term heavily associated with Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws truly came into its own not only as a genre, but as the sort of tent-pole spectacular we now associate with the term. The 1980s was home to the last two thirds of the original Star Wars trilogy, James Cameron’s Terminator and Aliens, which redefined the boundaries of action and horror and gave them mass-market appeal, and even the 1987 film Predator, which originally evolved from a Hollywood joke to have Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky fight an alien, since he’d clearly run out of human opponents after Rocky IV rolled out in 1985. Spielberg would continue his box office success with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982 and the Indiana Jones trilogy, and it seemed as though “blockbuster” had become synonymous with the movie-going experience.

When John Hughes burst onto the scene in 1984 with his directorial debut Sixteen Candles, he offered something distinct from the heavily stereotyped, raunchy, sex-comedies like Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds that dominated the early 1980s, and something even more distinct from the prevailing blockbuster form. What John Hughes pioneered was a new kind of tongue-in-cheek teen comedy; an incredibly self-aware imitation of middle class school life that dealt with teen characters without reducing them to cultural stereotypes.

Hughes had a successful string of films following Sixteen Candles, with the bizarro comedy Weird Science in 1985, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986 and Some Kind of Wonderful in 1987. Arguably however, none of his films are as culturally significant as 1985’s The Breakfast Club, a film that explicitly broke down the ridiculousness of teen stereotyping by collapsing the distinctions between the initial stereotypes he creates. A brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal are the imposed definitions that close the film, but Hughes shows the audience that really these are all just kids dealing with the same problems; fears about inadequacy and dissatisfaction with their relationship with their parents. In this film, the characters only act according to stereotypes because they perceive it as a way of fitting in, or dealing with their problems. Hughes even pairs up the characters in surprising ways to challenge our preconceptions. Hughes pairs the basket case with the athlete; the princess with the criminal and the brain gets to write an essay. Poor Brian.

Commercially, John Hughes was extremely successful. The Breakfast Club was produced on a $1 million budget and grossed over $50 million, a remarkably impressive return on the film’s initial investment. Whilst this pales in comparison with the highest grossing films of the decade, Spielberg’s E.T. would gross $435 million on a $10.5 million budget, it showed that teen movies were both low-cost and generated audiences, even if they were not into blockbuster territory yet. Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film Back to the Future is perhaps the closest the 1980s saw to a teen high school blockbuster, and was the eighth highest grossing film of the 1980s with a $390 million gross on a $19 million budget. Critically however, Hughes’s films were always well reviewed, but never considered important enough by contemporary critics to merit recognition at the Academy Awards.

Following Hughes’s teen film career, he branched into more diverse comedies. Hughes created Planes, Trains and Automobiles in 1987, his first non-teen comedy directorial effort, and went on to pen and produce the highest grossing film of 1990, Home Alone. Whilst he saw further commercial and critical success in his later films, none were as subversively critical or thoughtful as his run of teen comedies. When he died in 2009, Hughes was commemorated during the 82^nd Academy Awards in 2010, recognising his contribution to film.

Nowadays, the teen comedy has slowly regressed into the power of those like Judd Apatow, who have dropped the critical, subversive aspects of Hughes’s work in favour of crass sex-comedy once again. The 30^th anniversary of The Breakfast Club perhaps hints that it is time once again for a neglected genre to be shown some love and attention, to become a dissection of real life teenagers rather than a gross exhibition of parodic stereotypes. Let’s end with Andrew’s words from The Breakfast Club, “We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.”

Cinema is suffering from a lack of movement. Sure, it’s heading in certain directions (think of the dearth of medium-budget films being made nowadays and the ridiculous number of superhero films out and you can see depressing trends), but the Twentieth Century idea of the artistic movement within film, defined by an -ism and with something to say, is dead and buried.

If you went to the cinema in the late 1940s in Italy, you would have seen some of the most groundbreaking and politically engaging films, including De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D., or Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. The likes of De Sica and Rossellini, Cesare Zavattini, and Luchino Visconti were creating films that offered a view on Italy after World War Two, loaded with political and social meaning sympathetic to the average Italian. A decade later, in France, Truffaut, Godard, and Alain Resnais would blow the French literary establishment out of the water and crown cinema the new dominant artistic medium of the country under the tutelage of André Bazin and his auteur theory, that a director’s film ought to represent his or her personal vision. Again, these were deeply political films about young love and social conflict, all deliberately breaking the old rules of filmmaking and subverting expectation. It was historical cinema, which told you about the mindset of a section of society, the trials they faced, and the social, intellectual, and existentialist concerns of those living at the time.

These directors were artists, and, like artists, they fought for their ideas. Godard and Truffaut disagreed intensely on what the nouvelle vague ought to be, with the former accusing the latter of taking too much of the social realism of older French literature into his films. Godard was published in Bazin’s journal, Cahiers du cinéma, writing film criticism, as did Truffaut, who was so passionately critical in his reviews that he was banned from Cannes in 1958. Is there a director around nowadays who has so much to say, and so vocally, about the cinematic medium? The closest we seem to get nowadays is Tarantino shouting, once again, that his films’ gratuitous violence does not affect people in real life. Surely this in itself – a director denying the possibility of his work having any real impact on society – is an indictment of how cinema today engages with the wider world?

That’s not to deny that we now have extremely talented directors with intensely personal styles, and films which may try to teach us something about ourselves. Those with recognisable trademarks that spring to mind in Hollywood include Tarantino, Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, and Sofia Coppola. In the UK, Edgar Wright has been cultivating a uniquely off-beat and self-referential way of doing things, whilst in mainland Europe, Paolo Sorrentino, Gaspar Noe, and Lars von Trier are all taking things a little bit more seriously (the last admittedly, was part of a wider communicative effort named Dogme 95, which, in the 90s, had many intellectual hallmarks of a cinematic movement).

The problem is that there’s no conscious communication, no discourse. Where are the directors writing in film journals and where are the directors challenging norms and looking for new ways to express themselves? The best directors around are making stylistically wonderful films which are politically and socially void. The most politically moving films out at the moment are about hardship and persecution, certainly, but they are about examples so damningly obvious that you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who disagreed with the films’ theses; no one will deny the messages about persecution present in Twelve Years A Slave or The Imitation Game, but when it comes to turning the spotlight on our own culture and its injustices, there’s no one out there to do it. At a time when the young are increasingly marginalised by the establishment, there is a serious absence of their voice, or a voice for them, in mainstream cinema.

“Stop ringing me Richard, you’re not the dad… I don’t love you anymore, I hate you now,” says four year old Jessica. No, this is not the world’s most perverse episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show, it is in fact Channel 4’s most recent foray into the world of documentaries. The Secret Lives of Four Year Olds promises to be an interesting sociological and psychological experiment, allowing experts (charmingly referred to as simply “scientists”) in the field of child development to understand just how four year olds really interact and develop. This is, of course, Channel 4, so what you in fact get is lots of choice clips of small children saying funny things, with occasional interruptions from enthusiastic adults saying science words, but luckily the programme’s entertainment value is not effected by the boring grown-ups.

The programme charts multiple visits to the nursery, and it is admittedly a very interesting watch, as you can really see how the children develop and their relationships change. It’s odd how the personalities of the children affect you. You’d expect to feel a quasi-parental warmth towards them, metaphorically embracing each of the children as they develop, forming their own likes, dislikes, and skills through play; you’d be wrong. “I’m not listening to you!” screams Skyla, as innocent Jessica stands by, desperately trying to make friends with her. Quite why Jessica developed such an attachment to Skyla is unfathomable, but she’s young, I suppose, and the heart wants what the heart wants. Even if it is the non-sharing fake crying kid for a best friend.

Skyla is nothing, however, on Chaim, the nursery’s answer to The Kingpin. “He’s so cute and so lovely and so sweet,” says Chaim’s dad. Yes, if your idea of “cute” and “lovely” and “sweet” is a cake-stealing, toy-hogging bully. Interrupting girl-time at the water tray, Chaim causes yet another kerfuffle as he tries to snatch a measuring tube from one of his peers. “You know the bully boy, if he troubles you, just bite him,” Skyla advises his target. For all her fake crying and whining, she may have had a point.

There are, of course, beams of light in amongst the tantrums. Doe-eyed Luke, Chaim’s favourite victim, could make even the cruellest of hearts melt as he asks around to see who “will be (his) best friend”. Strong-minded Christian actually went so far as to reinvigorate my faith in humanity, acting as the last bastion of justice and goodwill in the harsh world of the playgroup, stepping in when Chaim wrestled Luke off his chair. “Please don’t do that… to my friend,” he said, with spot-on delivery and a tear-jerking dramatic pause. Hero. Absolute hero.

The input of the ‘scientists’ is at times valuable, but their characterisation of the youngest of the children, Cuba, as “Machiavellian” seems a little overboard, suggesting that his actions have some sort of superior consciousness and intellect behind them to those of his peers. He breaks rules, and he enforces them. That doesn’t mean he won’t spill his dinner all down himself and draw on the walls. At the end of the day, this is a programme about children, but that’s not to say that they’re all sweetness and rainbows. What do we learn from The Secret Lives of Four Year Olds? That some people are just born bastards.

A founding member of the Sugababes in 1998, the girl group with an ever-changing composition, Mutya Buena was the bastion amidst the shifting sands of Siobhans. But after leaving the group in 2005, Buena embarked on a short-lived solo career, releasing two albums before being dropped by her record label in 2008.

Things turned sour a year later, after Buena filed a claim for ownership of the Sugababes name with original bandmates Siobhan Donaghy and Keisha Buchanan. Unable to use the original name, however, the trio imaginatively combined their initials to form MKS, doing away with any ideas of more band member exchanges. Unfortunately, the band fell flat on their faces with single ‘Flatline’, which peaked at Number 50 in the UK charts. And what is Buena up to now? Well, having been declared bankrupt last year, perhaps she is taking a break from the limelight and from the buttock implants, for which she paid £5,000, only to have them removed later.

OUSE Hilary Term Concert, Friday 8pm, Christchurch Cathedral

As Oxford University String Ensemble’s first performance under its new conductor, this concert, set in the majestic surroundings of Christ Church Cathedral, promises to be an atmospheric evening. The programme includes pieces by Suk, Bach, Mahler, and the premiere of a work by Oxford Music student Alex Ho. 

Lou Lou’s Vintage Fair, Saturday 12-5pm, Oxford Town Hall

Lou Lou’s Vintage Fair returns to Oxford, now encompassing two halls of retro goodness. If you’re looking for vintage fashion, homeware, or a vintage beauty salon, this is the place for you. They’ve also now added a vintage hair salon, and a vintage tea room. Entertainment to be confirmed, but expect it to be… vintage. 

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The Alternotives Hilary Party, Tuesday 7-8pm, Merton Audiorium 

We’re guessing that this is a concert of some sort, but the blurb on the Facebook group made no sense, so we’re having to interpret. Even if the music isn’t your thing, they’re promising an after party at Itsu, which sounds absolutely wild. 

Mary Stuart, Tuesday-Saturday 7:30pm, Oxford Playhouse

Oxford Theatre Guild comes to the Playhouse, with this production of Schiller’s retelling of a pivotal moment in English history. The story follows Mary, Queen of Scots, as she waits for her death, and her final confrontation with Queen Elizabeth. A Twenty-First Century adaptation of a Sixteenth Century story, it questions how much has changed for women of power in a man’s world. 

Tragedy: A Metal Tribute to the Bee Gees, Wednesday 7pm, The Bullingdon

This is gonna be an eclectic one. We think we speak for everyone when we say we’ve been waiting for a heavy-metal rejigging of the Bee Gees for too long, and that’s what Tragedy (yes, their real name) provides. Plus, one of their members is called Disco Mountain Man. Enjoy! 

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Dylan Moran, Thursday 8pm, New Theatre

In his first UK stand-up tour for four years, Dylan Moran comes to the New Theatre with his show Off the Hook. Though his style might seem shambolic and rambling, don’t let that fool you; behind the facade, there’s a sophisticated comic mind that ensures there’s a joke every 30 seconds, no matter how subtle or surreal. 

Robert Fisk, Thursday 8pm, The Oxford Union

The Independent’s Middle East correspondent for more than 20 years, Robert Fisk promises to be an expert on foreign affairs. The recipient of more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent, Fisk is also one of the few journalists to have interviewed Osama Bin Laden. 

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Friday 6:45pm, Ultimate Picture Palace

A showing of one of the iconic masterpieces of cinema’s history, telling the story of a creepy carnival and the mysterious Cesare, a sleepwalker who can predict the future. The definitive German expressionist film, don’t miss the opportunity to see an absolute classic of the horror-gothic genre. 

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