Please, do NOT save Ferris

(First off, if you like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or keep a special place for it in your heart, don’t take personally what I’m about to say.)

Oh my god, does this movie suck.

I don’t know what inspired me to request it from the library in the first place. (Perhaps it’s the fog of 80’s nostalgia I’ve been trying to negotiate my way out of after watching the entire run of Freaks and Geeks over Christmas vacation.)

I should have known better, too, since I remember not liking the movie back in The Day. Which is odd, too, since in 1986 Ferris had everything going for it that I should have identified with: suburban-Chicago kid in his last year of high school skirts the system to create his own adventure writ large and, in doing so, shows the adults it really is better to be 18, clever, carefree, immoderate, and iconoclastic — rather than submissively get in line to don the “square” mantle of adulthood without so much as a last stand. I mean, that was my life (only off by a year). So why didn’t I buy into it?

Probably because this movie sucks. (And it’s not that I just don’t get it, either, though I’m willing to reconsider. If anyone could forward me a critical review that elucidates some brilliant and subversive sub-text that I’m just not picking up on, please, by all means clue me in.)

Yumi and I suffered through the first 40 minutes before ejecting (both literally and figuratively). I can understand why Yumi didn’t connect, but I’d watched the movie in it’s entirety at one time and so had a history with it. Guess I’ve just outgrown the genre. Or, more likely, little that I identified with in 1986 has much relevance to my life these days. Duh.

While I was at it, I thought I’d also give Caddyshack a screening — seeing as how I’ve never watched it. (!) Fortunately I didn’t pay to see this movie in a theater because that would have been time and money out right out the window. That said, it was tough to watch — neigh, endure — in the background even as I busied myself with other things. At this rate I think I’ll forgo other “period” films in the same vein that somehow got by me. Porky’s, anyone? I think I’ll just stick with Turner Classics.

(By the way, this is why I don’t care to recommend films or books to other people. I know there are legions of Ferris fans out there — my cousin being one of them. For me, though, I know a film just isn’t working for me when all I can think about are the other things I could be doing instead of watching it.)