Sixteen Candles (High School Reunion Collection) Reviews

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1. Anonymous

   October 2, 2010 at 8:53 am

   Review by for Sixteen Candles (High School Reunion Collection)
   Rating:
   If you want to own this movie on DVD then you’ll have to be prepared to pay an arm and a leg. It’s only out on region 1, and has long since been deleted, so commands a very high price for no apparant reason other than the film itself – its certainly not for the extras – there aren’t any.The film stars 80’s starlet Molly Ringwald (Breakfast Club) and Anthony John Hall (Weird Science, Breakfast Club) and also reunites them with director John Hughes, also from “The Breakfast Club”. Comparisions between the two cannot be helped. Personally I prefered “The Breakfast Club” but there must be many who disagree – both are good, assuming that you like that sort of thing. High School coming-of-age movies are after all pretty much of a muchness, as the recent spoof movie “Not Another Teen Movie” so aptly illustrates.Where both Hughes movies fall down on DVD is with the lack of extra features. “Sixteen Candles” is at least in widescreen, but that’s all – there’s no remastered 5.1 audio mix, no subtitles, no trailer, no cast biographies, no featurettes, no commentaries, no nothing. And if the other reviewers are to be believed then the music on the DVD isn’t even the original soundtrack, supposedly due to rights issues. I say this because I’d never seen the film before I brought the DVD so don’t know any different. If true, it’ll certainly be interesting to see the proper soundtrack if and when it ever comes to DVD again. 2004 will mark the 20th anniversary of the film, so prehaps the time is right to ask Universal to consider a re-release with decent extras.

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2. Thomas Magnum

   October 2, 2010 at 8:06 am

   Review by Thomas Magnum for Sixteen Candles (High School Reunion Collection)
   Rating:
   Sixteen Candles takes place basically over the course of one day when a family forgets the sweet sixteenth birthday of one daughter amid the preparations for the oldest daughter’s wedding. The sixteen year old is played by the 80’s teen queen Molly Ringwald. It was the movie that helped her gain that title and is the best of her career. She plays the role of Samantha Baker with ease and charm. We feel all her range of emotions from the hurt of being forgotten to the longing she feels for a boy, Jake Ryan, who she has a major crush on but doesn’t think he knows that she’s alive. Little does Samantha know that Jake wants to meet her and the movie goes through a series of near misses between the two. Anthony Michael Hall plays “The Geek” who is constantly hitting on Samantha. He acts like he is a man of the world, but really is full of hot air. Mr. Hall is extremely funny and the scenes where he gives Jake advice on women and eventually drives the prom queen home in Jake’s father’s Roll Royce are priceless. Both sets of Samantha’s grandparents are funny, one set are the worriers and the other the carefree sort. Gedde Wannabe is funny as an exchange student who comes with one of the grandparents. He does take the Asian stereotypes to the max but he comes across with a nice degree of charm. John and Joan Cusack show up in bit parts and the movie has a great soundtrack. The Thompson Twins’ “Wish You Were Here” perfectly frames the ending scene where Jake and Samantha finally hook up. Sixteen Candles was the directorial debut of John Hughes and set the stage for the Brat Pack movies that would be the dominant teen movies of the 80’s. Unlike his other movies like The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink or Some Kind Of Wonderful, Sixteen Candles isn’t full of teen angst, self-examination and skepticism that the others are. It is a charming look at the life of a teenager that seems to actually be real. The new version restores the original soundtrack and improves the sound somewhat, but compared with most digitally remastered dvd’s, this one isn’t quite up to par. It is definately an improvement over the original dvd version and since the first one has long been out of print, it is worthwhile just to have it back in circulation.

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3. Thomas Magnum

   October 2, 2010 at 7:24 am

   Review by Thomas Magnum for Sixteen Candles (High School Reunion Collection)
   Rating:
   Sixteen Candles takes place basically over the course of one day when a family forgets the sweet sixteenth birthday of a girl amid the preparations for the oldest daughter’s wedding. The sixteen year old is played by the 80’s teen queen Molly Ringwald. It was the movie that helped her gain that title and is the best of her career. She plays the role of Samantha Baker with ease and charm. We feel all her range of emotions from the hurt of being forgotten to the longing she feels for a boy, Jake Ryan, who she has a major crush on but doesn’t think he knows that she’s alive. Little does Samantha know that Jake wants to meet her and the movie goes through a series of near misses between the two. Anthony Michael Hall plays “The Geek” who is constantly hitting on Samantha. He acts like he is a man of the world, but really is full of hot air. Mr. Hall is extremely funny and the scene where he gives Jake advice on women and eventually drives the prom queen home in Jake’s father’s Roll Royce are priceless. Both sets of Samantha’s grandparents are funny, one set are the worriers and the other the carefree sort. Gedde Wannabe is funny as an exchange student who comes with one of the grandparents. He does take the Asian stereotypes to the max but he comes across with a nice degree of charm. John and Joan Cusack show up in bit parts and the movie has a great soundtrack. The Thompson Twins’ “Wish You Were Here” perfectly frames the ending scene where Jake and Samantha finally hook up. Sixteen Candles was the directorial debut of John Hughes and set the stage for the Brat Pack movies that would be the dominant teen movies of the 80’s. Unlike his other movies like The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink or Some Kind Of Wonderful, Sixteen Candles isn’t full of teen angst, self-examination and skepticism that the others are. It is a charming look at the life of a teenager that seems to be the most real.

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4. serena-muse@email.msn.com

   October 2, 2010 at 7:18 am

   Review by serena-muse@email.msn.com for Sixteen Candles (High School Reunion Collection)
   Rating:
   This is one of my all time favorite movies, and I bought this video because my old copy had worn out. After watching 10 minutes of the new copy, I felt physically ill. The entire soundtrack’s been changed! No “Love of the Common People”, no “Happy Birthday”. I couldn’t watch any further. Some moron has butchered this film, and I’d return this copy if I could. If you’ve never seen the original version of this film then go ahead and buy it because the actual film is great and you won’t notice the difference in the music. But to anyone who has seen it before, find an original copy. Watching this version will make you sick.

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5. Anonymous

   October 2, 2010 at 6:37 am

   Review by for Sixteen Candles (High School Reunion Collection)
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   I have to agree with the reviewer who complained about the “butchered” soundtrack. I grew up with “Sixteen Candles” — I’ve seen it so many times I practically know it by heart — and the songs are as much a part of the movie as the dialogue. I wonder if someone forgot to get permission to use some of the songs when the original movie was released — but that wouldn’t explain the cheezed-up “muzak” version of the opening credit music. And why substitute “Strangers in the Night” for “New York, New York” as background music for the post-party conversation between Jake and The Geek? The replacement music, as a whole, seems thrown together — the songs are obviously meant to sound “almost like” the originals but for anyone who really knows the movie “almost like” just doesn’t cut it. The most awkward moment is when the family is leaving the house the morning of Ginny’s wedding. In the original version of the film, David Bowie’s “Young American” is playing in the background as the family piles into two cars. In this version, there is NO music playing — the family enters the cars in silence. What used to be a funny, quick scene now seems agonizingly drawn out.”Sixteen Candles” is still a great movie, of course, and I’m glad that I have it in my DVD collection. But I found myself cringing every time a song was changed — I could barely concentrate on the diaglogue at times. (I don’t know what I would have done if the Thompson Twins’ “If you were here” was replaced at the end of the movie; thankfully, it wasn’t.)

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