Criterion Collection Releases The Breakfast Club
The 80’s teenage drama classic gets a 4K face lift thanks to The Criterion Collection
You know the story. It’s the story about a Brain, an Athlete, a Princess, a Basket Case, and a Criminal. It’s the story of how one Saturday during school detention five kids from completely different backgrounds bonded over It’s the story of The Breakfast Club.
Released more than 33 years ago, John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club has become not only an 80s classic, but the template other teen dramas try to be like but more often than not fail. These other movies fail because they forget the simplicity of The Breakfast Club‘s narrative. The wannabes try to be more complicated than they have to be and most don’t remember what it was like to be a teenager and forget the problems that come with being a teenager. Ultimately, these movies fail because the characters aren’t believable and neither are their stories.
The brilliance of Hughes’s script is the timelessness of the characters. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Gen Xer, Generation Y (aka Millennials), or Gen Zer, there will always be princesses, brains, criminals, and athletes in every school across the country. These may be generic terms, but they’re appropriate for the movie’s theme that we are more than just labels someone else has placed on us.
Not only does The Breakfast Club perfectly capture what being a teenager is like it’s also one of the few movies Hollywood can’t remake. Yes, Universal could hire a screenwriter to slap together a script and hire the current hot teen stars fresh from a CW series to fill out the cast, but what could they do to improve on the original? There’s very little Universal could do to set a remake apart from the original. At most, they could introduce cellphones, Facebook, or other social media platforms. Hopefully, Hollywood leaves The Breakfast Club alone.
Fortunately, fans of the movie have another reason to rejoice. The Criterion Collection recently released a 4K restoration of the iconic movie. Fans of the movie who wore out their VHS copies or suffered through the poor dvd and blu-ray transfers will love the 4K transfer. The picture is crisp as one would expect from a Criterion release. The sound also benefits from the transfer. In addition to a beautifully restored movie Criterion has also included more than 50-minutes of deleted footage and more than enough commentaries to make the biggest Breakfast Club fan happy.
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