Rent Sixteen Candles (1984)

Not All the Candles Are Lit. - Sixteen Candles review by griggs

Somewhere inside this is the John Hughes we'd get a year later with The Breakfast Club, still working out which pedals do what. Molly Ringwald plays Samantha, whose family forgets her sixteenth birthday — a brilliant setup for teenage misery, followed by several more ways to embarrass her.

I liked the odd tenderness between Jake and the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall, all elbows and nervous energy), two boys who actually talk to each other instead of simply competing over girls. You can already see Hughes getting interested in teenage boys dropping the performance and admitting they're as confused as everyone else.

It’s much lighter than The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, with plenty of the themes and none of the patience to sit with them. Some of the comedy has also aged horribly. Long Duk Dong is a stereotype wheeled out for laughs, while Caroline being passed around drunk is treated as comic business.

Charming in places. In others, painfully 1984. Still, a decent dress rehearsal. You can tell the candles aren't all lit yet.