And I think Entertainment Weekly got it right, so much so that I used their description of the movie, as their pick for The Best High School Movie Ever, and my pick for my 86th favorite movie of all time.
The Plot... One Saturday detention, five unhappy teens, and their scramble to prove they're each something more than a brain (Anthony Michael Hall), an athlete (Emilio Estevez), a basket case (Ally Sheedy), a princess (Molly Ringwald), and a criminal (Judd Nelson).
Why Its In The Dave100... We see it as we want to see it — in the simplest terms, the most convenient definition: The Breakfast Club is the best high school movie of all time. It may lack the scope of its peers — the drinking, the driving, the listless loitering in parking lots — as well as any scenes that actually take place during school. But if hell is other people — and high school is hell — then John Hughes is the genre's Sartre, and this is his No Exit.
Following the farcical fluff of Sixteen Candles, the issues Hughes explored — sex, drugs, abuse, suicide, the need to belong to something — were surprisingly subversive and handled with bracing, R-rated honesty. '''Kids movie' was a derogatory term,'' recalls Nelson, ''and Hughes was definitely not making that.'' Thus, 21 years later, the film still sparks intense debates about the trials of teen life. (Sheedy's goth freak gets a makeover, then gets the guy: well-earned happy ending or antifeminist propaganda? Discuss!)
Never mind the serious sociological stuff. The Breakfast Club rules because watching the group dismantle/ignore the authority of Principal ''Dick'' Vernon (Paul Gleason) is a vicarious thrill at any age. It rules because Simple Minds' ''Don't You Forget About Me'' is a kick-ass theme. Mostly it rules because, as Hall puts it: ''In the end, you learn maybe we're more alike than we realize, and that's kind of cool.'' Leave it to the neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie to get all cheesy. -- EW's Whitney Pastorek.
I can't add much to that--but you cannot go wrong with Simple Mind's "Don't You (forget about me)". It was written for the film, and was a number one hit for Simple Minds. Both Billy Idol and Bryan Ferry turned down offers to record it first (although in 2001, Billy Idol recorded it as a bonus track for his Greatest Hits album). The song was also turned down by Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, who then suggested they offer it to Simple Minds, who was led by her then-husband.
Random Trivia... The original running time of The Breakfast Club (1985) was about two and a half hours. Thinking the film would not be a hit, Universal Pictures trimmed the running time down to the modern 97 minute version. The studio then destroyed the negatives of the deleted scenes. John Hughes said in a "Premiere" magazine article that he has the only complete copy.