Audrey’s Pick: Shrek (2001)
Shrek matters to me. There’s a reason I bring it up in so many of my conversations, whether that’s to reference people having layers like an onion, the masterpiece that is the scene of Fairy Godmother singing “Holding Out for a Hero”, or even just me doing an ironically awful “GET OUT OF MY SWAMP!” impression (as one does when they’re living in Scotland). No matter how many times I’ve moved throughout my life, I can vividly remember watching Shrek in pretty much every place. Back then were the times we had access to physical copies, and I would be ecstatic to pop Shrek, all of ‘em, into the DVD player for the millionth time (although maybe my parents were not as enthused). It has held up throughout the years, and is a film that, I would argue, only gets better with age. So, as I embark upon the age of nineteen, I know for sure that Shrek will stick around with me for the next one.
Nikola’s Pick: Back To The Future (1985)
This is a movie where a high school student, whose best friend is a sixty year-old crackpot physicist, travels back in time, accidentally convinces his teenage mum that he’s a dude called Calvin Klein, before spending the rest of the runtime trying to wingman his dad because his own mother is madly in love with him instead. And the most implausible thing about it is the fact that the time machine is a car slower than a Ford Fiesta. “Wait a minute Doc, are you telling me you built a time machine…. out of a DeLorean?”
I’ve seen Back To The Future close to one-hundred times. Maybe more if you include the days I’d zone out in primary school and play the entire movie in my head, every line of snappy dialogue and every moment of suspense slotting right into place. Truth be told, I don’t think that’s particularly difficult. The reason this may be the greatest comfort film of all time is because the movie is, in its form, mathematically comforting. Every moment is so memorable because there is no moment to spare. Each dramatic beat slides perfectly into an optimally calibrated three-act structure of nested setups and payoffs. The screenplay is so good it kills Hollywood writing; nothing comes close to watching its Rube Goldberg machine level of convolutedness slowly begin to unravel until it leaves you with a clean and pure, satisfying ending.
Considering my unwavering love for this film, I was devastated when someone recently described to me how its appeal to 1950s nostalgia and the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ ethos make it a Reaganite ideological project. Though I find it hard to completely rebuttal this reading, part of me still feels that Back To The Future isn’t as much a film about protecting traditions as it is about protecting your friends.
Livvie’s Pick: The Breakfast Club (1985)
I don’t think there’s a single better film to summarise teenage angst than The Breakfast Club: the ultimate enemy being cliques, popularity, and peer pressure; the evil Mr Dick Vernon, more malicious than any horror film antagonist; the circle time, where the gang expose their deepest fears and truths. The Breakfast Club is the only time I’ve longed to be in Saturday detention.
The 1985 John Hughes coming-of-age story is the film that changed everything for me. I watched it for the first time in the summer of 2020, alone, deep into lockdown, and I was obsessed. I wanted, needed, that eighties lifestyle, that time before social media, pandemics, and Boris Johnson. Additionally, it was the first time I properly became interested in (and got very pretentious about) film.
I know it’s aged poorly, and I can admit I do find it hard to watch now, as the once heartthrob John Bender now disgusts me, and they ruined my girl Allison with her “pretty” makeover. But the spirit and legacy of The Breakfast Club still lives on: “But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club”.
Illustration by Rebecca Tate, @rebi_draws on Instagram