John Hughes, Filmmaker
John Hughes, director of generation-defining class conscious teen comedies, is dead of a heart attack, at age 59. Hughes wrote, directed, or produced some of the most beloved and influential films of the 1980s, from National Lampoon's Vacation through Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. He revolutionized family friendly live-action comedies in the 1990s. And despite his reputation as a retired recluse, he was credited under a pseudonym for work on both Maid in Manhattan and Drillbit Taylor in the 2000s. But (the huge influence of Home Alone on a slightly younger generation aside) he'll obviously be best remembered, forever, for his still-beloved high school comedies. They were, and are, remarkable for a few reasons: strong female leads or supporting characters, a focus on a slightly idealized and exaggerated reality instead of peeking-in-the-girls-locker-room outrageousness, and, as we mentioned, class. His movies dealt seriously, if not always realistically or positively, with class as experienced by, not coincidentally, public school teenagers growing up in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago. His rich suburban kids are neglected by parents more concerned with material goods than their children's well-being and his poor suburban kids are often just flat-out neglected or abused. Hughes was raised in the Chicago suburbs, where he developed his loathing for (and, frankly, fixation on) the entitled trust fund kids."I knew kids that in the third grade would say, 'When I'm 18, I'm getting $22 million dollars.'" This never translated into political liberalism for Hughes (he shared that weird '80s pretend-counterculture conservatism with a lot of his talented comedian colleagues), but the consciousness of having not-so-much and being forced into dealing with those fascinating creatures who have too much underpins all his crucial '80s work. So. Yes. Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, the gender-flipped (and superior) Some Kind of Wonderful, the still-hilarious Ferris Beuller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club—that's a pretty good legacy, and they're so ingrained in the popular culture that it's hardly worth it to exalt each one in detail. The entirety of Pretty in Pink is available on YouTube, for now. The opening Ferris Bueller monologue remains a comic masterpiece. Hughes began his career as a copy editor, sold jokes to Rodney Dangerfield, and eventually joined the National Lampoon staff. Despite his incredibly influence and obvious status as an auteur, he directed only eight films, from 1984 through 1991. MORE >>
Paps Snag Bam Fam Pix!
INF photogs snapped these candid pictures of Michelle Obama and daughter Malia leaving Top Chef Spike's burger joint in DC. Breaking: there are paparazzi in DC! There were pap pictures of the Obamas vacationing in Hawaii and transitioning in Chicago, but the mean streets of Capitol Hill have probably never been the scene of a shot sold to People or stolen by Perez. Not because DC and Capitol Hill are off-limits to the paparazzi, but because they're boring. DC pictures don't sell. Why would they? Do you care where Representative Peter DeFazio's LAs are drinking tonight? No. (They're drinking at the Hawk & Dove, btw.) But, you know, the Obamas are celebrities! And so John McCain's shitty summer 2008 campaign strategy has finally sort of come to pass. Barack Obama is not Paris Hilton, but his wife and kids are Kate + 8. (Though one imagines Secret Service presence will continue to make these shots something of a rarity.) Even more fun: when the set initially went up on INF's site, one of the shots was a close-up of the first lady's stomach. BABY BUMP??? (It has since been deleted.) [Pictures: INFphoto.com] MORE >>
Math Nerds Getting Richer, Sexier
The Way We Live Now: Revenge-d by the nerds. Statisticians are the new Hedge Fund Guys. The less math-y among us are just marks for con artists and shady Metrocard machines. But: hot stock tip, below! Nerds who love numbers so much they should marry them used to go into "quant" hedge funds and make like millions of dollars, but that business has fallen off, thanks to the work of algorithms devised by those same geniuses. The new way to make $125K right out of grad school: be a statistician. Moneymaking jobs are getting even more boring than "corporate lawyer," if you can imagine. "I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians," said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. "And I'm not kidding." Look, if the Poindexters have all the smarts and all the money, they cannot have all the sexy. It is just not fair. Leave the sexy for Arthur Kade. Do we need a supersexy master race of calculator-toting statisticians figuring out new ways to scam us online by telling us to wire money to some fictional character who will then give us a job, because we are unemployed? No thank you, we would prefer to be scammed by unsexy people. We are also being scammed by inanimate Metrocard vending machines. Do not lose hope, unsophisticated jobless suckers! We have a hot stock tip, just for you: a tattoo removal firm is holding an IPO. Get in now. This will be awsome. MORE >>
Twitter Attack Brings a Day Without Social Media
Noooo: Both Twitter and Facebook are flailing this morning. How will people plan their evening drinking sessions? And are they expected to actually put in an honest day's work in the meantime? It's a Thursday in August, for God's sake. Twitter has been unavailable for at least an hour; the microblogging service's status blog helpfully reports that the company has no idea what's going on. Facebook, meanwhile has been spitting out error messages and intermittently cutting off people's inboxes, our staff has noticed. PC World, which has also noticed Facebook problems, thinks this morning's internet mess might have something to do with Gawker Media's servers being attacked earlier this week. It wouldn't be the first time we've been accused of functioning as a gateway drug to depravity and unproductiveness. UPDATE: Twitter reports it's fighting a denial of service attack. So just go ahead and post your tweets and status updates in the thread below. Why not? You'll feel better, and with the messages about your breakfast or need for coffee or whatever out of the way, you might actually be productive, at your actual job. UPDATE 2: Twitter is back. Commence insipid microblogging! MORE >>
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