Sixteen Candles

Sixteen Candles (1984) is about a girl whose family forgets her sixteenth birthday. Samantha wakes up and nobody remembers. Her sister's wedding is the next day and the house is full of guests: four grandparents, an exchange student, chaos. She is in love with a boy at school called Jake who does not know she exists. It was John Hughes's first film as director and it set the template for eighties teen comedy: adults are useless, teenagers' feelings are taken seriously, and the dialogue is written the way teenagers actually talk. Molly Ringwald became known through it and appeared in Hughes's next two films. The best thing in it is Samantha's loneliness: the forgotten birthday is presented not as a joke but as a real injury. But the film has a serious problem. The Asian exchange student Long Duk Dong is a caricature throughout; a gong sounds in every scene he appears in and the character is made ridiculous entirely through his accent. Over the years it has become one of the most cited examples of how Asians were depicted in American cinema, and the actor who played him has described the damage it did to his career. A scene involving drunkenness also handles consent in a way that is plainly indefensible now. Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald star. It runs 93 minutes. Good for: eighties teen films, John Hughes, and period texture. Less good for: the racist caricature and the treatment of consent are parts of the film that cannot be carried now.