Ferris Bueller's Day Off

1 9 8 6 (USA)

The title character in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (played by Matthew Broderick) is the most goody-goody rebel since Greg Brady was caught smoking. He pulls off an elaborate school-ditching scam so he can go to a ball game, a museum and a parade! His take on life is that "Life goes by so fast, that if you don't stop and look around, you might miss it".

Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) is a born con artist. When he's not talking a mile a minute to his girlfriend Sloan (Mia Sara) and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), he's stepping aside, facing the camera and addressing all the rest of us in the audience, an annoying conceit that interrupts the action and wreaks havoc on the film's already lazy tempo.

In his dedication to the joy of loafing, Ferris audaciously convinces his parents he's ill, the student body starts raising money to save his life with a kidney transplant, and the dean of students thinks all sorts of people are dying. But Ferris isn't dying. He's just lying, and it's the ninth time in the same semester.

While the kids are bulldozing their way into an expensive restaurant (where Ferris snags a reservation by pretending he's Chi Town's "King of Sausages"), catching a ball game at Wrigley Field, and staging their own musical production number from Grease in the middle of a mysterious parade (if it's a holiday, with  floats and drum corps and 10,000 extras, why does anyone need to play hooky from school in the first place?), the principal, determined to catch Ferris red-handed, slinks around like a CIA agent on secret manoeuvres.

Thank you John Hughes, for creating a truant that Pat Boone could love! 

By the time the ditching trio motors back to their suburban homes, each is changed and edified for having had the experience of the day off. Not to condone rule breakage, surely - but in the movies, apparently profound enlightenment can be yours if you skip school every once in a while.

TRIVIA NOTE
A 1990 TV sitcom version with Charlie Schlatter (The Delinquents) and Jennifer Aniston (oh, you know!) as the title character's not-so-friendly sister Jeanie, thankfully bombed.