The Breakfast Club, which turns a quarter-century old this year, is often cited as one of the most influential teen comedies of all time. (Entertainment Weekly named it history’s greatest adolecent film.) And in the sense that it made America take legitimate notice of movies with protagonists barely old enough to shave, it was. But re-watching the film, which comes out on Blu-ray this week (nearly a year to the day after director John Hughes’s sudden death), one realizes that the most important lessons of The Breakfast Club – that “each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a princess, and a criminal” – is largely absent from the contemporary high school cinema it laid the foundation for.

It’s not that we don’t appreciate empathizing with people different than us – we’ve had that drilled into our heads since The Great Gatsby became required reading (something that will never change). It’s that one of the picture’s chief genres, the teen dramedy, has grown nearly extinct in modern theaters.

It is surprising that there aren’t more direct decedents of The Breakfast Club, considering its plot is so marvelously simple it seems rife for endless copycatting. Like 12 Angry Men with more New Wave dance montages and pastel sweaters, the film takes place almost entirely within an Illinois high school library over the course of one Saturday, where five students from disparate cliques (Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald) are thrown together for an extended detention. Before the day ends and Judd Nelson pumps his fist into a film-ending freeze frame to the synth-laden tune of Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” the teens fight, cry, laugh, bond, realize that their social status in school doesn’t define who they are and, in Emilio Estevez’s case, discover their superhuman ability to shatter glass with their vocal cords after smoking marijuana:

Video: Emilio Destroys A Window

The sight of Mr. Estevez cartwheeling into the Shermer High School library’s foreign language room and destroying a glass door with his voice is as good a time as any to note the schizophrenic nature of The Breakfast Club. Because for every (unexplained) superhuman sonic projection or extended slamdance, there are a half-dozen deadly serious moments: Hall recalls a suicide attempt. Nelson acts out his father’s spousal abuse. And everyone cries. Oh, lord, how they cry. The Breakfast Club is a comedy in the way that M*A*S*H or Philip Roth novels or Terms of Endearment is a comedy – which is to say, well, a tragedy.

In short, the movie, despite its devotion to dance sequences and drug references, is a rather heartbreaking piece of moviemaking starring a quintet of talented young thespians. It’s a raw analysis of what it is to be a young person in America. It’s Mr. Hughes’s finest hour. And to a modern audience, I discovered, it’s completely lame.

What makes The Breakfast Club “lame” in a modern context isn’t the acting or the dialog (“neo maxi zoom dweebie!”) or even the wardrobe; relative to the Wham! videos of the era, the aesthetic of the movie has aged remarkably well. More dated is the concept of taking teen melodrama seriously. Sure, teen films have been a solid blue chip in the last 25 years, but no major film since The Breakfast Club has attempted such an unashamedly un-ironic look at the social drama that unfolds within the corridors of the primary education system from the perspective of the students. Teen cinema owes a lot to The Breakfast Club, but earnestness is one item not on that tab.

Why? Because, as a rule, anything seriously trying to appeal to modern high schoolers must be cool, and there’s nothing less cool to modern high schoolers than taking high school seriously. In a recent essay for The Paris Review online, Marisa Meltzer claimed that the titular outcast of MTV’s cartoon Daria (also recently released on home video), a whip-smart outcast uninterested in high school hierarchy, represents an archetype largely absent from modern culture. This may be true, but the act of rolling one’s eyes at cliques and sophomore soap operas, which Daria did so well, is alive and kicking in movies.

Just take a survey of the most popular teen films released in the years and decades following The Breakfast Club and you’ll see an overwhelming trend toward the satirical. In post-Breakfast films like Heathers, Jawbreaker, and Election, the importance of high school popularity is blown to hilariously gargantuan proportions (often resulting in murder) to show just how absurd it is to regard things like queen bee status with a straight face. Clueless and Mean Girls, meanwhile, offer a seemingly serious account of the lives of popular adolescent academics, but always with a knowing touch of the absurd (Cher’s fuzzy hats and exaggerated Valley speak, a sequence in which teenagers get on all fours and act like sub-Saharan wildlife, vehicular meyhem, etc.) that assures us the filmmakers are in on the joke.

The Breakfast Club, on the other hand, was deadly serious about the pressures of high school. Take the movie’s climactic scene, in which the five students sit around in a circle, tearfully rueing contemporary high school social politics and explaining the circumstances that caused them to act out (hint: it’s the parents). At over 10 methodically paced minutes, the scene is something of an ’80s masterpiece, resembling the second act of a Tennessee Williams play more than Porky‘s (though we do get a sweet glimpse of Molly Ringwald’s cleavage-cue excited high fives). It’s wonderful, heavy stuff. But try to imagine Juno joining such a maudlin powwow and you see how far we’ve diverged since the wholesome Reagan years.

Today’s go-to source for teen melodrama is, its viewers will note, television. From Degrassi to Beverly Hills 90210 to Dawson’s Creek to Gossip Girl, the small screen allows us to cry over the so, so important yet so, so trivial issues of detention, homecoming dances and house parties from the privacy of our own living rooms. They are the true progeny of The Breakfast Club, with their creators’ tongues far, far from their cheeks. Like Del Griffith, the silly, surprisngly deep shower curtain ring salesman played by John Candy in Mr. Hughes’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles, they’re “the genuine article.” What you see is what you get. Movies, meanwhile, have become quite literally too cool for school.

Notable Special Features: Audio commentary by Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson, during which the listener waits for the sound of Nelson crushing his Styrofoam coffee cup and screaming “dweeb!” at Hall. (Sadly, this never happens.)

Release date: Available now

All great artists have their masterpieces: Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Coppola’s Godfather, Guns N’ Roses‘s Appetite For Destruction. But all great artists also have their snobbish fans who snub their noses at these populist decisions and see — beg your pardon — true brilliance in some obscure, alternative work: Caravaggio’s real masterpiece is some pencil sketch he scribbled in Venice, Coppola’s actual greatest film is Jack, and GN’R's best album, undoubtedly, remains the tribute LP “The Spaghetti Incident.”

So it is with careful tread that I venture into that realm of snobbishness and suggest that Christopher Nolan’s relatively lo-fi 2002 thriller Insomnia, out on Blu-ray this week, may be the director’s greatest film. After all, this is the man behind Memento. The man behind The Prestige. The man who got America talking about a film where a dude dresses up like a bat and punches a dude dressed up like a clown with the social reverence usually reserved for Arthur Miller plays. But with the director’s new film, Inception, causing fervent debate between those who consider it his masterpiece and those who regard it as an overblown bore of a picture, what better time than now for a bit of Nolan revisionism?

So is Insomnia Nolan’s best film? Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell no. Really long answer: Well…

By most standards, Insomnia is a success. It made all of its $46 million budget back within two weeks, and received positive reviews when it came out. Rotten Tomatoes currently ranks the film at an impressive 92%. But as those of us who spend our nights braving the netherworld of online movie blogs and scribbling message board postings to The A.V. Club know, Chris Nolan standards ain’t most standards. Ninety-two percent is, at best, treading water in the Tomatometer-topping body of Nolan’s flicks. In his short career, Nolan has dominated both ends of the cinematic spectrum, delivering a genre-warping indie film told in reverse and a colossal blockbuster that injected new creative life to superhero flicks (Batman Begins), then topped all that with a sequel (The Dark Knight) that garnered critical praise, heaps of cash, and perhaps the greatest honor of all for a piece of pop entertainment: applied political subtext. Based on his continuing adoration from the online community, he may hold the world record for postponing the inevitable online fanboy backlash that is the bane of all popular figures in science-fiction (most notably the Wachowski Brothers).

All this makes Insomnia‘s otherwise-admirable 92% one of Nolan’s lowest Tomatometer scores to date. A relatively typical homicide thriller, Insomnia remains the only widely-released Nolan film not on the Internet Movie Database’s top-250 list, and in a 2002 Esquire piece declaring Nolan the greatest filmmaker working in America, Insomnia went conspicuously unmentioned.

Regardless of whether-or-not we can call Insomnia Nolan’s best film, we can certainly define it as the most naked representation of his skills. Just check the out the plot: A homicide detective, played by a haggard and subdued Al Pacino, flies up to a small town in Northern Alaska to investigate the brutal murder of a local teenage girl. Once there, he struggles with both the perpetual daylight of the polar state’s season and some looming guilt about his own questionable ethics while a wide-eyed local cop (Hilary Swank) tags along and the crime’s prime suspect (Robin Williams) cleverly eludes him.

What, no reverse narrative? No overlapping stories? No Joker? Pretty standard stuff, Insomnia is. Sure, there’s a bit of genre subversion in swapping the traditional night-scapes and dark alleys of noir thrillers for eternal sunshine, as well as a first-act shootout that jumbles motivations inventively, but for the most part Insomnia, narratively speaking, has more in common with A-to-B whodunits of the 1950s than the the 21st-century head-trips that would come to define Nolan’s work (as well as Adaptation, Synecdoche, New York, and the rest of contemporary cinema’s steady stream of films I must pretend to totally comprehend).

What we’re left with, in Insomnia, is Christopher Nolan as Man Behind the Curtain, the creator’s impressive wizardry momentarily turned off. And if the history of ambitious filmmakers has taught us anything, its that they tend to do their most timeless stuff when they quit trying to impress us and settle into a quiet craftsmanship. This is why Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, a gargantuan 2006 meditation on mortality that spans multiple centuries and ends with the explosion of a galactic nebula, didn’t garner an eighth as much critical acclaim as his follow-up flick about minor-circuit professional wrestlers that barely left rural New Jersey, let alone our solar system. Or why Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love did more with two actors and 95-minutes than the sprawling cast, frenetic editing, and rain of frogs that stretched the seams of Magnolia‘s 3-hour running time.

This leaves us with the question: is Insomnia one of these quiet masterpieces? Is Nolan, un-distilled and unfiltered through spectacle or subversion, a better director? Well… probably not. I wish I was the kind of cineaste who could honestly say he prefers lingering shots of a guilt-ridden Al Pacino cooler than a movie told backwards, but a movie told backwards is pretty fucking awesome. The lack of Nolan’s more bombastic trademarks, however, do allow some of his more subtle touches (present-but-overshadowed in his bigger films) to shine: the detached naturalness of his lead actors; well-choreographed action sequences that are simultaneously as frenetic as a Bourne film and as crisp and comprehensible as a western duel; and mesmerizing, fetishistic close ups of the human anatomy (Pacino’s exhausted face; the fingernails of a victim’s pale corpse).

But what makes The Dark Knight and the rest of Nolan’s more famous films (including, now, Inception) truly great are their ability to carry over the kind of old-fashioned craftsmanship displayed in Insomnia into new-fashioned stories. At his best, Nolan takes the raw materials that make a classic, solid thriller and reassembles them in a way that’s at once familiar and completely new. His 2002 thriller remains the only film where the director leaves the pieces alone. This may not make Insomnia his best film, but it improbably makes it his most unique.

Notable Special Features: A conversation between Nolan and Pacino.

Release Date: Available now.

The Witches of Eastwick and Practical Magic (Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman) Release Date: July 6, 2010

A decade before True Blood and Twilight transformed vampires and werewolves from soulless monsters to brooding, morally ambiguous young men with gelled hair and black muscle shirts, witches were the adorable horror characters our country loved to not hate. In 16th-century Salem, we burned Wiccans at the stake and prayed to Almighty God to deliver our towns from the sultry grip of their Satanic harems. Cut to the 1990s, when we gave them sitcoms on ABC and generally imagine them as Melissa Joan Hart-types – girls with pigtails and droopy overalls who more often used their powers to get Pearl Jam to play the junior prom then turn the harvest fallow. From Sabrina to Wicked, witches paved the way for giving monsters the chance to share their side of the story. They’re like Susan B. Anthony with a pentagram carved into her chest.

Witchcraft in movies of the late 20th century, more specifically, was a robust metaphor for the decade’s emerging culture of female empowerment. In “hear us roar” movies like Practical Magic and its philosophical predecessor The Witches of Eastwick (1987), all the single (and enchanted) ladies use hocus pocus to exact their just revenge on those testicled cro-magnons we call men. You wouldn’t have needed a crystal ball twenty years ago to predict the trio of strong Boomer actresses in The Witches of Eastwick: future Catwoman Michelle Pfeiffer; Cher, the baritone brunette behind the scorned-lover anthem “Just Like Jesse James”; and the always terse (and occasionally intimidating) Susan Sarandon. The three play small-town women who crack open a book of spells in defense against He Who Must Not Be Named – emphasis on He – played with infinite appropriateness by a crass, insensitive, gluttonous yet entirely seductive Jack Nicholson, that paragon of male ego, in a role similar to his snarling ball of unrestrained testosterone in 1994′s Wolf.

Cher, Pfeiffer and Sarandon may be the fairy godmothers of big-screen broomsticks, but it wasn’t until the ’90s arrived in earnest that witchcraft hit its American cultural stride. What better fit was there for an emerging generation of alienated teens who distrust authority than an alternative culture once the victim of unjust persecution from hypocritical Puritan elders. But the main point of witchcraft remained the same: girl power. Weather it was Sabrina the Teenage Witch harmlessly slipping a love elixir into the football captain’s milk or Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Willow ruthlessly flaying the skin from the body of her girlfriend’s killer (easily the most awesomely violent moment in Buffy‘s seven seasons), paganism has proven as empowering as 10 Lilith Fairs combined.

In the late ’90s film Practical Magic, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock play enchanted sisters who concoct a potion to get rid of Kidman’s abusive boyfriend. The boyfriend returns (in demonic form, of course) and the sisters must rise up and vanquish him. That premise, replete with spectral demons and books of spells, is a bit more blatantly fantastic than the more allegorical Eastwick (which is based on a John Updike novel), but underneath its mysterious shroud of the occult, Practical Magic is just another uplifting piece of estrogentertainment – The First Wives Club meets Legend. Just observe the scene where the sisters and their two single aunts (including Bonnie Hunt) dance around a coffee table drinking margaritas. Or listen to the perky soundtrack of Joni Mitchell, Faith Hill and two Stevie Nicks songs.

Practical Magic was the pinnacle of this feel-good supernatural cinematic sub-genre, but it also signaled its abrupt decline. One year after Practical Magic‘s release, The Blair Witch Project arrived to close out the season – and decade – of the adorable witch. Made for a fraction of what Practical Magic (or even Eastwick) cost, it became a national phenomenon and grossed more than $200 million at the box office. And all it had to do was remind audiences that witches can, from time to time, be scary.

Notable Special Features: None. But the two-in-one package does make for a interesting double feature – particularly if you’re into depictions of witchcraft on screen. Or seeing Jack Nicholson half-nude.

Predator: Ultimate Hunter Edition
Release Date: June 29, 2010

No decade did movie violence quite like the 1980s. Between the highbrow, aesthetic bloodshed of ’70s auteur cinema (Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, everything Sam Peckinpah ever touched) and the winking, postmodern uber-violence popularized by Quentin Tarantino in the early 90s, the Reagan Era brought us films whose gnarly deaths and soaring body counts had little (intentional) cultural agenda other than getting 16-year-olds to high-five with excitement. Recall, if you will, the rampant machine-gunning of Ruskies in Red Dawn. The neck-snaps in Commando. And the ruthless menagerie of pain (and ponytails) that was Steven Segal’s Above the Law.

At first glance, Predator is a standard addition to this library of freewheeling ’80s violence – albeit with a science-fiction twist. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Dutch, an American special forces major leading an elite squad — composed of Native American stereotypes, future state politicians, and Carl Weathers – that finds itself unexpectedly tracked and brutally attacked by a ruthless, mandible-mouthed extraterrestrial game hunter while on a rescue mission against guerillas in South America. The death and graphic dismemberments are fancifully high, and the one-liners come fast and blunt – wonderful nuggets of macho id (“If it bleeds, we can kill it…”), most delivered by Schwarzenegger (“Get to da choppah!”). Moreover, Predator made standard many action/sci-fi tropes used to this day, most notably the quasi-invisibility effect used by the alien, and its ominous infrared POV.

Yet director John McTiernan, who crafted the Rosetta Stone of modern action films in his hostage follow-up, Die Hard, and first-time screenwriters John and Jim Thomas are having a bit of subversive fun, toying with the typical Schwarzenegger ethos as much as they are contributing to it. Note how the titular hunter of the movie doesn’t make his first real appearance until a full 45 minutes into the film – roughly half of the movie’s running time. Before that, Predator plays out like an R-rated version of Bridge on the River Kwai. (The closest structural equivalent to Predator that comes to mind is From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez, who probably not coincidentally is producing this summer’s Predators.) It occurred to me you could leave halfway through Predator convinced it was meerly a movie about South American warfare with no pranormal element whatsoever – and you know what? It would still be pretty good.

Then, very suddenly, the traditional uniformed bad guys are replaced by a foe far less familiar and far more terrifying. The Predator puts the Americans unexpecdedly on the defensive, with the enemy actively seeking them – a rather novel concept in the 5-decade chasm between Pearl Harbor and the age of terrorism. With its masked face, dreadlocks, ceremonial jewlery and mysteruous tactics, the Predator (designed by the legendary Stan Winston) is the ultimate example of the terrifying Eastern “Other.” Other culture, other galaxy.

McTeirnan would make a more deliberate – and costly – attempt at subverting the action film years later with the underrated Last Action Hero, but with Predators he was already dipping his toe into Schwarzenegger post-modernism, even if he didn’t realize it. When Predator begins, Arnold is in familiar territory, flicking a throwing knife at a bad guy and shouting, “Stick around!” By the time the Predator arrives, however, all he can do is stand on a cliff and scream at the top of his lungs, as though ushering in an age of terror where snappy one-liners have no business.

Notable Special Features: “If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It,” a making-of from way back in 2001, but well worth watching to hear inadvertently hilarious stories of the on-set bodybuilding competitiveness between Schwarzenegger and co-star Jesse “The Body” Ventura (both of whom would be elected govenors someday).