1 Happy St

I caught the beginning of Ferris Bueller on Saturday morning*. I hadn't watched it in a while, but I think I noticed for the first time that the first 15 minutes or so of that movie is pretty stupid. I know I'm blaspheming when I type that, but consider some of the following:

- Ferris is on the phone with Cameron, who is lying in bed. Ferris's dad calls, so he clicks over and has a 30 second conversation. He hangs up the phone, then looks into the camera and says something like "I'm so disappointed in Cameron. 20 bucks says he's sitting in his car right now debating on whether or not he should go out." Cut to Cameron, who is doing exactly that. How did he get there so fast? 30 seconds earlier, he was in bed and complaining that he was about to die, and now he's fully dressed and in his car? What the?!?

- Ferris's big plan to get Sloane out of school was to have her grandmother die. I have a couple problems with this plan. First of all, unless her grandmother was already dead, it would have been real bad karma for Ferris to fake something like that. My guess is Sloane would have had a huge problem with Ferris making light of a non-light situation. And if Sloane's grandmother was in fact already dead, there's a million things that could have gone wrong with killing her off again simply to get out of school. Somehow I doubt an expert in hyjinx like Ferris would have used it.

- Ferris asked for a car, but instead he got a computer. How's that for being born under a bad sign? Well I'm not sure what the answer is to that question, but we do know that Ferris was an accomplished computer hacker. So why did he wait until he had reached 9 absences before hacking into his attendance records? Why wouldn't he keep them permanently updated with the fake number? Better yet, why wouldn't Mr. Rooney question that the number was being changed right in front of him? Here he was watching fraud occur right in front of him and all did was yell for his assistant. This is FBI stuff, man. Your computers are being hacked. Make a phone call already.

- When Ferris called Mr. Rooney to ask if his sister could pick up his assignments, why didn't he use the sick voice that he used on his dad? Instead he sounded all chipper. Wasn't he supposed to be deathly ill?

- And finally, I'm just not buying the Ferris/Cameron friendship. If Ferris was so popular with the sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, and dickheads, how did he even end up with Cameron as a best friend? You'd think that a guy like Ferris would have a best friend whose ass wasn't so tight that it could turn a lump of coal into a diamond. I understand they were best friends since the 5th grade, but their differing personalities makes it hard for me to believe it would have lasted. Some time before H.S., Ferris would have dropped Cameron as a friend. I have no doubt.

Or course the last 90 mins or so of this movie were classic, so I suppose I can forgive the first 15. But I wish John Hughes would have addressed some of those things.

* Aren't Saturday morning's the best? They're especially great if you wake up early and have nothing planned. You can get up and make some coffee and read the paper (if the weather is nice, it's a bonus because you can do this outside), or you can lay there in bed and watch TV. Either option is a friggin awesome way to spend a morning.