The “timeless” movie Lily Collins would watch forever: “I love it so much”
Anyone who has seen Lily Collins in Netflix’s abysmal privilege porno Emily in Paris will think of her as a very modern figure.
There’s barely a scene in the entire show where the titular character isn’t gripping her phone, hunched over a laptop, or fussing about social media. However, despite its contemporary setting, the whole ‘greed is good’ element of the series is a throwback to the 1980s.
This time period is crucial to Collins’ story. First of all, it’s the decade in which she was born, although her birth date of March 1989 means she missed out on most of it. More importantly, it’s the decade in which her father, his Lordship Phil Collins, established himself as one of the biggest pop stars in the world. All the opportunities that Lily was privy to in later life were set in motion during the ’80s. Without ‘Sussudio’, who knows where she’d be now?
Elsewhere, the star of To the Bone has expressed love for the cinema from this era, and specifically, she’s a big fan of John Hughes and his extensive array of comedies and teen dramas, and even though the likes of Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles rank highly on her list, there’s only room for one classic right at the very top.
“I really love The Breakfast Club,” she confessed to Backstage. “All the characters are so relatable. The dialogue is so good, the way in which it’s delivered is so real, and you just feel so connected to every single person. I love how different each of the characters are, especially when you’re in school at that age, too. It’s the cliques and the different people, and how they all can come together. When you can take amazing dialogue and really make it your own – I can’t imagine any other actors playing those characters.”
When it comes to Hughes’ youth-oriented output, The Breakfast Club ranks up there with the most prominent. Set in a high school detention session, the plot follows the titular band of misfits who have been reluctantly thrown together one Saturday morning. All the stereotypes are here: the jock, the bully, the nerd, the goth, the popular girl, it just doesn’t get much more ’80s than that.
Alas, there are some people out there who think that this film should stay in the past, and there are many thinkpieces from highly respectable outlets (cough cough) detailing why The Breakfast Club has aged so poorly. Everything from the language to the tone to the treatment of the female characters feels very different in the cold, hard light of the 21st century.
This criticism can be boiled down to the scene in which Allison (Ally Sheedy) is given a “makeover” to appear more feminine and, therefore, more “attractive” by the standards of the time. In my opinion, no popular movie has undergone as much of a critical reevaluation as this one in the past decade or so.
It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but Lily Collins probably doesn’t care one bit, and if you don’t want to watch The Breakfast Club, she’ll happily watch it for you.
