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Uncle Buck (1989)
John Hughes had already demonstrated he understood teenagers in hits such as The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off when in 1989 he joined forces with John Candy in order to close the gap between the parent generation and their kids in Uncle Buck. As a comedy, the film starts off well enough, more thanks to Candy's persona than Hughes' script, but it soon becomes all too apparent that Hughes is out to moralize, and not with an ounce of subtlety. Stereotypical characters and situations surround the supposedly complex Buck, for whom Hughes' film turns out to be the perfect self-help program. The problem is just that the contrived script doesn't really help Buck at all – he was actually a better guy when we first met him than the affected, movie-made guy he turns into. And his so-called funny antics along the way wear off much too soon. Only Macaulay Culkin and Gaby Hoffmann make this enjoyable. At least they're not trying to impose their morals on us.
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