OK, so maybe he wasn't the brilliant auteur I thought he was when I was 15. But man, those movies were great. I watched The Breakfast Club over and over again, with different groups of friends, and always felt that mournful pang when Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me" came on at the end, knowing that I would forget about them and they would about me; or, even if I didn't forget, we would simply lose touch. And I loved Molly Ringwald (enough to still sit through some fairly terrible plays just because she's in them), hated Judd Nelson, identified with Anthony Michael Hall.

Those films are probably as trapped-in-amber as silent movies or Douglas Sirk films, and thankfully so -- was Long Duc Dong the only minority person in that universe? -- but he captured the angst and misery of Reagan-era suburban adolescence as well as anyone this side of hardcore punk.