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I'll be honest, Sixteen Candles has not aged well in many aspects. Most of John Hughes film's haven't. The one that escaped mostly unscathed in my opinion is The Breakfast Club and even there's many moments that you look at with an infinitely more critical eye than audiences of the day would.
A ★★ review of Sixteen Candles (1984)
“Mister, you had better shape up, or you will miss your sister’s wedding.” “Promise?” John Hughes wrote the script for this movie in 1982 as a low-budget production, but the company that initially agreed to bankroll the film changed their mind, resulting in it entering turnaround. When John...
Welp, time to get lynched by a generation, it was nice knowing you all.
Yeah, watching this for the first time, without any nostalgia, there were definitely just so many "this was acceptable back then?" moments.
Well you know what they say, 'The past is a different country and they do things differently there'.
Sorry I'm not terribly familiar with the Sopranos, nor am I particularly clever. So can you do me a solid and just call me a spacker if that's what you mean.
It's just one of the hundred instances in Sopranos of characters feigning outrage or surprise over a hot take.
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Don't fault a thing for being the thing it is. Yes, the movie is very loose with its adherence to scientific realities, but you should have guessed that the moment they dismissed interstellar spacefaring as effectively "oh, that's the easy part." It's a beautiful movie that uses all of the plot armor and McGuffins to tell a story about a forged bond between two alien entities, and it nails it. All that to say it's not a movie about realistic space travelling capabilities or the likelihood of extraterrestrial life; it's not a Sci-Fi movie in the strictest sense; it's a movie about a deeply committed friendship. As cheesy as that sounds, I think it'll be one fondly remembered as a classic as it ages.
Maybe I'm a bit harsh on the movie but I feel like the problem the main characters are facing just didn't make sense. Like a heist movie, the heist itself has to flow and make sense regardless of whether it's a serious heist movie or a fun one. Why have the alien have vision based on echolocation but then you disregard that several times later? You could've just made his vision to be normal vision. I don't mind handwaving stuff the movie really isn't about like interstellar travel or even the fuel source that probably also makes no sense (the astrophage literally does anything the story requires). You could've had the astrophage be some new and unknown type of life and essentially had that be the explanation for everything (and it would make enough handwavy sense) since that was the theory of Gosling's character but they made the creature very standard composition for, I guess, a joke.
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That's clearly addressed in the movie. Rocky builds a light sensor attached to an echolocation-friendly "sand-screen". Overall there is much more science in the book, but the movie doesn't forget that particular detail. An example of the hard sci-fi in the book is the way the necessary 2 million kilos of astrophage is gathered on Earth: they have to dim a large part of the Saharan desert with black metal plates to gather enough energy for them to multiply.
As an aside, the Asylum version of War of the Worlds was quite decent, IMHO, better than the Tom Cruise movie. Admittedly in part because they couldn't afford to hire Tom Cruise.
Fun fact: Chuck Norris once lit a fart in the Sahara Forest.
