I didn't follow his career, which held less meaning for me than for those a bit older, but I enjoyed some of his early and mid-career movies: As I was born just past the trailing edge of Generation X and too early to be counted amongst Generation Y, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club are not included in the pantheon of "defining movies of my generation," but Weird Science was one of the first movies I ever saw (part of a weekend spent at a childhood friend's grandparents' house -- they should not have let elementary school kids see this one), the National Lampoon's Vacation films hit the comedic bull's eye for me before I reached calendrical double digits, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off sits high atop the list films that serve to weave together the self-referential pop cultural skein through perpetual quotation.
Ironically enough, the ability to consistently recognize allusions to these movies, among others of the period, became a signifier of social inclusion and astuteness as much as other forms of fashion following that were such sources of teenage angst for the characters of Hughes's most remembered films, see e.g. references to The Breakfast Club in Go.
Hughes's later films were not so much to my liking, and he did unleash the twin monsters of Ben Stein and Macaulay Culkin, but the admittedly superficial sense I get from reading his obituary is that he was a pretty good guy. Retreating from the hurly-burly to live in quiet seclusion on a farm, starting a fresh script immediately upon finishing the current one -- admirable ways to live the writing life.
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