The Breakfast Club: Now Requiring AARP Membership

I went to see The Dark Knight on Thursday with my intern, Kat. She's 21. Before the previews started, the new JC Penny back-to-school promo aired. It features a revved up version of "Don't You Forget About Me" and steals the general premise of The Breakfast Club, compacting it into one minute to sell jeans and other tween fashion sensations.

I leaned over to Kat. "You know, the funny thing about this is that the audience they're trying to appeal to wasn't even born when this movie came out."

"Oh," she said. "This is based on a movie?"

Play It Again, Sam

I am a lover of reruns. For awhile, I religiously watched the back-to-back episodes of “Golden Girls” on Lifetime at 7 and 7:30. I could watch the episodes again and again, even if I’d seen them two or three times. There’s something comforting to me about knowing how it ends. I do this with other television shows (“Sex & the City”), books (insert romance novel title here) and movies. Lots of movies. I have watched Bridget Jones’s Diary approximately 500 times. I can finish watching it and instantly restart it in an almost unbreakable addictive cycle. I can almost do a complete voiceover of Clue. And I could step in for John Bender at any given moment in The Breakfast Club.

Then there are those movies that I watch every time I catch them on TV, no matter how many times I’ve seen them. Anything directed by John Hughes. Dirty Dancing. When Harry Met Sally. In these cases, it’s because I love the movie. But there are other times when some subtle message in those frames-between-frames tells me I must finish the movie. In his book Seinlanguage, Jerry Seinfeld says this is a basic difference between the sexes. Women want to nurture a show, help it grow. Men are like, “No, no, he’s stupid, she’s stupid, keep going, what else you got?” But me? I need to see it through to fruition. Like Titanic. It’s three hours, but when HBO was running it incessantly last month, I watched it to the end every time I caught it. I often have this problem with Jurassic Park. For awhile, The Fugitive. So, what’s your favorite re-runner? And your nomination for best hidden message to NOT LOOK AWAY from the screen?