I was more surprised/impressed by the Cabaret Voltaire poster on Ferris Bueller's wall. Bonus points for going fairly obscure.
While I really enjoyed this movie, I thought the musical score for the film was really cheesy and seems incredibly dated now, moreso than even films made a few decades earlier. There's just something about that early 80s background music sound that doesn't work.
Don't get me started on that bargain basement sounding drum set with the paper-sounding heads and tinny cymbal. I'm also taking a wild guess that the actor was not a drummer. I was a lazy slacker when it came to practice and a pretty mediocre drummer overall, but I had a lot more rhythm than that kid back in high school. At least it wasn't as bad as Shannon Doherty's 'drumming' (more like epileptic flailing) in Mallrats. I really feel like watching the old teaser trailer to John Huges; movie Some Kind of Wonderful to cleanse the audio palate.
Musical pet peeves aside, I thought Gregory's Girl was a really good film when I caught it on TCM tonight.
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TBH I wasn't that surprised or impressed by the "obscurity" of the poster of Cabaret Voltaire on Ferris Bueller's wall compared with the poster of Rush (still largely unknown outside US and Canada at tht time and in the UK had only just made an impact in the independent scene) on Gregory Underwood's wall. If they wanted to go for New Wave obscurity in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, something like a poster of the Talking Heads splinter group the Tom Tom Club would have been more apt.
As for the comparisons with the music in John Hughes' films, for me the music in Greogry's Girl may have been "cheesy" and "cheap-and-cheerful" but that was part of the reason why it worked so well - the film is much more simple and laid-back in manner than anything John Hughes ever did, so the music was perfectly apt for the time and for the premise of the film - it suited this gentle teen comedy much better than the usual "rebellious" feel of John Hughes films with their angsty teens, arrogant villain/rivals trying to pull the siren/hunk in the senior year, with endless New Wave song after New Wave song being blasted out over and over again - the concept of which worked excellently in Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club but had, quite frankly, got predictable and boring by the time "Some Kind of Wonderful" came out
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