Vacation is a comic travelogue following the Griswold family - Clark (Chevy Chase) and Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) and their kids Rusty (Anthony Michael Hall) and Audrey (Dana Barron) - from Chicago to Los Angeles and the world-famous Walley World amusement park and a better survey of virtually every sort of comedy that you can put into a movie is hard to think of. The man's comedy bona fides are in place, even if his great films are rare and he hasn't made anything good since the beginning of the century. It is true that Ramis's output as a director includes a lot of likable junk and some awful shit, but it also includes Groundhog Day, the best romantic comedy of the 1990s. I suspect it is also not a coincidence that Vacation opens in Chicago and the surrounding environs.Īnother good reason for the film's quality is that it was directed by Animal House co-writer Harold Ramis, who had at that point just one prior film under his belt: but that film was Caddyshack, which I've always found to be a touch overrated but it is undoubtedly in the top tier of '80s sex comedies. It is true of most writers, of course, that they do their best work when developing stories that personally interest them, but in the case of Hughes his best scripts all have an autobiographical tang to them, based in subtle but meaningful ways on the northern Chicago suburbs where he spent his adolescence and most of his adulthood. Mom is just competent: it is the first Hughes screenplay that is, apparently, based in material that personally animates him. And this, I think, points to one of the main reasons that Vacation is a brilliant comedy where Mr. The film is based on a comic story, "Vacation '58", which Hughes wrote for National Lampoon magazine during his time as a staffer there it was inspired in a loose way on a horrible childhood trip to Disneyland. Which means that if it weren't for John Hughes, we would not have the glory that is Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj. And for a third thing, Vacation was the fourth film released under the National Lampoon banner, and the first one since Animal House to do well enough for itself to secure the future of the brand name when it was right on the cusp of folding. Mom/i> is sweet and aimless and bland, Vacation is a deconstruction of the insulated self-assurance of the white suburbanite that verges on outright anarchism in spots. Mom is regarded with a kind of glazed acceptance, National Lampoon's Vacation is still held up as a comedy masterpiece in some circles, for the unanswerable reason that, whereas Mr. $64 million at the US box office - and it did that with the handicap of an R rating. For one thing, it was almost as successful as Mr. Mom proved that he could write a big, Zeitgeisty hit, but his next effort (which premiered a whole week later in July of that year) was almost certainly the more impressive achievement. Of the three films John Hughes wrote in 1983, Mr.
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