Amoeba Music

Amidst all of the (well-deserved) praise for Judd Apatow's recent successes as a writer-director-producer, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that he's following a trail that was pretty well blazed by John Hughes twenty years ago. Like Apatow, Hughes made a name for himself by using a tight-knit group of collaborators to make a series of comedies that were at times slapstick, at times raunchy, at times high brow, and at all times built around a strong, essentially heartwarming story of personal growth.

Uncle Buck, Hughes' penultimate film, is a great example of this. John Candy, in one of his finest performances, plays Buck Russell, a proud bachelor that has built his life around having nothing and no one to weigh him down. After a family emergency, Buck is called upon to babysit his nephew Miles (Macaulay Culkin, at his most precocious) and nieces Maizy (Gaby Hoffmann) and Tia (Jean Louisa Kelly). He quickly gains the trust and love of the young Miles and Maizy, but teenaged neice Tia is old enough to recognize Buck for the black sheep that he is, and she intends to use Buck's stay as an opportunity to get away with things her parents wouldn't allow, especially with her boyfriend, "Bug."