John Hughes died earlier this week. The retrospectives and personal essays are going up all over the place, and though this movie has been in the hopper for a while, there’s no better time to talk about what I think is his best movie: Some Kind of Wonderful.

“This is what my girlfriend would look like without skin.”

On an objective level, this movie goes deeper into a lot of the issues that Hughes had previously only touched on – class issues, the inner life of the school bully, unrequited love, the absolute terror of high school – and while I think it’s funnier, it also has some truly painful moments in it.

The unrequited love part is probably the most painful for anyone who has, uh, ever lived, I guess, unless you’ve always been lucky enough to have your love requited, in which case you are from Mars.

Rather than just hitting the Duckie angle again, though, Some Kind of Wonderful presents us with Watts, a badass drummer from the wrong side of the tracks, who’s savvy, sarcastic, and basically way too good for the guy she likes, played by Eric Stolz in the only role of his I can stand.

He is, of course, oblivious, because he only has eyes for Amanda Jones, a girl so good-looking she’s hovering above the blue-collar kids and running with the rich and the beautiful. (Meanwhile, poor dumb Ray is in love with Watts, which is an unresolved plotline because everybody, including Ray, knows that’s a losing battle.)

I’m still not sure why this movie is my favorite, since I think Watts and Keith are not a particularly good match, and even within the frame of the movie we only root for them to get together because Watts is so awesome she deserves to be happy. Keith sort of wanders around in a daze, doing what the script tells him to do.

(Even when I was a kid watching this, I thought Watts should have gone with Duncan, who was a badass, and hilarious. His thoughtful “This is what my girlfriend would look like without skin” cracks me up every time. Plus, he helps out on the date! Resourceful AND an artist!)

However, there’s a lot else in this movie to love, from the annoying little sister who still warns her brother when she hears about trouble brewing, to a truly disgusting and sadly accurate portrayal of what a rich, entitled high school douche looks like. (When I first watched this movie, I was attending a Catholic school peopled entirely with kids who “summered in Europe”…and me. Mini-Hardys all over the place.)

Even Lea Thompson, whose character agrees to a date with Eric Stolz to try to show Hardy that she’s not his property, gets cool right at the end when she pulls the “I choose myself” thing, and it’s the sort of John Hughes moment where you feel all the triumph of it without really thinking ahead to the part where she hits college and majors in psychology and ends up getting married junior year to a guy who’s a smidge nicer than Hardy and spends the rest of her life wondering what happened to that dream she had in high school.

The end of the movie is the same way – Keith and Watts get together, but they’re both indifferent students and he spent his college savings on a pair of earrings, and basically they’re fucked. But, Watts is happy, so we let it go. A triumph when you’re young is so hard to come by that we’ll take it without asking what comes next; John Hughes knew that, for sure.

Here it is; and these days, my favorite moment is Watts telling the girl she hates that she misjudged her. Oh, Watts; will a character like you ever come again?