"Life moves pretty fast.
If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Well, Ferris Bueller's Day Off moves pretty fast, too.
Perhaps everyone has seen it so many times that they didn't stop and look around and
realize that there are a lot of baffling events in the movie.
One of Ferris’ earliest schemes involves securing a car for the day.
Ferris tells us
"I asked for a car, I got a computer."
...as a way of explaining why he doesn’t have wheels of his own.
The problem is that his computer is one of the many expensive toys that fill his bedroom.
In addition to a computer cool enough to be connected to the web in the mid-80s, Ferris'
room is also stuffed with a slick sound system and even a synthesizer he puts to particularly
good use.
Throw in the classic electric guitar and he's got quite a bit of money laying around.
Sell your stuff, Bueller!
After fooling his parents with a fake illness, Ferris' next big task is convincing his best
friend Cameron Frye to join him on his day off.
Ironically, Cameron is already out of school for the day, home sick in bed for real.
Ferris doesn't believe Cameron, noting his hypochondriac
tendencies.
But Cameron does seem to be quite ill, so much so that he barely feels like moving.
Somehow, Ferris is able to rouse him and bring him along on the trip, and just like that,
Cameron is fine.
He goes from lying in bed to hanging out at a Chicago Cubs game.
Not once during the day do we see Cameron becoming dizzy, trying to nap, or knocking
back some DayQuil.
He was either faking it, or he was miraculously cured.
Ferris invites Cameron along, in part, because he needs a car.
They could just use Cameron's, but Ferris is too greedy for that.
He wants to spend his day on the town in style, and has his heart set on stealing Cameron’s
father’s car: A limited edition 1961 Ferrari convertible.
It's a pretty sweet ride, and so valuable that Cameron’s Dad doesn't even drive it.
"He just rubs it with a diaper."
Despite the car’s value, though, there’s little to no security for it.
It's just sitting there, without any protection, in the garage, which Cameron and Ferris can
just walk into.
It's almost as if Mr. Frye wants it to get stolen.
Ferris covers his tracks at his house with a dummy, a complex pulley system, and a tape
playing snoring sounds.
By comparison, his scheme to get his girlfriend, Sloane Peterson, out of school for the day
is surprisingly low-tech.
It starts with a phone call from Cameron posing as Sloane's father, claiming her grandmother
died.
Ferris and Cameron then head to the school to grab Sloane.
When Ferris arrives, he has to disguise himself as her father by wearing an oversized trench
coat and old-fashioned hat.
Somehow dean of students Mr. Rooney is fooled by the lazy ruse, even after Ferris and Sloane
share a long, wet kiss.
One of the first things Ferris does on his day off is take Cameron and Sloane to an extremely
fancy restaurant.
He doesn’t have a reservation, so he steals someone else's from the restaurant’s list.
For this scheme, he chooses to pose as Abe Froman:
"The Sausage King of Chicago."
The restaurant’s host is, of course, extremely skeptical of Ferris' claim.
Ferris works around him by having Sloane call the restaurant and describe him as Froman.
Somehow, it works, and the baby-faced teen who is obviously not a meat magnate gets his
table.
One of the most famous scenes in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is the parade sequence, but there's
a lot about the scene that’s hard to understand.
It's a big cultural event that shuts down several downtown city blocks, but it's somehow
held in the middle of a weekday.
The heart of the scene is a bit baffling, too.
Huge parades are highly secured, but this one just lets some random teen up onto a float
to lip-sync to an old Wayne Newton song?
And why does the float have a microphone anyway?
It's not hooked up to any kind of sound system.
This all leads to a synchronized dance number set to "Twist and Shout."
It's a little more realistic that Ferris would know that song, but it's not realistic at
all that a bunch of people have put together dance routines to go along with this otherwise
completely spontaneous performance.
Ferris plans his day off so it’s packed with extremely fun activities.
He and his friends go to the Sears Tower, the Art Institute of Chicago, a fancy lunch,
a Chicago Cubs game, and even a parade.
One problem with packing all that into one day is that there's no way Ferris, Cameron,
and Sloane could fit it all in with the limited time they've got.
It's mid-morning by the time Ferris convinces Cameron to come with him, then he has to jailbreak
Sloane from school, and then drive into the city.
Once they're in the city, they have to leave the car in a garage.
Factoring in travel time between activities, plus setbacks like traffic, there's no way
Ferris is getting back to the suburbs before his parents.
The villain of the film is dean of students Ed Rooney, and he both hates and obsesses
over Ferris Bueller.
The thing is that Rooney actually has a good reason, noting that Ferris...
"He gives good kids bad ideas."
It's Rooney's job to keep the student body in line and in class, something Ferris doesn't
help with.
He has so many absences that it's a problem.
Rooney knows this, and even sees the evidence of Ferris covering his tracks by hacking school
records.
So Rooney spends the movie tracking Bueller to prove the kid isn't really sick.
He goes through a lot of nonsense to catch Bueller in the act of skipping school…which
means he's really just a guy trying to do his job.
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