"Tellingly, the adults in modern teen films are no longer clueless squares who can’t fathom teens; if anything, they understand them too well. They’re either Amy Poehler’s parodically with-it mom in Mean Girls, pathetically trying to hang with the kids, or the non-parodically with-it parents of The O.C., who actually did hang with the kids. This makes sense: We, the now-adults raised on Hughes, don’t regard teens quizzically; we emulate them. We trail them onto Facebook and sit alongside them at Harry Potter and Transformers. Whether this makes us better adults is debatable (who wants to grow up to be Principal Rooney?), but one thing’s clear: Hughes’s aliens landed, took over, and are running things now."