There are only a handful of actors in the movie. But all of the teenagers are very good. Those are played wonderfully by Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall. There is also the school's principal played by Paul Gleason which looks suspiciously like Ben Mendelsohn. And there's the janitor with the most wholesome serial-killer smile ever, played by John Kapelos. All these actors know what they are doing very well. And the acting in the movie is pretty much, I think, what holds it together. Because there isn't much else to see, to be honest.
1941 was not received very well in 1979 when it was released. It was supposed to be a comedy. But it was a not very funny parody on World War II together with being perhaps the loudest movie ever made ( until Christopher Nolan said "Hold my beer" ). Being written by Robert Zemekys ( who would later direct such classics like Back To The Future and Forest Gump ) and Bob Gale the script was what the producer John Milius describes as "social irresponsibility". And what attracted Steven Spielberg to it was the fact that he could blow, break and destroy in multiple ways a bunch of stuff.
Also while we know John David is good, because it's not his first big film, it's Madeleine's first movie. Like literally, if you look for her online, all you find is pictures of her as the robot child in The Creator. And damn she a good actress. Like holly shit!
The music for the film is made by the legendary Michael Giacchino who also got a cameo in the movie as one of the police officers. At some point John Williams was brought as a guest to help Giacchino conduct. Giacchino admitted trying to sound like John Williams for this movie. Because frankly, J.J. Abrams was trying to shoot the movie like Spielberg would do. Though he added enough of his own touches, such as a dutch angle to make it feel more unique.
The film has a rather large cast of characters, most notably John Goodman as Pops. I paid homage to this character in my film Moria's Race where the father of the racer is referred to as "Paps" ( almost the same as Pops ) and he is kind of fat like John Goodman. But almost every character in Moria's Race is a homage to some real or fake movie person. Can you spot all of them? Pops in Speed Racer is very much like Mario. He is fat, has mustaches and wears a hilarious red top. The original version of this character was in a Japanese TV show from the 60s. So it seems like it could be that Nintendo took the same inspiration as myself for their Mario character.
Sheiny read a little bit of the text. There was a quote of some person named John Stuart Mill. It went:
To obtain it you need to fill up a form in which they ask you your name, email, phone number, country, city and street where you live. I put John Doe everywhere and it let me see the next step, which is a huge License agreement that nobody reads. Shall we read it then?