After an impressive string of hits — “Home Alone” is one of the top-grossing live-action comedies of all time — Hughes, who never won a major show business award, stopped directing in 1991 and virtually retired from filmmaking a few years later, working on his farm in northern Illinois.

The filmmaker, whom critic Roger Ebert once called “the philosopher of adolescence,” was a major influence on filmmakers including Wes Anderson, Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow, who told the L.A. Times last year, “Basically, my stuff is just John Hughes films with four-letter words.”

“I feel like a part of my childhood has died. Nobody made me laugh harder or more often than John Hughes,” said Apatow in a statement.

Bruce Berman, who was VP of production at Universal and president of production at Warners when Hughes made several films with those studios, told Daily Variety, “He was one of the most challenging relationships an exec could have, but one of the most fun, most talented and gifted.” Berman said that although Hughes was one of the fastest writers in the biz — “He could write a draft over a weekend — he didn’t like to be rewritten.”

Born in Michigan, Hughes used his high school town of suburban Northbrook, Ill., as a location for many of his films. He got his start as an advertising copywriter in Chicago and started selling jokes to performers such as Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers. Hired by National Lampoon magazine after submitting his short story “Vacation ‘58,” he wrote his first screenplay, “Class Reunion,” while on staff at the magazine, and it became his first produced script in 1982. His next, “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” based on his short story, became his first big hit and spawned several sequels.

Hughes’ first film as a director was 1984’s “Sixteen Candles,” starring Anthony Michael Hall, John Cusack and Molly Ringwald. The teen romance introduced several of the actors who would make up Hughes’ “stock company” of thesps, several of whom became known as the Brat Pack.

In 1985, “The Breakfast Club” became the era’s iconic and influential high school film. It starred Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Hall and Judd Nelson as teens who must learn to get along when thrown together during Saturday detention.

Hughes wrote and exec produced Ringwald starrer “Pretty in Pink,” which felt of a piece with his directing projects, then directed “Weird Science,” starring Hall, and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” starring Matthew Broderick. He also wrote “Some Kind of Wonderful” and “She’s Having a Baby,” heartfelt adolescent stories that both bore his stamp.

He branched out with 1987’s more grown-up “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” starring Steve Martin and John Candy, then directed just two more films, “Uncle Buck” and “Curly Sue,” his eighth and final film as helmer.

Hughes turned primarily to writing and producing, seeing his greatest success with 1990’s “Home Alone,” which he wrote and produced. It spawned three sequels.

“He understood young people in a way few filmmakers ever have. He tapped into the feelings of teenagers and literally changed the face of the ’80s. The film industry has lost a giant — a gentle, wonderful giant,” said “Home Alone” actor Devin Ratray in a statement.

Hughes continued to write and produce family comedies during the 1990s, including “Dennis the Menace,” “Flubber” and “101 Dalmatians,” as well as an independent film, “Reach the Rock.”

While no longer active in Hollywood, he more recently provided the stories for films including “Maid in Manhattan” and “Drillbit Taylor” using the pseudonym Edmond Dantes.

He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Nancy; two sons, John, a musician, and James, a writer; and four grandchildren.

Sadly, most of the film reviews I wrote back then are not online . . . I’d love to share the absolutely horrible review I wrote of The Story of O for the Daily Texan, circa 1975. But alas . . .

Geeks and movies go together quite nicely. I’ve been thinking about films that reflect tech and geek culture, and have pulled together a list of 15 movies that should probably be on any geek’s must-see list.

These are in no particular order, except that the first one is my No. 1 Must-Watch-for-Geek-Cred film.

• Brazil – There are some geeks who’d argue you should just list “any film directed by Terry Gilliam,” but I’m only putting three on my list. Brazil tops it, though, for the ultimate in skewed sci-fi dystopia. Geeks relate to its themes of freedom, longing and getting the girl, despite being quite dorky. Oh, and Robert DeNiro as a subversive air-conditioning repairman rocks, too.

• The Matrix – Yeah, the second two in this series almost ruined the legacy of the first, but The Matrix remains an icon of geek culture. A fun mix of sci-fi, cyberpunk lit and sociopolitical commentary, it extends the notion of machines run amok further than any previous film. And after seeing it, I dare you not to wonder whether we all are, indeed, jacked in to some cheesy simulation of reality.

• The Fifth Element – The best Terry Gilliam film he didn’t make, The Fifth Element has some cheap special effects but makes the list for its vision of media, society and art. If the vocal performance of the tube-headed alien doesn’t give you goose bumps, you’re not alive. Oh yeah, and Bruce Willis is pounds of fun, too.

• Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan — William Shatner’s cry of “Khaaaaaaaaaaan!!!” has entered the Geek Movie Scene Hall of Fame, as has Chekov’s getting an earful of a space worm. Lines such as “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,” uttered by Spock as he sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise, have entered the lexicon.

• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – The next-best film in the series makes the list for two wonderful scenes. The crew of the Enterprise comes back to mid-1980s Earth to save the future planet from destruction by a whale-loving alien. At one point, engineer Scotty confronts a Macintosh and tries to talk to it. Someone points out he should use the mouse, which he then picks up and says into it: “Computer!” Next is the scene in which Spock gives the Vulcan death grip to a rude, boombox-toting punk on a bus. Audiences still cheer that scene.

• Serenity – Even if you’ve never watched the Firefly TV series, you owe it to yourself to see Serenity. It’s easily the best Star Trek movie that’s not a Star Trek movie, and you don’t need to be versed in the characters to get what’s going on. In fact, even if you didn’t follow the series, you’ll still weep when one of the major characters dies. This movie is smart, funny and hits the right balance between serious action and fun camp.

• Dark City — There are those who hint, eyebrows arched, that The Matrix got its best ideas from Dark City, even though the latter was released just one year before the former. A city is reworked each night, people’s memories are rewritten and those who begin to guess the truth are reprogrammed. This film owes a lot visually to earlier works, such as the films of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene.

• 12 Monkeys — A Terry Gilliam/Bruce Willis pairing, 12 Monkeys is a little less serious in its dystopian vision. Willis travels back in time in an attempt to prevent a virus from ravaging the future. The film is worth it for Brad Pitt’s best performance ever, as a crazed environmental terrorist. A review at the Internet Movie Database offers a grammatically garbled warning to take to heart, though: “. . .this movie needs your attention the forthcoming two hours and you better not miss some minutes for getting a coke as there is a danger you can’t follow.” I think I agree . . .

• Shaun of the Dead — This is both the best parody of a zombie movie ever made, and the best zombie movie ever made. All zombie movies are political commentary — the masses are mindless and dangerous, yada yada — but few of them have as much fun with it as this one. In Shaun of the Dead, the heroes are misfits and geeks who bust through the conventions of zombie filmdom. It will be hard to make a zombie movie with a straight face from here on out.

• Darkman – Sam Raimi does a comic book movie, pre-Spider-Man. It’s an updated version of Batman with a darker heart and more attitude, in which a scientist is horribly disfigured by thugs and uses his brains to outwit their brawn to wreak vengeance. In other words, geeks harassed in high school by jocks for being science nerds will relate.

• Army of Darkness — More Sam Raimi, this time capping off his Evil Dead series with a more mainstream and approachable film. Bruce Campbell, arguably the king of geek actors, reprises his Ash role as he’s sucked back in time to the Middle Ages. Ash is both brilliant and brilliantly dumb, playing a geek who succeeds in spite of himself. Best scenes — Ash assembles a replacement for the arm he hacked off in Evil Dead II, and he does battle with a demon in the aisles of an “S-Mart”.

• War Games – Possibly the first film to give mainstream audiences a taste of hacker culture — sanitized though it was — War Games is both a period piece and a source of geek lexicon. The term wardialing, the practice of dialing random phone numbers until you find a modem to connect to, came from this film. That later morphed in to wardriving – cruising the streets in search of unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Geeks will also have a great time watching for the techno-mistakes, which are legion.

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail – I occasionally run into geeks who say, “I’ve never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but I feel like I have.” I think it’s fair to argue that the Pythons invented geek humor, and this movie is its pinnacle. Note to serious geeks: You shouldn’t just have seen this movie, you should pwn it.

• Office Space — No film has captured what it’s like to work at an “enlightened” high-tech workplace as has Office Space, which bombed when first released but has become a cult hit on DVD. Who among us hasn’t wanted to smash the office fax machine with a baseball bat while profane hip hop plays in the background?

• Repo Man – Directed by Alex Cox, this movie is best known for having been produced by former Monkee Mike Nesmith (the smart, talented one). Emilio Estevez plays a punk who takes a job as a repo man. “Repo man is intense,” Harry Dean Stanton tells him, and that’s an understatement. Geek alienation and the blanding down of mainstream society are the themes here. Those who missed the 1980s may not get the references to black-and-white generics — Estevez dines from a can marked simply “Food” — but a little history lesson never hurt anyone.

Those are my favorites; what are yours? Add to this list via the comments.

We were lucky enough to get a copy of Max Allan Collins’ novelization of G.I. Joe: The Rise Of COBRA. And we had not fully appreciated the dementia of this storyline, which really is all about nanotech and how it’ll eat the world.

In the G.I. Joe universe, nanotech can do almost anything — turn regular people into super-soldiers, control your mind, devour the Eiffel Tower. I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie’s script was actually written by nanobots, which sliced up a million other action-movie scripts and mashed them up into a wonderfully incoherent mess. There are undigested scraps of Sho Kosugi movies and bad war movies floating around this gray goo of a story, and it’s nice to watch them sail past.

This might actually be the most prominent nanotech action movie ever — I’m straining to think of another movie where nanotechnology is so central to the plot.

The central villain of the movie, of course, is the Scottish James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), an arms merchant who secretly hungers for power. In a flashback, his ancestor gets tortured by the French by being fitted with a searing-hot metal mask, and so McCullen has a special hatred for French people. When we meet the present-day McCullen, he’s selling the NATO brass on his latest weapon — nanomites, which are basically nanomachines that eat anything metal, until you hit their “Kill Switch” and turn them off. They can disarm an opponent without the need for bloodshed, and so one NATO suit jokes that McCullen may be the first arms merchant to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

But McCullen, of course, has other plans — after he delivers the nanomites to NATO, he launches an attack of his Neo-Vipers to steal them back. The Neo-Vipers are supersoldiers who have been enhanced by nanotechnology — which also controls their minds. At one point, McCullen gloats that his troops still have their own thoughts, but they’re incapable of doing anything but obey his orders. The convoy escorting the nanomites is led by Conrad “Duke” Hauser and Wallace “Ripcord” Weems, and they’re the only ones who are prepared when the Neo-Vipers attack.