Miles was priveleged? High school English teachers are priveleged?
Does The Andromeda Strain count as mainstream?
Blech. Dime-store psychadelics, the dehumanizing horrors of technology that just seem laughably quaint at worst (or childishly reasonable at best), all the Made for TV Peacenik scientists who like Stickin It To the Man to prove their street cred.
As my (recently late) grandfather would say: Bah. (Actually, he pronounced it more like B’nyaaaaah… with a disdainful growl cultivated by decades of misanthropy and cigarette use.)
Annie Hall. Baby boomers whose lives are fucked up are presented as endearing instead of just self-centered and obnoxious.
Oh my God, yes. I trudged through the Wisconsin winter for 10 blocks in the ice and snow, to catch a midnight showing of this incredibly long and insipid movie. I was too proud to sleep through it with my college friends along. By the time they got to the stupid frog thing my inner monologue was repeating, “Am I dead? Am I in hell?”
I think we’ve got to step back a bit and understand “Pretentious”. For instance, how exactly was “Forrest Gump” pretentious? A movie isn’t pretentious because everyone else liked it but you think it stank. “Titanic” was pretentious? How exactly? It was a movie about a boat that sank.
I can see how “The Matrix” could be considered pretentious…throw in Christ imagery, talk about saving humanity, sophmore dorm bull session philosophy and so forth, all in a movie where the real appeal is watching slow-motion kung fu battles. Yeah, that’s a bit pretentious.
But some of the other movies mentioned? I don’t see it. Remember, this isn’t a list of movies that other people liked but you didn’t. It’s a list of pretentious movies.
I can’t speak for don’t ask, but I would have made it all about that one ancient-astronauts theme, without sticking into the middle a completely unrelated plot about an AI going crazy. I also would have made the ending less ambiguous/puzzling.
The way it aspired to sum up 50 years of US history and culture through the observations of one simpleton, possibly. I remember thinking the movie’s tag line (something like, “you haven’t seen America until you’ve seen it through the eyes of Forrest Gump”) was horribly pretentious.
And I enjoyed that movie.
[further hijack]
Just out of curiosity, what did they think of the nurse/housekeeper, Nelly Dean? She is the one entirely sympathetic character in the novel, the one who sees clearly what is going on and how unhappy the other characters are making each other, and who on infrequent occasions at least tries to set things right – though she doesn’t accomplish much and the final plot resolution owes nothing to her efforts. Lockwood is sympathetic and wholesome, but he just sits on his invalid ass and listens to stories; he never even attempts to do much of anything, not even propose marriage to Catherine Linton. No one ever seems to talk much about Nelly – she’s nice and hard-working and conscientious but she isn’t sexy or interesting. One of the Daughters of Martha.
[/fh]
It was worse than pretentious, it was pernicious, in its false message: Virtue is more important than intelligence, not in any abstract scale of values but in terms of gaining material prosperity. Gump gets rich for no better reason than that he deserves it, having been a good and honest man and done his duty to the best of his limited ability at every stage in his life. He gets his chance because he has the only shrimping boat in the harbor not destroyed by the hurricane – apparently because he’s been going to church and won God’s special favor. Real-life Forrest Gumps never end up rich save by inheritance or inherited connections.
Including LOTR? That had its faults, but it was no more (or less) pretentious than the novels.
I’m tempted to list Bonfire of the Vanities, except that the final courtroom scene with its inspiring background music and righteous (and completely inappropriate under the circumstances) speech from the judge convinced me that film was intentionally bad, a conscious self-parody of pretentiousness.
The novel deserved better.
Not only sly, ironic references, sometimes near-copies of scenes or lines of dialogue. 
How is it pretentious at all? In fact, if anything, it’s the OPPOSITE of pretentious. It’s just a big sweeping romantic historical epic with hardly any particular pretentions to anything more. (You could argue that it has a message about social class and/or feminism, but it in no way rubs those in our face at the expense of story and spectacle.)
My nomination: The Day After Tomorrow. Rarely have I seen a clearer case of hollywood bigwigs patting themselvs on the back for making a movie that’s a big special effects action movie (and a STUPID one), but also has a message. A facile and idiotic message, but a message. What a terrible terrible film.
I’d have to disagree about Forrest Gump. While they definitely loaded up some amusing bits with him going through nearly every major event at some point, I thought the point of it was just Forrest trying to deal with life. Sometimes he got really lucky, sometimes he was very unlucky. But Forrest never changed (probably a good thing). He never let either bother him. He just went about his thing.
Heh. Did you see somebody’s post in the Pit about the Birds remake?
Why is that so bothersome? He’s not making references to Shaft and Superfly that everybody would get and think are hip. He usually makes references to really obscure movies that only film geeks like him have even heard of. It’s sly and ironic sometimes, but I can’t read it as demonstrating anything other than respect or love for the movies.
No. I love the movie. I can’t deny that it’s more than a bit pretentious though. But I tend to be forgiving if a movie is aiming high.
No, I love Magnolia.
But, yeah: it’s pretentious. It’s supposed to be. 
I just heard a blurb on CNN that Spiderman 3 grossed more than any other movie at the box office. No, I don’t have a cite, nor do I care to verify it. If this has even a tenth of truth to it, I weep for humanity.
Wait, so now *Spiderman * is pretentious? Come on, pretentious doesn’t mean “I didn’t like it”. It doesn’t mean the movie is bloated, or has a stupid script, or cost a lot of money to make.
Titanic is not pretentious. It’s a movie about two crazy kids who fall in love on a boat that sinks. That’s just about the opposite of pretentious.
And I’ll disagree about “The Day After Tomorrow” too. This is the instant ice age movie, right? It’s no more pretentious than the original Godzilla was pretentious, with Godzilla’s “Nuclear weapons are bad, m’kay?” message. The “message” is just a hook on which to hang the destruction of New York or Tokyo by forces Man Was Not Meant To Tamper With.
Look, a pretentious movie is a movie that’s pretending to be something it’s not. A movie about a boy and a girl on a boat that sinks that pretends to be a movie about a boy and a girl on a boat that sinks isn’t pretentious.
“Field of Dreams”? Pretentious. “Major League”? Not pretentious. “Bull Durham”? Not pretentious, because it’s the only sports movie that imagines itself more than a sports movie, and pulls it off.
Hijack: There are two types of sports movies. The first type is about a team of lovable losers who learn important lessons and overcome adversity to win the big game against their hated rivals at the last second with a lucky play. The second type is “Bull Durham”.