“Lost in Translation” - whatever was supposed to be good about that movie was sure as hell lost in translation when I saw it.
“2001: A Space Odyssey” - bo-ring.
“The Piano” - even Harvey Keitel’s wang hanging out didn’t save that one.
“The Ice Storm” - everyone screws around on everyone else and bad stuff happens.
“American Beauty” - hunh?
“Annie Hall” - I hate that movie. I also hate Diane Keaton. She isn’t cute. She’s just a pain in the ass. So is Woody Allen, come to think of it.
“Citizen Kane” - best movie ever - if you have no interest in actually being entertained by your movies.
And a special category for “The Producers,” which somehow managed to be a completely un-funny, pretentious physical comedy.
One thing to remember when people give statistics about current stuff, is that there are more people on the planet than there have ever been before. If a movie released this week has more people going to see it than one 30 or 50 years ago, we really shouldn’t be too surprised.
What days, exactly, were those? You’ve listed movies from 1994, 1982, 1978, 1957, and 1954. Is it just the forty years bracketed by Pulp Fiction and On the Waterfront that make up these golden years of cinema? Because I’m pretty sure that I can come up with a list of five “meaningful” movies made after that period. (Many of them have already been listed in this thread.) I can also list two dozen movies from your “golden age of meaning” (no matter what years you use to define that period) that are ten times worst than the latest steaming pile dropped out of the sphincter of Hollywood.
The most popular movies have always been the most shallow, because any time you try to make a movie with a definite point to it, you’re going to alienate a certain segment of your audience who disagrees with whatever point you’re trying to make. A film that doesn’t try to say anything will have an advantage in the market over a film that does, because it doesn’t limit it’s pool of potential viewers to those who agree with its message. There is no special, magical long-ago time when this was different. This is how movies have always worked, and this is how movies always will work, so long as there are humans involved in any portion of their creation and consumption.
Thing is, every year of Hollywood produces a vast seething ocean of crap, a solid core of workmanlike good movies, and a couple of gems. Look back to movies of 40 years ago and do you remember the crap movies? No, you remember the workmanlike good movies, and rewatch the gems.
But just watch MST3K sometime and then tell me with a straight face that Hollywood used to produce only good movies. It produces oceans of crap every year, it’s just that we flush the crap down the sewer every year and forget about it.
Modern day blockbusters are MUCH better than old-timey monster movies. Just watch some of those movies…90 minutes of some stupid reporter wandering around the desert arguing with the local cops, then 2 minutes of some guy dressed in a spider suit. They SUCKED. Well, except for a few. Just like modern movies suck, except for a few. At least nowadays when you’ve got a monster movie, the monster actually gets some screen time.
LOTR was so obsessed with being the “definitive” version of Tolkien’s work that instead of chopping out stuff so that things can move along quickly, it covered them in loving detail. Having a character give a multi-page description of something I can’t see is one thing, but when I can see it on the frickin’ screen and the character still gives the description of it, is another.
In what way was Pulp Fiction a meaningful movie? It’s just a bunch of mindless violence stitched together with a spoolful of cool. It is a very entertaining film - but meaningful? It is titled Pulp Fiction for crying out loud - do you know what pulp fiction is?
It’s not just that-it’s more symptomatic of Tarantino’s huge ego and his attempts to trick up his movies in various ways. His dialogue is certainly pretentious more often than not, to give another example (e.g. Samuel Lee Jackson’s sermons in Pulp Fiction right before he kills someone).
The movie that, to me, exemplifies the term “pretentious bullshit” more than any other is What the Bleep Do We Know!? Just thinking about this crappy, smug, pseudo-scientific film sets off my bullshit detectors. I’m gonna have to replace the batteries.
Each of those movies was, when released, the highest grossing movie of all time, up until that point, right? I mean, that must be true, otherwise, what you’re saying makes no sense, right?
I agree with many of the films already listed. Here are more pretentious films that haven’t been mentioned yet:
Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou (2004) I hate to say it since Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are two of my favorite films.
Women in Love (1969)
Angels and Insects (1995)
Superman IV (1987)
Full Metal Jacket (1987) *Yeah I get it, war is bad, thanks for letting me know, try including a plot next time. *
As others said just hit the little reply button at the bottom of each post and it replies with the quote. Or you can do it this way… Just replace {} with
{QUOTE=Abby_Emma_Sasha} Ok, since the only think I know to do is “post reply” that’s all I can do. {/QUOTE}
I loved the book–even though that too is pretentious. But Oprah really laid it on thick. Something about her acting and the way the camera was all up in her nostrils all the time.
Ironically, the ones I most agree with so far have all won or been nominated for Oscars: Crash, Babel, American Beauty and Lost in Translation.
I don’t know if it counts to add the movie adaptation of a play, but I’ll add RENT. I like a lot of the music and some of the performances were great, but I can’t stand the story. The villain Benny (Taye Diggs) is a villain because he’s going to evict 3 slackers who won’t get real jobs from a loft apartment in Manhattan where they’ve lived rent free for a year, and the reason he’s going to evict them is because they’re assisting with a major bad PR protest against his plan to revitalize and gentrify property he paid a lot of money for in such a way as to recoup his investment and {GASP!} make profit (“BAD CAPITALISM! MONEY’S SOULLESS! BAD!”) Meanwhile lots of well meaning friends decide to cheer up their friend the HIV+ unemployed musician by giving him exactly what any recovering smack addict needs: a smack addicted underaged promiscuous new girlfriend, and they all hate their parents but you can be pretty sure none have ever turned down a check from them, and working for good money for a tabloid show is beneath talentless filmmaker Mark (as evidently is waiting tables or anything else for which there’s a demand) who evidently wants to start with a 10 documentary deal for PBS while continuing to live off of the charity of Benny (who even if he is sleazy, married for money, and shagging said underaged heroin addict, nonetheless has the right to do with his property “as he pleeeeassses”) and doesn’t mind stiffing waiters or ignoring their requests not to move tables (major annoyance to food service people). In short, GET JOBS YOU DAMNED HIPPIES!
Jonathan Larson’s death just before this show opened of course cemented his own immortality and tragic fame. Had he lived he’d have made millions from the show. I wonder which is more likley: he’d have stayed in his working class neighborhood adn surroundings and given all his money to charities, or he’d have “left this cold Bohemian hell” not for Santa Fe but for a $3 million 2 BR overlooking Central Park, sued hell out of anybody who tried to stage a copyright infringing production of the show, and fired any agent who didn’t get him top dollar for any project or the use of his songs. Twer it the latter, I wonder how he’d have reconciled it with the show’s La Vie Boheme message. (Of course I have to admit a special and somewhat envious hatred of the entitled GenXers who live lives of subsidized independence but are completely ungrateful for the subsidies and contemptuous of those who provide them.)
This is so weird to me. I really enjoyed the movie and never interpreted Forrest’s good fortune as anything more than dumb luck. If anything, I thought the film was saying “Look at the dunce actually believing God answered his prayers.” Even they way they cut to him singing in the choir presents, as a joke, his tendency to follow a suggestion to the fullest.
Pretentious is a very specific word that, to me, best applies to American Beauty. The dialogue with the bag in the wind made the movie sound like it was begging to be taken as something brilliant and deep. Especially bizarre in a movie that was also shouting “Everyone has major flaws they keep hidden.” I did like the gay homophobe, though. It would be a long time before Hollywood would tire me of the gay homophobe.
