No, bup. The message is, “Don’t think about things, do what you’re told.”
Yes, sir.
**Forrest Gump **is one of those “don’t get me started” movies, that just piss me off the point of having difficulty discussing them rationally, like Good Morning Viet Nam and Schindler’s List.
When we used to see poll numbers showing how many people still beleved Iraq was involved in the 11th of September attacks, I always assumed the country had adopted this a guiding philosphy.
I know what you mean, I feel the same way about Sho…
No, I can’t, it’s just too easy.
I disagree. To me, it was obvious that the message was, “Don’t just try to be smart, try to do what you know is right.”
It wasn’t that Gump did what he was told (he didn’t always—for instance, he rescued Lt Dan when ordered not to, and he started the shrimp fishing business when everyone told him he was nuts) but that he did what he knew was right. When smart people in the movie rationalized their way into doing things they knew were wrong, they got grief. Gump wasn’t smart enough to convince himself to do the wrong thing.
None of his friends that wind up happy gave up their individual thought or “did as they were told” in order to get there, they simply learned a lesson from Gump and did what they knew was right in the first place.
The more I think about it, the more I despise Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The proto-Gump acts like a damn fool, reacting to adversity with violence and maudlin martyrdom. “Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for” ? Geez, pal, why not try fighting to improve the lives of your constituents while respecting the value of compromise with the conflicting needs of other citizens within the framework of rule of law?
Plus the obvious solution never occurred to him because he was too busy proclaiming his innocence. All he had to do was say “Okay, I’ll sell all my holdings in the vicinity of Willet’s Creek to the Federal Government for one dollar, lest anyone accuse me of profiteering.”
I mention this one only because I allowed myself to waste however much over an hour and a half it took to see if it was ever going to make any kind of point at all. It is the sort of thing that might entrap a curious viewer of cable or On Demand. It is on the one hand an unsettling “scary” thing and at the same time a total gob of snot.
I speak of The Grudge.
Loves me some Incredibles!
Thanks for posting the most relevant quotes, saves me the trouble.
I teach at a Junior High School. The academic couseling counseling department contacts me and says, “Who’s the student in your computer class that gets the Student of the Month award this time?” I say, “Jacob.” They say, “You can’t nominate Jacob, he got it for one of his other classes last month.” I respond “Then I have no nominee.” Jacob’s the one who deserved it, Jacob’s the one who should get the award. A less talented student of mine should not receive it just because Jaob has been artificially removed from contention.
In the commentary to the DVD, the creative team says that is the point of their film, and its genesis arose from a similar circumstance to what I just described. Artificially creating a world where everyone is seen as having an exceptional level of certain talents renders those talents unimportant. Syndrome is determined to be regarded as a super-being, even if the only way he can achieve it is by eliminating everyone who could be regarded as better than he is at it (he fails to stop his own robot at the end, if you recall).
The message of the film isn’t that there’s some permanent class separation, it’s that your time is probably better spent developing your own talents rather than obsessing over what others can or can not do, and trying to pretend everyone is (or can be, or even ought to be) the same.
Brilliant!
You’re entitled to your opinion. As for mine: comparing Moulin Rouge to the fantastic piece of artistic cinema that is **Hedwig and the Angry Inch ** makes baby jesus cry. Blood.
Josie and the Pussycats- You don’t get to make a clever commentary about big corporations taking over the world and them plaster your movie with bona fide Starbucks and Target logos. No, it’s not ironic, it’s fucking stupid.
Jurassic Park III- You idiots brought a couple of yutzes to a big island with dinosaurs and are too stupid to check whether you’d be paid? Why would I care if you live or die, again?
The Day After Tomorrow- The father bravely treks through the frozen-over eastern seaboard to reach his son who’s starnded in the NYPL… to accomplish what, exactly? Unless he had several dozen pounds of astronaut food & water in his pockets that we didn’t see (or, I suppose, if he was going to kill himself and offer his flesh as food to the survivors), I don’t see much point in taking that hike.
“The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.”
Frrom “Harrison Bergeron,”* by [the increasinly irrational and cranky, but that’s neither here nor there] Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
*The entire text can be found here, along with an irrelevant but mercifully short and skippable introductory paragraph.
But that wouldn’t work IRL, not the way it worked for Gump. I repeat: The Forrest Gumps of this world do not prosper, and it’s just flat wrong to tell the public otherwise.
When it comes down to it though, Forrest gets rich because of dumb luck, it doesn’t relaly present it any other way.
On an abstract scale of values, virtue is more important than intelligence.
I’d rather be the Thing than Dr. Doom. Or at least I’d rather there were mor good-hearted rock monsters than genocidal maniacal super-geniuses.
d’OH! this was meant to come after the Incredibles commentary from scotandrsn.
S’what I get for fancy codin’.
To be fair,* Moulin Rouge *benefits from having seen a huge lot of other movies. It’s about as postmodern as a movie can get, and is as much ABOUT movies as it IS a movie. Very specific movies. Depending on how many of its reference points are familiar to you, it could seem pretty dang irrelevant and hollow.
The Forrest Gumps of that world didn’t prosper either. The movie doesn’t hide the fact that Forrest was lucky as sin, and a lot of his wealth was just because Lt. Dan was just lucky enough to invest heavily in Apple before it became a major company.
Bubba wasn’t morally or intellectually any different from Forrest, and he gets killed. The movie doesn’t teach that the good people come out ahead, or that the borderline retarded kids finish first.
I honestly think you guys are reading way too much in to what’s basically supposed to be a fictional biography. I don’t really know what greater points you could draw from the film, other than just saying “wow, dude had a crazy life.”
I suppose I should conrtibute my own offering:
Poison Ivy
I was making fun of it througout the entire film, for which my girlfriend got mad at me. When the lights came up after the film finally, mercifully ended, someone moaned, “Jesus Christ!” and the whole theater broke up. The local TV entertainment critic, one who was never above praising a well-publicized piece of dreck, reported she was recognized at the screening she attended, cornered by a mob of angry filmgoers, and told that it was her civic duty to warn people away from this film. Poor Sara Gilbert’s career was destroyed.
It’s not so much that I felt the film insulted my intelligence, it’s that I felt the film led my whole brain out in back of the theater at gunpoint, beat the snot out of it with an hardwood bat for over two hours, pissed and shat upon it, then returned its mutilated, humiliated remains to my skull with a little bow tied around them.
It’s one thing to create a character who is indifferently malevolent, It’s another to create a character whose only motivation for doing anything at all over the course of a day is that it happens to be the worst thing that could possibly happen to the protagonist at that particular moment.
What has it been, nearly 15 years? I’m still pissed!
I guess if those were the only choices, I’d agree with you. But virtue and intelligence aren’t mutually exclusive by any means.
I never saw EF, but I was always given to uderstand that the draw was not the script, but how gorgeous the lush jungle appeared on the big screen (remember this was twenty years ago, when most people still saw most movies for the first time in a theater).
The only film I ever walked out on because of my assessment of its quality was The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover