Yes, Kevin Kline won Best Supporting Actor (one of my least faves). It was nominated for a ton of shit though.
Well you know that is kind of the problem I have with a lot of candidates in this thread. A big grossing film doesn’t equal cultural impact. Often big movies make money because they are cashing in on a current cultural trend- they didn’t start it. I guess starting a fantasy movie trend would count but I’m not sure I buy that for AiW.
Five Easy Pieces, 1970, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach, was popular and angsty, now remembered for the chicken salad andwich scene if remembered at all.
Oh yes. That reminds me of The Little Dictator. Everyone was talking about it when it came out. Now? Nobody even knows it.
“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
Goddamn right! Also:
“You just shot an unarmed man!”
“Well, he should have armed himself if he’s going to decorate his saloon with my friend”
The bigger they are, the harder they fall, or deeper they sink in the case of Titanic. It was the top grossing movie until Avatar, but hasn’t had the lasting impact of Star Wars. The Sixth Sense was huge, but is just another 90s movie now, as is Jerry Maguire. Many 70s blockbusters no longer garner attention, such as Rocky (although the Conti soundtrack is great), Jaws, American Graffiti (now just another teen movie), Bad News Bears. Jim Carrey has more memorable movies than Liar Liar such as The Grinch, Dumb & Dumber and The Truman Show. And the Wizard of Oz used to be all over the TV during the holidays until they started moving the holiday shows over to DVD. Now it’s just another DVD option.
How about the films of Ingmar Bergman or Fellini? Seems like they used to be put on a pedestal of “this is the best that modern cinema has to offer” and any writing on film was littered with tributes to their greatness. But these days they’re probably conspicuously absent from anyone’s list of favorite movies… and with all their long silences, circus freaks and heavy symbolism, they are mostly indistinguishable from parodies of “pretentious art films”. (The SCTV parody of Bergman isn’t any sillier than the actual movie being parodied, “Hour of the Wolf”)
I’d exclude Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage from criticism, by the way - that is his one truly powerful movie IMHO, which also cuts out all the artsy bullshit. I heard it actually made divorce rates go up in Sweden when it came out.
Bwuh? Almost all of those movies are still hugely popular.
It’s had a pretty lasting impact outside of the US. “Cafe Titanic” is still a go-to restaurant name in quite a few developing countries.
While I hate"bwuh", I gotta agree. Rocky is still massively a cultural touchstone. I don’t get at all what some people are using as parameters in this thread.
Me, either. It doesn’t get much bigger than The Wizard of Oz. It may not be on TV every year, but it’s been parodied/spoofed endlessly, spawned two additional musicals, and I’d wager to guess most people know most, if not all, of the songs from it.
Someone beat me to mentioning The Sixth Sense and Titanic, so I’ll name one other big blockbuster which I thought would be this huge cultural movie comparable to the Star Wars trilogy but didn’t.
The Matrix.
Maybe it was the sequels, but for whatever reason it seems yo have been completely forgotten or almost completely forgotten in the cultural memory after about five years(admittedly it was very culturally influential during that time period).
The visual equivalent of those super-sour candies. (Didn’t see it, but the trailers were enough to give me a headache.)
See post 64. Beat there too.
Easier but less interesting. We’d just be discussing classics like The Wizard of Oz and perhaps cult films. An interesting category might be movies that became “modern classics” despite not being that big when they came out, such as The Princess Bride.
We got people here in this thread discussing Wizard of Oz as a forgotten film, my friend!
CarnalK writes:
> Oh yes. That reminds me of The Little Dictator. Everyone was talking about it
> when it came out. Now? Nobody even knows it.
What are you talking about? I don’t know anything significant called The Little Dictator. Do you mean the movie The Great Dictator? That considered more significant now than when it came out.
Give me an example of their huge popularity. I’m aware the Wizard of Oz is still culturally relevant, but it’s not the ubiquitous presence it was during the TV age.
My mistake. Don’t know how I did that, except maybe I was internalizing it’s point. Lol. But no, its not even remotely considered significant today outside of real movie buffs. What the heck are you talking about? I challenge you to ask people on the street tomorrow and I bet not a single person knows about that film.