Shrek
Moral: You shouldn’t make fun at someone for being ugly. Making fun at someone for being short, however, is encouraged.
Equilibrium
“Fahrenheit 450 was pretty good, but it needs some stupidly improbable martial arts. Also, who cares about books? Lets instead cram all the famous stuff we can think of into this guys cellar, including the Mona Lisa, 6 times too big.”
Crash
Two lessons learned from this movie:
Racism is bad. But it can be cured by falling down the stairs.
You should see past racial stereotypes, and examine your own deeper preconceived notions. Also, Chinese people are bad drivers and run illegal trafficking.
(Won the Oscar the year of: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Quantum of solace
Earlier Bond villains were on their own secluded islands, building giant lasers to take over the world. Not to be intimitated by them, this villain carried out an evil scheme that would enable him to - gasp - sell water at a somewhat increased price to Bolivians. Bond spies on him by driving up his moped on a sunny sunday afternoon, and listening at the gate.
American Beauty
Movies, now with 100% stereotypes instead of characters. The materialistic real estaste salesman, the homophobic marine guy who is actually gay, etc. The worst, though, have got to be the full-of-themselves “deep” teenage couple. Actual quote: “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it.”
(Won the Oscar the year of: Fight Club)
Forrest Gump
What’s up with the black guy being the intellectual equal of Forrest, but no explanation is deemed necessary for that? Also, she said he is the one. But the kid is not his son.
(Won the Oscar the year of: Pulp Fiction)
Top Gun
I have seen gay porn less gay than this. Ehm… wait, strike that.
Dead Poets society
A new teacher arrives at school, and through his teaching of a group of rigid and wimpy students and miraculously manages a transformation so that they become: Even wimpier. We have a group of young men able to sneak out of school at night, which they take advantage of by: Reading each other poetry.
Well, to be fair, it would be ridiculously increased prices. I mean, he might charge as much as bottled water in the US.
Why is an explanation required? People meet all sorts of people. He happened to meet one black guy with development problems. They connected because they were similar.
Schindler’s List
The war wasn’t actually all that bad for the Jews who got themselves a spot as a slave laborer for a Nazi capitalist who needed their slave labor to continue being a Nazi capitalist. Also, that shower at Auschwitz? The one hissing with the sound of gas coming through the pipes to kill you? PSYCH!
Dude. When the boulder starts rolling down the ramp, he should have run back under the ramp, not the other way. Not that it matters, because Indy probably isn’t even a human being; after being dragged under and behind a speeding truck over a dirt road, a normal human would be dead with very little skin left. Plus, he rides a submarine across hundreds of miles of open ocean. If the boulder had hit him, it probably would have just bounced back.
Hey, if he could survive being dragged by a truck and riding a submarine through the ocean, then I’m certain a mere boulder blocking his way would have presented very little challenge. However, since he could also apparently run faster than a rolling multi-ton boulder through a rough-hewn tunnel with blind turns that he had never been through before without bumping into a wall or tripping, I concede the point.
Would you be interested in elaborating on that? (Perhaps in a different thread, so as not to hijack this one.) It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie, but I’m having trouble seeing how you got that interpretation from it, and would be interested in seeing your reasoning.
Petty rant about Benjamin Button: the infusion pump in the hospital scene didn’t deliver a single millilitre of Normal Saline in the whole time the daughter was with her dying mother.
Saving Private Ryan: A truly great opening battle scene followed by a mediocre war movie. How do you make a narrative out of a massive war involving millions of people and taking place all over the world for several years? Simple, you scale it down to a small squad of soldiers carrying out one big mission. Gee, that’s only been done about a thousand times.
And what’s with the whole “earn this” line? Ryan was fighting in the middle of combat. He didn’t ask for anyone to come pull him off the line and all three of his brothers had been killed in action. What more exactly was he supposed to do? Obviously he didn’t know because we saw that decades later he had spent the rest of his life haunted by survivor’s guilt because Captain Miller was a dickhead.
Of course, characters Captain Miller and Private Ryan had no real substance to them. They were just icons so that middle-aged baby boomers like Steven Spielberg could finally apologize to their fathers for acting idiots back when they were teenagers.
HAY-ted it. A classic, gungho, pro-war movie, hypocritically dressed up as an anti-war movie. Nothing wrong with a pro-war movie, especially if the war in question is WWII, just be honest about it, Shlomo.