You bet I object to the anti-hero!
A clarification: The movie poster shows a big rig crumpling a police car. (The TV ad for the movie also showed a totaled police car being dragged away). If the movie was as good as Dopers seem to make out, I see no acceptable reason the movie company could have, to resort to false advertising on the posters to attract moviegoers. (I had heard the bit about trucker-flattens-a-row-of-motorcycles six years before the movie came out; it was even alluded to in Jan Harold Brunvand’s book The Baby Train.)
The ads for James Garner’s movie Tank, likewise showed a good ol’ boy mashing cop cars.
And something else I alluded to on the Snopes website, under “Glurge Gallery” on the UL Message Board: the movie Back to the Future. I had been urged to see this movie by a family I have known since the 60s; the year before an older customer of mine, whose daughter was also a classmate of mine in 1967, had urged me to go see [í]Amadeus;* I did and was quite impressed. With this in mind I went to see Back to the Future, and had one too many straws put on my back.
Specifically: these elements each irritated me just a little bit:
- The movie opened on a filthy laboratory which had obviously been abandoned for a week.
- Fox’s character was a snide little smart-aleck, the likes of which would, or should, get his teeth knocked out early on in the real world. In one scene, he pays as much attention to the infuriated high-school principal as he might to a blank wall.
- At one point he hitches a ride (on skates) by holding on to the rear bumper of a police car. This may show Spielberg’s contempt for the police, but it’s a foolhardy and dangerous stunt that could even have put the stuntman’s life in jeopardy.
- At Fox’s home, he finds out, not only has his father’s employer used Fox’s family car (without permission, presumably), but has wrecked it. And he treats the family, whose car he has just wrecked, to severe verbasl abuse in their own home! Sounds like something I might read about in The Daily Worker.
- Huey Lewis and the News (billed in the opening credits, so I was at least forewarned) played one of their songs at one point. I stayed out in the lobby until it was done.
- The topper was the old man (Christopher Lloyd) with Fox in a mall-parking lot; a VW bus full of maniacs approaches and they fire on Lloyd with sub-machine guns.
As I have noted elsewhere, it isn’t the existence of negative elements in a movie that irritate me; it’s the combination of the six, and the apparent use of these elements to appeal to the viewer. Why would I want, for example, to see Arnold Schawrzenegger (in any movie) gun down helpless people with a howitzer, or whatever, unless I condoned murder myself?
The six items in Back to the Future, put together, pushed me past the point of tolerance. Without a word to anyone I left, just after the sub-machine-gun attack, and went home, lest I lose my tempter in the movie house and run the risk of being thrown out or arrested. (As for the family that recommeneded the movie to me: about two months after IU went to see it, the father died. I went to the funeral. This sure enough was a low point. :(:(:(:()