The Onion to the rescue!
Tarantino’s point, cribbing from the French New Wave, was that you can make violence as slick and cool as you want, but you still end up dead. It’s kinda what the whole movie is about. Jules chooses to give up the life, and Vincent doesn’t. Vincent gets shot unceremoniously on the toilet. He even throws in a poorly-acted cameo as Jimmy to show that you can’t escape your past. It’s regular movies that glorify violence, gangsters, war, and crime while the hero escapes unscathed because the bad guys are pure puppy-kicking evil. Making the bad guys funny and cool while the good guy is a liar who just killed a guy in the ring damns everyone involved.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train;11133587
Sleepless In Seattle When a woman stalks a heart-broken widower and misleads her generous and caring fiance because he has allergies, it’s cute. [/QUOTE]
Word.
Plus, the message from the Annie Potts character is that you are quirky, funny & interesting. But if you attract a rich, sweet guy you have to make yourself over into something conservative & dull to keep him.
“I’m a leaf on the wind. Watch me soar!”
I have the same issue with The Breakfast Club.
Agreed - in fact the Breakfast Club is even worse!
The Breakfast Club is even worse; Ally Sheedy’s character is made over and dulled down in order to attract the attention of the dull, violent, unintelligent, following sheep jock. If she was going after the nerd it might’ve been marginally more acceptable, but as it was, it was just her becoming another sheep. Boo.
Shrek? Shouldn’t make fun of/ridicule people who are “different” from you. The old “can’t judge a book by its cover” angle… except for short people. They don’t count. Their covers are small, afterall. Why would they?
Walter was supportive, and mostly admirable in his attitude toward Maude and her choices about her pregnancy (except for the whole 'lying about the vasectomy thing), but Carol’s views were just as represented, and I found them to be pushy and unsupportive. It felt to me that it was more important for her to make a statement about feminism than to support her mother’s wants and decisions. I feel I can address the viewpoint of one character, as long as the show stands behind that view.
On another note, I always saw the whole “Shrek is anti-short people” thing to be unfounded. If Farquad hadn’t been such an evil jackass, maybe the heroes (and movie) wouldn’t have mocked him so much. Message: if you’re nice to people, they wont hate you and take petty shots at you.
The Apple IPO was RISKY? That’s not how I remember it.
And Carol from Maude was a shrill moron and, like everybody else on a Norman Lear show, a cartoon. Great boobs, though.
This is why I never had pogs?
I am short.
Fair enough. Kate is smart, skilled, funny, (and hot)… she definitely deserves to find happiness.
And while I can’t see much of the attraction of Jocelyn (aside from the obvious – hey, I am a guy) 
she is Will’s chivalric ideal of a high-born lady, la belle dame sans merci – though she turns out to have genuine feelings for him.
I enjoyed Forrest Gump as a dramatic comedy but will dispute there was any real “message” other than the fact that it was funny and poignant that Forrest was a lucky, lucky 'tard who kept falling face first into remarkable situations and into good fortune. It’s more analogous to Peter Sellers “Being There” than anything else.
Re. Forrest Gump: the story of the Wise Fool goes way, way back, to medieval times or earlier, in traditions ranging from European to Chinese. It’s hardly original.
More to the point, if he hadn’t been a jackass WHO SPECIFICALLY REFUSED TO ACKNOWLEDGE HE WAS SHORT, there would have been no jokes.
The jokes were primarily things like Farquad having special armour to make him look tall, and people trying, desperately, not to say ‘short’ around him. The jokes were about Farquad’s ego, not his height.
Point taken. 
I think that whether or not we choose our professions or they choose us is a bit too existential for a Kindergartner, or maybe not. Maybe that’s the perfect time to ponder such questions.
Except that Forrest wasn’t really all that lucky. He got to do a lot of things that other people would care about much more than he did, like meet the President and such. All the really cared about was the well-being of his friends. Bubba died, Jenny got AIDS, and Lt. Dan got his legs blown off and went crazy. Forrest was hardly ‘lucky’ in the sense that he always got what he wanted, he got a bunch of stuff he never wanted and didn’t really care about but recognized on some level that it was useful. He was just stupid enough to recognize the simplicity of things. I think that was the message. If you think that he was a lucky lucky tard, then you are projecting your own wishes and desires upon him. If anything his luck was that he was not attached to the things that the rest of us want and as such is able to live the Tao in a way people with a more complex thought process cannot.
He was smart enough to be grateful for the blessings, but too stupid to curse his suffering.
Re: Fight Club
I’ve always seen it as a parable on the rise of fascism and a warning on how it could happen again, in America.
It seems to me many people are confusing what happens in a movie (or any story) with the morals of said movie or story. Without wanting to give Hollywood too much credit for high standing morals, if a story has a negative content, usually that doesn’t mean that the storyteller condones such behaviour. It’s more often intended (however blandly and tastelessly) as a warning of sorts. A ‘realistic’ movie may portray people and events in a rather grim light, not because that is how the director wants reality to be, but because that is how he perceives reality to be.
That being said, I have always been puzzled by these slasher movies where the immediate punishment for teenage sex seems to be brutal dismemberment at the hands of some violently inclined mental patient. A curious message, to say the least. One wonders in what deep and dark recess of the collective psyche such images are born. It appears to be mostly a Hollywood phenomenon though. Other movie cultures seem a lot less less obsessed with the dire consequences of juvenile promiscuity.
jimgorilla, you seem to have completely forgotten that this country was founded by Puritans.