Your Excellency said:
I've removed Clockwork as you approve and Bowling as it's not scripted fiction, so we're left with:
Pulp Fiction
The Shawshank Redemption
Gladiator
Good Will Hunting
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Vanilla Sky
Fight Club
Just before we begin, can you first identify which is the film/s on this list that you haven't seen, so that we can remove them from the impending discussion? Thanks.
Good Will Hunting. The rest I've seen. Pulp Fiction is a good movie, if totally bereft of any real depth (which I have to consider is somewhat intentional on QT's part, considering that it's called Pulp Fiction, thereby embracing its pulp/comic book nature), so remove that, as well. Eternal Sunshine you can remove as well, since it IS good although overrated.
Basically, the ones I take issue with:
The Shawshank Redemption
Gladiator
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Vanilla Sky
Fight Club
Shawshank is a highly mediocre movie. The characters are stock prison movie characters, especially Morgan Freeman, who plays yet ANOTHER wise old black guy character - seriously, how are people not sick of him playing the same character in every film yet? The writing is sometimes alright but mostly quite mediocre. The film's attempts at depth - the scene with the beer on the roof, the escape scene, the ending - are all quite forced and over-the-top, the sort of fakey drama Hollywood peddles in. It's not a terrible movie or anything, but the fact that a film so unexceptional in every way is called one of the best movies of all time on the IMDb Top 250 frustrates me.
It IS a much better movie than Gladiator, which is an outright bad movie. The opening battle scene is well-shot, and Russell Crowe gives a good performance, although he's given much BETTER performances in any number of other films. That's it, those are the only two words of praise that I can offer the movie. The rest - from the exceedingly silly Joaquin Phoenix character and performance, to the unnecessarily revisionist history, to the off-the-rack music, to the dated CG and washed-out look of the cinematography, to absolutely ham-handed attempts at symbolism such as the slave owner standing in front of a light-flooded window with his arms stretched out in a Christ pose - is really bad, and although there are some entertaining fight sequences, they're completely pointless since the movie does nothing to really make you care about what is happening on the screen and doesn't even try for any sort of depth or higher level. It's overdone dreck, and the fact that it's a lauded movie shows the absolute failure of the critical establishment.
Last Crusade is probably a better movie than Temple of Doom, but I think it's probably the least memorable of the three original Indy movies, as shown by the fact that it's probably the least-parodied/homaged of the three. The bits with Sean Connery are, of course, quite entertaining, but it's ultimately the most derivative and predictable of the three films. I can forgive this one a bit more, since this is a favorites thread and not a "try to name what is objectively better" and IS an entertaining movie, overall, but it's again symptomatic of your preferment of rather formulaic, plot-heavy fare (in this case, the formula of its own series.
Vanilla Sky... really? Do I really have to explain this one? The convoluted plot machinations don't do so on their own? Thus far, not a single one of these films has displayed any of what you expressed a desire for in the other thread; all of them have rather unmemorable dialogue (save for maybe the exchanges between Ford and Connery in Last Crusade) and poor and/or predictable plotting (Eyes Wide Shut evokes a dream state far more aptly than Vanilla Sky, which rather rubs your face in the "night and day" shift from reality to dreaming, not to mention that Tom Cruise gives a good performance in EWS and a standard one in VS).
As for Fight Club, well, I don't think I have to do much to explain that one. It's like a Bible for disaffected young males, but it offers a rather shallow and naive philosophy via predictable characters, and a twist that retroactively makes the movie very silly. So... yeah. Between these two threads, you've shown no real critical acumen and a preference for very easy, overly-plotted, sometimes very Hollywood movies. I can't dispute your taste, but literally none of the movies that I just talked about is good, except for MAYBE Last Crusade (and that's if I'm being generous and not dinging it for being a less imaginative retread of Raiders).
