Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
Forest Gump. The 1994 Best Picture nominees were some of the most highly competitive the Academy has ever had, and they went with the one that was just a straight-up terrible fucking movie. It has no value except as nostalgia bait for Americans and propaganda for those who want to believe in the myth of American individual exceptionalism.
Its musical score is also probably the worst thing I’ve ever had the misfortune of performing in an orchestra. Dull and repetitive.
And its most famous line is straight-up bullshit. I’ve heard the book does it differently, but the movie puts “something that kinda sounds deep to a 14 year old” over a level of rationality that stands up to 20 seconds of thought from an average person. A box of chocolates tells you precisely what you’re going to be getting.
If anything, Forrest Gump is a satire of The American Dream^^^TM
Only guy to have such a successful life without doing anything unethical is a mentally challenged, politically unaware, and extremely lucky, who does everything he’s told without questioning it.
It’s truly a film about not judging the book by its cover and allowing for that to happen instead of taking the film literally you can see the themes and especially satire/parody of the American dream as described above.
It’s white exceptionalism mixed with conservative narratives about Murican history.
There’s a YouTube video that’s like “What if Forrest Gump took place in modern day.”
And it’s wonderful, he gets beaten up during the George Floyd protests by police and thinks it was because he called for a cab not knowing calling for a taxi was illegal. (The cops misheard him and thought he shouted “ACAB”), then later he decides to go on vacation to the Capitol because he’s a patriotic American and he’s always wanted to see it, he goes there and meets other excited patriots who seem to be having some kind of a party (It’s January 6th 2021)
This is probably one of the weakest arguments against this movie—and there’s plenty to criticize. Labeling the chocolates was not always a common practice. It’s something mass produced chocolates started to do. There was a time people bought from a confectioner and there wouldn’t be labels. That’s the context of the line. You can criticize this line but the labeling isn’t the problem.
The book is WILD! Gump goes to space, there’s a lot more racism and sexism in the book, and Gump doesn’t come off as a lucky mentally challenged, but overall nice guy. He ends the book looking like a racist asshole, and criminal, IIRC. I read the book as a teenager after seeing the movie and that was the first book that I decided that the movie was actually better.
Can’t help but love that you’re criticizing the line as faux-deep when it was delivered by someone with a mental disability.
Yeah, but a lot of the point is how despite being mentally disabled, he’s supposed to have deeper insight into things. That’s certainly how the cultural perception of the movie is. The problem is that the “insight” he has and which both the movie itself and the cultural memory of the movie treat as genuinely meaningful is actually fucking dumb.
I had listened to the audio book before I saw the movie. The movie is so off the mark on the ridiculous life of Forest Gump. My favorite part of the book is that Jenny leaves him, she doesn’t die, she leaves him because he becomes a major pot head.
Why do I know wanna see a modern remake of the film where Forrest Gump gets baked and goes on Joe Rogan? Then says some shit that accidentally fixes the Left-Right Divide and leads to Trump being kicked out of office?
that would be spot on!