When last we left our heat-addled heroine, she’d undertaken a defense of Forrest Gump, the last of which she fears she has not heard…

Heh. I stand by that position, although I probably shouldn’t, but let’s see if my explication of the rest of Premiere‘s 20 Most Overrated Movies list engenders any other insane pronouncements, shall we?

Gone With The Wind
Why it’s allegedly overrated: “Bloated”; it hasn’t aged well, culturally or cinematographically
Agree or disagree? I agree, but not exactly. The overrater’s charge that panoramic shots that broke new ground back then “look uninspired today” is valid, I suppose, but any movie is a product of its time, and how readily a viewer can forgive that probably depends on how fond she is of the movie. I mean, the first time I watched Citizen Kane, I sat there all, “Gee, a focus pull, zzzz,” not really getting that, you know, Orson Welles invented a lot of these techniques, and of course I’d seen them a million times — because every other director used them afterwards. Psycho, same thing. I had a teacher in middle school who told our homeroom a story one time (and Lord knows how she got on the subject, but her yarn-spinning is a whole other column, so anyway) about how she went to see Psycho on her first date with her husband, and she got so scared and grossed out that she threw up in his car. Psycho is a great movie, but it’s so much a part of the culture at this point that it’s hard for us to imagine finding it that upsetting.

All this by way of saying that I can live with certain signs of aging; when a scene set in a moving car is blatantly background-screened and the movie’s from the fifties, well, it’s the fifties. That’s how they did it back then. As to the racism, again, I think it’s a product of the time the movie was made, and of the time the movie was set in, and while it’s certainly cringe-worthy, it’s cringe-worthy in the larger sense that only now do we cringe at it when we didn’t back then.

With all that said, I’ve never liked Gone With The Wind. The overrater does point to the “swell taming-of-the-shrew routine” Leigh and Gable do as a positive, but I’ve never really “seen” that either, to tell you the truth, and it’s not the fault of the actors; it’s just hard to understand, even in the book to an extent, why Rhett would stick his hand in that crazy, and it’s impossible to understand why Scarlett sees anything in Ashley Wilkes and pursues him so monomaniacally — and almost impossible to watch it unfolding at the speed of continental drift.

I know that, in a way, that’s the point, that’s she’s unsympathetic, but…she’s still unsympathetic. Four hours is a long damn time to spend with a fundamentally unlikable person, watching her walk all over other people you might have liked had they stood up to her in the first ten minutes, so you’re left to watch it as a historical epic, which is fine, but we’ve got Ken Burns for that.

But do I think it’s overrated? I guess I do, but it’s become such a part of the culture and such a part of our idea of epic filmmaking…I don’t think it’s held up very well myself, but objectively, I have to admit that it’s durable. Still, so is Easy Rider, inexplicably, so: yes, it’s overrated.

Good Will Hunting
Why it’s allegedly overrated: “Forced premise”; “derivative”; Robin Williams
Agree or disagree? It’s surprising to me that this is my reaction, but: I agree. It’s another movie I wouldn’t expect to see on the list, because I thought it sort of had its moment, and then Damon and Affleck springboarded off it to do other things; I didn’t know anybody considered GWH a great movie in an enduring sense.

And it isn’t, really. I always watch it if I dial past it on cable, but I do that with While You Were Sleeping and The Talented Mr. Ripley, too — and when the serious scenes roll around where Robin Williams is shticking around his office cramming seventy-eight nightcrawlers’ worth of Oscar bait onto his hook, I usually get up to pee or do some filing. It’s just not interesting to me; I’ve seen it, from Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People, and it felt pat there, too. The movie has its charming moments — I still love that “how do you like them apples” exchange, and the scenes with all the guys hanging out in the car really work. But the rest of it is by the numbers, pretty much.

It’s fine. Damon is very appealing in it. It’s not an all-time classic by any means, and I doubt anyone would argue otherwise if Robin Williams hadn’t snagged an Oscar.

Jules and Jim
Why it’s allegedly overrated: It’s actually kind of hard to tell, but I think the gist is that it’s interpreted as a “tribute to free love bohemian bons vivants,” when in truth it’s quite depressing
Agree or disagree? Agree. I hate Jules and Jim, and I never took it as a “celebration” of the tortured threesome; I took it as an indictment, but the movie is so in love with itself and its stylized depiction of everyday emotional tragedy that it’s hard to plug into it no matter what you think of the relationships themselves. I like a good exploration of romantic discomfort as much as the next girl, but if it’s too self-conscious, it’s not an exploration anymore — it’s a pose instead.

It probably sounds like I’m accusing Truffaut of insincerity, which isn’t the case. Every other Truffaut I’ve seen, I’ve really really liked, and in his later movies he learned to exploit that self-consciousness, to invert it and say something interesting. But he’s too surface-y here, like a sophomore art major who glues Barbie parts to her canvas. It’s not that it’s a bad idea; it’s that it’s all idea, without anything concrete underpinning it to make it personal and compelling.

Truffaut is a great director; this is not the correct example of that, to my mind.

Monster’s Ball
Why it’s allegedly overrated: Too much tragedy to be plausible; Halle Berry is overmatched
Agree or disagree? Yep, I agree. I liked the movie fine, but it…tries too hard. Some movies, you can sense the director “over-packing,” throwing in a bunch of shit he thinks he might need, what if it gets cold at night, blah, and Monster’s Ball is a good example. I wouldn’t say it’s not credible, exactly, but like I said, it tries too hard.

I really have no problem with Berry getting an Oscar for it, but the overrater here suggests that the movie would have worked better with Angela Bassett in the role, which is interesting; Bassett is probably too much weapon for that fight, but I can see why Berry might seem a little lightweight to some people even if I didn’t particularly feel that way. Billy Bob Thornton is reliably strong in his role, too, but in spite of the performances — or maybe because of them — the movie does feel like an exercise at times, like, how much misfortune can we catalog before the audience shuts down emotionally? Discuss; give examples.

There’s an “okay, now it’s too much” line crossed, eventually, and then it’s not a great movie anymore. Memorable, sure. But overrated.

Moonstruck
Why it’s allegedly overrated: Unlikable male characters; Italian-American extended-family cliches; the central romance rings false
Agree or disagree? Huh. I have to say, I’d never considered any of that, but it’s a valid set of opinions, now that I think about it. However, I disagree that it’s overrated, because I believe the movie is shooting for fabulous — not in the Queer Eye sense, but in the sense that it’s the stuff of fable, with the giant moon and the metaphorical implications of replacing pipes and the book-ended way John Mahoney repeatedly gets a drink thrown in his face. It’s a fairy tale.

Now, if you agree with that contention but you just don’t think it works on that level, okay. But the overrater’s primary issue is apparently that Ronny and Loretta fall in love too fast, which…I hesitate to say that the central conceit of the movie is beside the point, but it…kind of is, because Moonstruck is a story, an illustrated children’s book for grown-ups, about love. It’s not asking you to believe that it could happen in real life; it’s asking you to see what did happen in the world of the movie.

If you can’t get into it, you can’t, but demanding real-time romantic realism from a film in which the moon is the size of the Woolworth Building is probably not a workable argument.

Also: “Old man, you give those dogs another piece of my food and I’m gonna kick you ’til you’re dead.” Love.

Mystic River
Why it’s allegedly overrated: “Ridiculous coincidences”; too many subplots lead to weak pacing; “Laura Linney’s totally offbeat Lady Macbeth moment”
Agree or disagree? Oh my God do I agree, and I’d like to thank Premiere for specifically mentioning Linney’s bizarro hard-ass turned-on-by-power scene, which came out of nowhere, landed with a loud clank, and then basically went nowhere.

I didn’t mind the Kevin-Bacon’s-prank-calling-wife subplot that much; it came off too pointedly weird for my taste, but every minute devoted to that is a minute I didn’t have to spend watching Sean Penn’s neck veins undulating like a sine wave, or Tim Robbins’s hunchy, shuffly, squinty portrayal of A Damaged Man — he had so many tics going at once just in emotionally quiet, expositional scenes that when he had to kick it up a notch, he had nowhere else to go. Nowhere except “cross-eyed,” that is, which is exactly where he went, and somehow he got an Oscar for that dinner-theater shit (although, in his defense, he did seem a little confused about that himself at the podium). Robbins is a good actor, he’s smart about it usually, and Sean Penn’s squealing and grunty bombast and “IS DAT MY DAWTUH IN DEYUH” and “look at me, doing a bit of naturalistic business with my bifocals, I Am An Ack Tore And This Is My Crahhhhhhft” made me want to snap a rubber band into his lip, don’t get me wrong, but…that’s Penn for you. He somehow manages to talk down to the audience while speaking lines someone else wrote; I’d admire his dexterity if it weren’t so consistently insufferable. I expect less tricksiness from Robbins.

Still, it’s apparent early on that the movie is a ham buffet, and it’s eminently possible to enjoy that kind of thing — if the movie isn’t a stentorian string of desolate-for-desolation’s-sake scenes, punctuated by the occasional burst of inchoate howling. Alas, that’s exactly what Mystic River is, and shooting it in a self-important high-fiber style doesn’t mean we’ll actually care. You have to tell a believable story, in a way that doesn’t feel like a curfew lecture.

I mean, if you’ve got some lady on the internet using the word “stentorian” about your movie? You went badly wrong somewhere.

Nashville
Why it’s allegedly overrated: The signature overlapping dialogue is “headache-inducing”; too many storylines make it feel sloppy; it’s “overwrought” and “overindulgent”; the music isn’t good
Agree or disagree? Disagree. Altman’s m.o. is tough to take at times, and it can feel like work trying to follow various threads of dialogue and figure out what to pay attention to. Not that the overrater doesn’t get that; I think the point is that Altman’s signature style just doesn’t work here, that he tried to do too much and did most of it inelegantly.

And it is somewhat clumsy, comparatively, but I like that about Nashville. It has a home-movie or a documentary feel about it, an ad-hoc sense, like these things really happened. I will say that it’s not a movie I’ve wanted to watch again, and that it does drag in spots, and I just plain don’t like the Barbara Jean character, or Ronee Blakely in the role.

But anything I could change about it would alter the movie in a fundamental way. It’s complete as it is, bad/weak parts and all, and it’s a unique piece of art. I should say that I consider myself a fan of Altman’s work, but many fans of Altman’s work have infinite patience with him when he’s off-track, or stuck, or doing a lot of throat-clearing, all “well, you can see what he’s trying to do”…yeah, you can, but when Altman misses, he misses by a wide margin, in my opinion. It’s not “flawed.” It’s bombing, straight up, and it’s too much effort. My point is that I can see what the overrater is getting at, but when an Altman movie doesn’t work, it Doesn’t Work, and that’s not the case here; yes, it’s sloppy, but the difference between “sloppy by design” and “sloppy because it’s just not catching fire” is eminently easy to spot in an Altman film, and Nashville is the former. And it’s sloppy, no doubt (or “sprawling,” if you want to spin it that way), but that’s the idea.

It’s not overrated.

The Red Shoes
Why it’s allegedly overrated: Melodramatic, yet “monotonous”; more fun to look at than to watch as story
Agree or disagree? The overrater notes Martin Scorsese’s fondness for the movie, and I watched it based on Scorsese’s recommendation myself, but I had no idea anyone thought particularly well of it besides Scorsese, so…yes, I guess it’s overrated. I don’t recall much of anything about it, except feeling at the time like it’s a product of its era and not designed for me to “get it.” It’s sort of the way I feel about Westerns — I don’t hate them or anything, but I think they spoke to people fifty years ago in a way they just don’t anymore, for whatever reason, and while you could certainly point to exceptions, I would argue that a movie like, say, Unforgiven proves the rule. Unforgiven isn’t a Western; it’s a Clint Eastwood movie. If that makes any sense. It’s a genre we’ve…moved on from, or something.

The Red Shoes operates on the same principle; I think too many movies have come and gone between it and now for it to have a profound effect.

The Wizard Of Oz
Why it’s allegedly overrated: This is a fairly significant oversimplification, but: it’s cheesy
Agree or disagree? See my comments re: Gone With The Wind. I don’t know that it’s possible to over- or underrate a film that, for better or worse, is part of American culture almost on a DNA level. The overrater comments, “The film’s reputation as kitsch-that-transcends-kitsch precedes it; a new viewer unaware of that rep might see kitsch, plain and simple.”

Fair enough, but…good luck finding the mythical “new viewer” of which he speaks. Most people see it for the first time as kids, and kids don’t really have a kitsch filter; I don’t have much interest in sitting through it now, but God, I loved it as a kid, the songs, the scary scene where the witch’s feet curled away under the house, everything. Of course it’s cheesy — a talking lion? Come on — and if you see it for the first time as an adult, it’s not going to grab you the way it would have if you’d seen it at five years old.

But I don’t think it’s supposed to, and anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s part of the lexicon now; it’s American canon. I haven’t seen it in a long time, so I can’t really speak to whether it’s a great movie on the merits, but again, whether it’s a great movie or not isn’t really the question.

So, I’ll agree that it’s overrated, mostly because I can’t really credibly disagree, but…it’s like overrating the Bible. Bit late for that, innit?

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