Overly appreciated movies?

[rjb1]

As they say in poker, I'll see that defense of "A Christmas Story", and raise it. (However, being mindful that it's my opinion, not fact, and everyone is free to like it or not.)
The first time I saw that movie I thought someone had spied on me and told my early life story. The movie was fictionally set in northern Indiana, was actually shot in Cleveland, and I grew up just outside Detroit in the mid-fifties. Geographically identical... One tiny detail is that if you look in the background of the opening shot with all the ice on the trees, you can see some large industrial equipment in the distance. In that part of the country the houses and factories were intermingled. Our houses and our street looked just like Ralphie's.
Among many other things, Ralphie went to Warren G. Harding Elementary School - I went to Warren G. Harding Elementary School (in Detroit). The inside of the schoolroom looked just like the one in the movie. We also had "hillbilly" neighbors. (If you asked Bruce, the kid from that family, where he came from originally, he would say "Tucky" (Kentucky).)
We had a bully and he had a toady, and we would go around the block to avoid them. One of the pictures in the family photo album shows me and my brother seeing Santa Claus and I'm smiling and he's crying, as in the movie.

Even the Christmas tree ornaments were *exactly* the same as we had. Last but not least, I wanted desperately (and later got) a BB gun.
We didn't have a leg-lamp, and no one got their tongue stuck to a flagpole, but we did discuss doing that (but knew better).
People think that the movie is set in the forties, but that gang of kids are the first-wave baby-boomers who were born in the late '40's after the GI's got home after WWII. We were Ralphie's and Randy's ages in the mid-fifties. Me and my pals looked and acted just like the kids in the movie.
There are some small glitches and anachronisms in it, but for the most part that movie *is* the Midwest in the mid-fifties.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

I agree. I grew up in mid eastern Indiana and was 8 years old in 1955. Christmas Story nearly mirrored much of my early childhood as well.
HD

 

[jamespowers]

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. :cool2:

But I know the feeling; there are certain movies that are (or were) hugely popular, and I'll never understand why. For example, Mad Max. A lot of people told me I'd "love" that movie, so my wife (who was my girlfriend at the time) and I went to see it; about 30 minutes in we decided we'd rather be doing anything other than watch the rest of the movie, and left the theater. Some time later I did see it start to finish, and my opinion didn't change.

Another movie that I'll never understand the attraction to is A Christmas Story. But, in that case, at least I know why I don't understand it--I can't relate to any of the characters or situations in the movie. I wasn't alive in the 1940's, I never wanted a B.B. gun, I've never had to deal with snow, my parents weren't morons, and I don't like Bob Clark's movies.

Definitely lots of hippie in that movie. I had to get out my :laser:

A Christmas Story I can understand even out here near The World's Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum.
I wanted a BB gun and got one.

 

[Zombie_61]

I'm going to try to, not convert you, but give another perspective on this...I find that movie has several things like that, things you don't really pick up on until you watch it a few times.

I've actually seen it three times--in the theater when it was first released, on television a couple of years later, and again on television a couple of years ago; neither of the subsequent viewings changed my opinion of the movie. Also, I was joined by my wife and a good friend during the last viewing, and they both thought it was one of the worst movies they'd ever seen (and my wife grew up in the suburbs south of Chicago in the 60s, so she's very familiar with snow). I appreciate your efforts, but it's just one of those movies I'll never understand.

As they say in poker, I'll see that defense of "A Christmas Story", and raise it...The first time I saw that movie I thought someone had spied on me and told my early life story...Me and my pals looked and acted just like the kids in the movie...

I agree. I grew up in mid eastern Indiana and was 8 years old in 1955. Christmas Story nearly mirrored much of my early childhood as well.
HD

And you've both just proven my point--you identified with the characters and situations because they reminded you of your own childhoods. There's none of that in A Christmas Story for me.

Just to be clear, I'm pleased that so many people like or love the movie (or any movie, for that matter). I'm just not one of them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Not to nitpick details, but "A Christmas Story" could be set no later than 1940 -- that was the final year "Little Orphan Annie" was on the air under Ovaltine sponsorship. The decoder badge Ralphie receives in the mail is the 1940 version.

Jean Shepherd himself was born in 1921, and he would have been Ralphie's age in the early 1930s -- which was the period of "Annie's" greatest popularity on the air, and the period in which the original story was set. The film's director chose not use that setting, though, figuring a forties setting would be more accessible to the audience of the early eighties.

There are anachronisms that become apparent after about the fiftieth viewing -- the "Hut Sut Song" can be heard on the kitchen radio in one scene, which came out around the spring of 1941, and thus wouldn't have been on the air around Christmastime in 1940. And one of the police cars that responds in the flagpole scene is a postwar model. But overall, the setting is most consistent with the late prewar era.

That the film resonates so well with boomers confirms just how long elements of the Depression and prewar eras continued to linger in the mass culture. A lot of that was still going on my neighborhood in the late sixties, except that BB guns were for the middle-class kids. The kids I knew made do with throwing rocks, bricks, and frozen crab apples at each other.

I once got my tongue stuck to an aluminum storm door, and when I saw the flagpole scene in the movie I knew exactly what that poor kid was feeling.

 

[herringbonekid]

Something I don't like are self-consciously-arty "art films." I don't mind a film with artistic value, but it has to have actual entertainment value as well.

i'm guessing you mean directors like Wim Wenders, Peter Greenaway, Jim Jarmusch ... the art house directors ?

i think they need to be taken on a case by case basis. i can't abide much of Lars Von Trier's work for example, but i love many films by Ingmar Bergman, Bela Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky which would be written off as pretentious twaddle by many.

i draw the line at Andy Warhol though.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Von Trier is a disgusting puke, as a man as well as as a filmmaker. There, I've said it.

Warhol was a con man as much as he was an artist, and you've got to appreciate the art in that, I guess.

I cannot *stand* Terrence Malick. Someone needs to slap him across the back of the head and say "ENOUGH ALREADY."

The Artistes today who really irritate me are the young hipster types, the whole "mumblecore" crowd. We get a lot of that stuff, and whenever I see Duplass or Shelton or any of their disciples coming up on the schedule, I start trying to figure out how I can take some time off. Absolutely can't stomach movies with incomprehensible dialogue, nausea-inducing hand-held cameras, and smug, overentitled young white people whining about their lives. Blech.

 

[herringbonekid]

Lizzie, i haven't seen any of the recent mumblecore films, but i have seen many of the early 90s 'indy' precedents.

for me, 'art films' have to be first and foremost visually interesting, beautifully shot. low budget / wobblycam won't cut it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

for me, 'art films' have to be first and foremost visually interesting, beautifully shot. low budget / wobblycam won't cut it.

My idea of a great art film is "Sunrise." Beautifully composed visuals, but also a powerful, meaningful, comprehensible story.

 

[Smithy]

Warhol was a con man as much as he was an artist, and you've got to appreciate the art in that, I guess.

Warhol's work in the 60s was a response to the very first iterations of disposable/mass consumer culture. I'll agree that his later work was self-indulgent to say the least but his fine art/film work in the 60s was some of the first to question and highlight popular culture, the emerging cult of personality and fame, and the originality of an image.

Film-wise though I'll admit he's no great earth shaker in production values.

 

[Nobert]

Not to nitpick details, but "A Christmas Story" could be set no later than 1940 -- that was the final year "Little Orphan Annie" was on the air under Ovaltine sponsorship. The decoder badge Ralphie receives in the mail is the 1940 version.

Jean Shepherd himself was born in 1921, and he would have been Ralphie's age in the early 1930s -- which was the period of "Annie's" greatest popularity on the air, and the period in which the original story was set. The film's director chose not use that setting, though, figuring a forties setting would be more accessible to the audience of the early eighties.

There are anachronisms that become apparent after about the fiftieth viewing -- the "Hut Sut Song" can be heard on the kitchen radio in one scene, which came out around the spring of 1941, and thus wouldn't have been on the air around Christmastime in 1940. And one of the police cars that responds in the flagpole scene is a postwar model. But overall, the setting is most consistent with the late prewar era.





That the film resonates so well with boomers confirms just how long elements of the Depression and prewar eras continued to linger in the mass culture. A lot of that was still going on my neighborhood in the late sixties, except that BB guns were for the middle-class kids. The kids I knew made do with throwing rocks, bricks, and frozen crab apples at each other.

I'd guess the period was left deliberately ambiguous, for exactly the reasons you suggest...that the texture of kid-dom remained in a lot of ways consistent throughout the general time frame, so a child of the depression, the war babies of my parents' generation, or baby boomers could all get that sense of cultural deja-vu. (Note that Randy gets a toy Zepplin for Christmas...not a toy I would expect to be much in demand after 1938... while if Ralph Parker were a true boomer he'd more likely be watching The Lone Ranger on T.V. than listening to Little Orphan Annie on the radio.)

By the by, if anyone who doesn't know wants a fix of onscreen Shepherd, try looking up The Great American Fourth of July or the other televised specials based on his writings, which feature a teenaged Ralph played a by a young Matt Dillon (yes), and in tone and outlook are closer to Shepherd's somewhat fatalistic worldview than Bob Clark's movie.

A slight backtrack there, back to the kvetching.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Von Trier is a disgusting puke, as a man as well as as a filmmaker. There, I've said it.

[video=youtube;QHZR9SA5pOg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZR9SA5pOg[/video]

Never heard of Von Trier until now. His life reads like a Sprockets skit on SNL. lol

 

[vitanola]

I'm going to try to, not convert you, but give another perspective on this. I also wasn't alive during the 40s, and never wanted a B.B. gun, but I love A Christmas Story. I like the way it seems to capture the flavor of middle-class life during the period, I like the fact that Ralphie is often borderline comatose, while his inner monologue may be reeling, which to me captures the helpless feeling of being a know-nothing kid pretty well. I don't think the parents are idiots. They're adults as seen from a kid's perspective, with their own quirks and foibles that adults think kids don't notice. Take another look at the "soap in mouth" scene. At the start, the mom is all parental discipline until she calls Schwartz's mother. Then notice her reaction when she hears Schwartz being wailed on, as though she's kind of second-guessing the whole discipline thing, thinking about what it's actually like for the kid when they are on the receiving end of what may as well be, for them, divine retribution. After she sends Ralph to bed, she tries putting the soap in her own mouth, just to see what it's like.

I find that movie has several things like that, things you don't really pick up on until you watch it a few times.

Anyway, I rest my case. You're free not to like it, of course, I just wanted to put in that plea.

I've a soft spot in my heart for the picture just because I grew up in Cleveland, had relatives who lived on W11th St., where the outdoor scenes were filmed, and remembered the lovely transformation of our Public Square and Euclid Avenue for the filming.

I was pretty young, about 21, when the picture was filmed here, and was one of the drivers in the street scenes (in my (then) appropriately beat-up 1927 Ford Coupe, which appears in one or two frames), and I provided some of the radio sets which appear in the department store window.

The picture for me invokes both my mother's tales of her childhood and my own salad days.

 

[Nobert]

The only Lars Von Trier movie I ever saw was Dancer in the Dark and I frankly am not even sure how to evaluate it. It was an ordeal as much a movie. If not a "theater of pain" experience, definitely a theater of extreme, squeamish discomfort. It would be with extreme trepidation that I subjected myself to another of his films.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The only Lars Von Trier movie I ever saw was Dancer in the Dark and I frankly am not even sure how to evaluate it. It was an ordeal as much a movie. If not a "theater of pain" experience, definitely a theater of extreme, squeamish discomfort. It would be with extreme trepidation that I subjected myself to another of his films.

We showed "Melancholia" a couple years ago. At the end, the Earth is destroyed, and my only thought was "Ah, sweet relief. At least that means there won't be any more Von Trier movies."

 

[Worf]

We showed "Melancholia" a couple years ago. At the end, the Earth is destroyed, and my only thought was "Ah, sweet relief. At least that means there won't be any more Von Trier movies."

That's the only film of his I've ever seen and I loved it. Watch it everytime its on Showtime. I've seen just about every "earth doomed" movie there is (except that crap on the SYFY Channel) and "Melancholia" was the most beautiful, trancelike experience I've ever seen. Depressing? Sure! But great film making as well.

Worf

 

[Nobert]

A couple of modern ones that I thought garnered more hoopla than was merited:

American Beauty. I generally like Kevin Spacey, but this one just fell flat for me. Overwrought in an understated way. When I see a film about a miserable office worker who gets fired, has a personal renaissance, then gets killed, and my greatest lasting impression is "Thora Birch, what a dish," then something didn't click. And on the subject of the stars of Ghost World...

Lost in Translation. Again, I like Bill Murray, thought he did a good job, and some of the scenes of he and Scarlett Johansen aimlessly knocking around Tokyo were quite nice. But overall, the movie was so crammed with quiet, poignant, meaningful moments that I couldn't tell what was going on half the time.

 

[p51]

I've watched 2001 a handful of times over the years in an attempt to understand why so many people held it in such high regard, and never quite got it. Then, last year, after a discussion about the movie with a good friend whose opinion I value I watched it again and, for whatever reason, it "clicked". For me, the secret was to consider it a silent movie with occasional sound effects and bits of dialogue instead of title cards. I still think the ending is rubbish, but with regards to the special effects I think it's still one of the best sci-fi movies ever made.

As a space program fan, I marvel at the technical and artistic achievement he accomplished with 2001. But I do understand those who think the movie is rubbish, especially those who read Clark's book.
A pal of mine at NASA said it best, "I think 2001 is an amazing movie, can you imagine how much more amazing the movie would've been with a plot?"

 

[celestial]

WTF is wrong with some of you people? Critical much?

"Anything by Stanley Kubrick."
You obviously know nothing about cinema, bud.

 

[Two Types]

WTF is wrong with some of you people? Critical much?

"Anything by Stanley Kubrick."
You obviously know nothing about cinema, bud.

One thing he does know about cinema is that he doesn't like Kubrick's films.

It's called opinion. And this particular thread exists solely to offer the voice of dissent against the generally accepted views of what is great.

P.S. I realise that in my earlier posts i forgot to mention two particular films whose reputations are, in my opinion, undeserved: One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and The Shining.