Rebel With a White Claw – 5 Classic movies that suck
America, sometimes movies are called classics, masterpieces, or even works of art, and you watch them, and you just scratch your head, and wonder why.
I get the art aspect of it, and sometimes a movie just looks beautiful, and comes across as a boring waste of time. Now, as you know, I like to expand my horizons. I like to try new things. Heck, even if you watch an old black and white classic, you are really taking an hour and a half of your time, because they rarely made anything over that time.
Today I have decided to enthrall you with my list of five movies that are “classics”, that I absolutely hated, and five movies I liked, that are not well known.
Citizen Kane
If Charles Foster Kane would have kept his trap shut, I wouldn’t have wasted 4 Hours of my life, and then every time I hear it mentioned add 5 minutes of me wondering why it’s considered a classic. The acting was, as usual for the time, a little overdone. The scenes are fine, if not pedantic. But the story is just a snoozer. It tells the tale of reporters trying to figure out Kane’s last word, “Rosebud”, and what it meant. I’ve seen this movie twice sadly, and remembered quickly the second time, I didn’t care why he uttered it. Definitely overhyped.
Gone with the Wind
Amazingly, the first two movies I picked go over the 90 minute mark I claim most movies at this time go. This movie comes in at a hefty 4 hours. Four god damn hours telling the time of Scarlett O’Hara, a rich southern belle, living on Tara, not getting the man she originally wants, because he’s marrying his cousin. (that’s how southern stereotypes, and my jokes, start). Luckily Rhett Butler hears, played by Clark Gable, so he weasels his way into her life, and…well, you’ve all probably seen it. I’ll be honest, this is my aunt’s favorite movie, I have watched it with her a few times as a kid, when you didn’t have other options, and have seen it in its entirety, but have never seen it start to finish because I have fallen asleep. All I can say, after about a half hour of melodramatic acting, you actually root for Sherman to hurry up.
Rebel without a Cause
Who is the coolest man in the history of film? James Dean of course. With his body of work of three films, he never had a chance to prove that he was a pretty mundane actor. Honestly, most method actors take themselves too seriously, and really put out one or two amazing roles, but usually bog down a movie. In this movie, if you read about it, all it talks about is how amazing an actor he is, all the different quirky things he did to get in character, and how this movie is a classic. Here’s how I saw it. Jim (James Dean), is a tormented teenager, not fitting in because he’s new. He’s drunk at the police station to start, and whines because one parent tells him one thing, one tells him another. The leather clad youth’s have taken a disliking to him, which results in bullying, a knife fight, and eventually a game of “chickie”, where the chief hood drives off the side of a cliff, because his leather jacket gets caught on the window handle. (For you kids too young to know, us old timers had to use physical labor to raise and lower our car windows…barbaric”. This causes Jim more angst, so he falls into the arms of a 16 year old Nathalie Wood, and has some of the most unrealistic kisses ever, very stiff. This also allows Sal Mineo’s character Plato to moon over him the whole movie. It is pretty obvious that he is in love with Jim, but because this was filmed in 1955, homosexuality had not been discovered yet, so there is no way it could be depicted in the movies. I’ve seen this a few times and hate it more each time I watch it. People are lost in his image, this is a crap fest
Apocalypse Now
I am so sad I am putting this on the list. I really wanted to like this movie. I really like some of the performances in it. I think some of the special effects are just amazing. But it’s slow, and once you see Marlon Brando method acting (see above), as a 300+ pound colonel, I was calling bullshit. I thought Martin Sheen was brilliant, Robert Duvall was great. There were other great performances…but it just dragged. Granted, its 147 minutes long, seems much longer, and once again I wish Sherman would have shown up and marched.
A Clockwork Orange
Once again, my friends all told me that I really needed to see this, how amazing it was, I was missing out…so I was pretty late to the game. So I watched it. And I watched it again. Heck, I watched it 3 weeks ago. I have literally watched this movie 5 times. I get the premise behind it, Malcolm McDowell is amazing as the head Droog. There is nudity. But the dialog is hard to follow. The movie also drags. You question if people can really be that stupid. You question where you’re at in life. At least there is nudity. And to make sure I didn’t miss anything, I decided to read the book. It really isn’t that long a book. It took me three weeks to read it. It was worse than the movie. Reading the dialect was harder than hearing the dialect. Deciphering the dialect actually took away from the plot of the movie. I won’t read it again, and after reading it, the movie still sucked.
If you really want to discuss it, comment on the blogs, or you can reach me at @jaycanchu on most any social media platform. And you get to see inappropriate memes, pictures of me flexing my muscles, and pies I bake.
Tomorrow will be the second half of this talking about some movies I enjoy, that you may not have heard of.
Be nice to each other, do a kind thing for a stranger, and pet kitties.
Jay Roach