This week, I've been invited to appear on Full Moon Fever (Thursday at 10 a.m. on WMFO) to talk about movies and address the hosts' disagreements with my picks for overrated movies. In honor of this appearance, and because I like throwing more fuel onto the fire, I give you a second installment of overrated movies! This time, however, they're all united by a theme: movies that think they're a lot smarter than they are. (Insert joke about a certain pop culture columnist here.)
"Donnie Darko" (2001): We all know the high-school kids out there who revel in feeling smarter than everyone else, even though they are far from the smartest kids in their classes. Thankfully for them, this self-indulgent film exists. I "got" it (though fans will insist that I didn't), but frankly, in the end there was not much to get. The film is intentionally vague and convoluted, whilst half-heartedly throwing in some freshman-year philosophy, so that it can say very little but appear to say a lot. But like I said, it has the perfect defense of saying to all of its detractors that they just don't "get" it. It can't lose.
"Scarface" (1983): This film suffers from what I have termed "Dark Knight Dilemma." It is too stupid to be taken seriously, but I can't turn my brain off and enjoy it as dumb fun either because it's so slow and ponderous. Yes, the last scene is fun, blow-'em-up insanity, but is it worth the three hours of build-up and dealing with Pacino's cringe-worthy accent? No. I'm not a big fan of MTV's "Cribs," but at least that show has the sense to strip down the appeal of gawking at lots of bling to simply gawking at lots of bling without trying to shoe-horn in a plot or characters.
"V for Vendetta" (2005): This movie is a perfect example of anarchy made for mass consumption. In true Hollywood fashion, it does away with the source material's scary and disturbing ideas, like having a prostitute as the point of identification or, even worse, actually placing the blame of the status quo on the people and not just the big, bad, shadowy government. The film even gives us a completely unnecessary romance between main characters V and Evey; in Hollywood logic, why else would there be a man and woman on screen together? Furthermore, while I'm not necessarily opposed to changing things for movies, I must ask why they even bothered using "V for Vendetta" as a basis for a Bush-administration allegory: the comic book is so much about Britishness and Thatcherism that to change it as they did completely ripped out the story's core. It would have made sense to go all the way and transpose it fully to America or just leave well enough alone. But all these changes made the movie far more palatable to an American audience. They got a vague criticism of Bush (that exonerated them of guilt) with the comfort of not seeing their country in ruins, but a similar, though ultimately foreign, one in its place.
"The Boondock Saints" (1999): God, I wish I could remember this movie well enough to rip into it. The problem is that it is just like every other action movie, so it's tough to recollect or even properly hate it, except that it has religion. And religious references automatically kick everything up a level on the class scale, right? Also, this movie has the "appeals to a certain group" benefit. Unsurprisingly, I was shown this movie by two Bostonians who strongly embraced their Irish-American heritage: I suspect that they had more incentive to rally around this film than just its quality.
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Devin Toohey is a senior majoring in classics. He can be reached at Devin.Toohey@tufts.edu.
