Dishonorable mentions for those near misses:
Bottle Rocket (W. Anderson, 1996), Casino (Scorcese, 1995), Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore, 1988), Magnolia (Anderson, 1999), No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007), The Others (Amenábar, 2001), The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, 1993), Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro, 2006), Sin City (Miller & Rodriguez & Tarantino, 2005), Thelma & Louise (Scott, 1991), The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988)
10. Crash (Haggis, 2004) – Modern melodramas dressed as cautionary moral tales are always showered with gallons of praise by those who want you to know how enlightened or socially conscious they are. It's a pedantic subgenre, and it's structured to thrive on a series of absurd contrivances that gradually increase the tension between characters (racial tension, in the case of Crash) until a boiling point is reached. Alea iacta est when a morally ignorant character lashes out horribly and violently toward a character of relative innocence.
It’s essentially a formula designed to foster drama and pull at the heart-strings while also making a moral stand. If the script has integrity and allows the ending to evolve naturally, this can be a great way to tell a story (e.g. Syriana, Straw Dogs). Usually, though, these film scripts rely upon stupid characters with improbably bad luck to reach that “ZOMG, I can’t believe that just happened!!!” ending (e.g. The Virgin Suicides, Mystic River).
Crash (2004)
"I can't take any more of this liberal edification... Shoot us. Please."
Crash has three or four inspired moments buried under all the false manipulation, paper-thin characters, and atrociously unsubtle dialogue. It isn’t close to the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but people who find it life-altering piss me off. This is how those conversations always go:
Them: "Have you seen Crash?"
Me: "Of course. I can't believe James Spader fucks a chick in the leg hole!"
Them: "Um... What?"
Me: "Oh. You mean the one with Ludacris."
Them: “Yeah! It's intense, maybe the best movie I’ve ever seen. And it really makes you think, too…”
Me: “Heh. What does it make you think about?”
Them: “You know, racism, class struggle, how fucked we all are inside. It forces you to look at what's going on in society.”
Me: “Oh yeah? And what conclusions have all these thoughts brought you to?”
Them: “I don’t know. Racism is bad. People should look past skin color.”
Me: “Awesome. I'm going to go now, and stab myself in the eye with a fork.”
9. Any Christopher Guest movie. Pick any one, it doesn't matter.
I have no problem with documentary parodies. Häxan (Christensen, 1922) and Land Without Bread (Buñuel, 1932) are ancient classics. More recently, Borat is funny, Diary of the Dead is passable, and Drop Dead Gorgeous fucking rules.
But Christopher Guest? His mockumentaries are about as funny as chewing through a colostomy bag; it's the same drab actors having the same mundane conversations in every one. And when you comment on the lack of laughs, his minions will chastise you for not appreciating subtle humor. Oh, I enjoy a buried punchline as much as the next guy, but an uninspired gag about dumb hicks trying their hand at community theater isn't even mildly funny when stretched out over 90 minutes. He creates buffoons who think they are anything but and it makes us feel superior to laugh at them, I get it, I do. But if Guest really wants to do something "for my consideration," he should have someone film Eugene Levy bashing him in the face with a Louisville Slugger.
8. The English Patient (Minghella, 1996) – Alright, I need to confess. I never even saw The English Patient. I admit it. It's still overrated, though.
Every year, those kooky guys and gals running the Oscars arbitrarily pick one mediocre period drama and elevate it above genuinely great films. I’m positive The English Patient was their darling in 1996.
Even if it were, hypothetically, a very good movie, it isn’t better than the great ones it went up against. Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen) and Lone Star (Sayles) are two of the best independent American films in the past few decades. Jerry Maguire (Crowe) is also highly underrated (as a sports flick and as a romantic comedy). And Danny Boyle’s colossally triumphant Trainspotting is better than all of those movies combined. I don’t have access to the algorithms used by whomever is behind the curtain to determines the “best picture,” but evidently any film set in a World War II hospital is a mathematical certainty.
(The English Patient has a low ranking because (1) while it may have won most of the Oscars in 1996, it has already been forgotten by most people. Thus it’s no longer rated highly enough to be egregiously overrated. (2) I never saw it, so there’s a 3.58% chance I have no idea what I’m talking about.
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Tomorrow we'll tackle 7 through 4…
(NOTE: Deep down, everyone knows Zoolander is dogshit, right? I’m not going to waste time writing about it here.)
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