As you’ve been reading throughout the week, I asked quizzo regulars Mike Minion, Junior, and Koob to submit their favorite and least favorite movies that won the Best Picture Award. They’ve all three agreed on Casablanca as one of the five best films to win Best Picture. (I disagree, btw. I think it’s way overrated.) There is also one film they all agreed was one of the worst: Dances With Wolves. All three of them hated this film. Of course, part of the reason they all hated it is that it’s a bad movie that knocked off one of the greatest films of all time. Here are their comments, as well as the one Best Picture winner Mike Minion refuses to watch.
Junior: This movie was the one which made Kevin Costner think he could do anything. I would have liked it a lot more if Costner wasn’t in it, but he was EVERYWHERE! Too earnest and self-conscious and self-satisfied.
Better Choice: GoodFellas
Koob: This movie was just long, slow, and boring and it beat out Goodfellas which is one of my favorite movies of all time and probably my favorite Scorsese movie.
Mike: When Kevin Costner cares about a subject, he can make a decent movie. He likes baseball, so Bull Durham and Field of Dreams are pretty good. Apparently, he doesn’t care for oceans, the US Postal Service or Native Americans, as Waterworld, The Postman and Dances with Wolves are not. Three hours of Kevin Costner being “earnest” is about 173 minutes too long. To quote Lisa Simpson, “Poor Mr. Costner, he tries SO hard.” Even worse: it beat out Goodfellas for the award.
As for the movie that Mike won’t watch, because he’s ridiculously stubborn so principled: The only Best Picture I haven’t seen is Titanic, and I never will. I have seen the You-Tube version: The Titanic in 5 Seconds. Now, THAT I like. But when you take an engrossing tale of tragedy, heroism, cowardice, nobility and fate and ruin it with a sappy and impossible love story (steerage passengers did NOT look like Leo DiCaprio; they had bad teeth and smelled like yesterday’s catch), I just can’t get on board.
My take on Mike and Titanic: You had Gigi in your top 5, so who knows what you’ll like. Who knows? You might love Titanic. Personally, I don’t like it, but I don’t hate it either. Everything other than the dumbass love story is pretty awesome. But the love story is incredibly cliche and obnoxious.
Refusing to see Titanic on the basis of some dubious principle is ridiculous, especially when you’ve been perfectly willing to see considerably worse movies like Braveheart and Gladiator. As Goodtimes says, the love story is awful. Cameron apparently has the belief that not only is he a very talented director who can make an exciting action flick, but also that he is a great writer, writing eternal stories that speak to the human condition, which, in fact, he is not, and is completely incapable of writing even vaguely human characters. He got probably the two best actors of their generation to star in the movie, and they were completely incapable of doing anything to make that story watchable.
But the historical parts of the movie are well done and exciting, and they’ve stayed with me much more than any of, say, Gladiator, which is just a completely unremarkable film, and pretty much just as full of terrible clichés.