5) J. Edgar
I apologize for the Clint Eastwood hate. I’ll make up for it another time. For now, what the heck happened with J. Edgar? And better yet, how did this movie make it onto both the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review’s respective top ten movies of the year lists? Again, if someone could explain this for me I’d be overjoyed.
What I saw was a lot of speechifying characters and a pretty straightforward biographical drama that showed glimpses of interesting things but went the broad route instead of going into depth in anything. I much prefer something like Lincoln, which allowed itself to get kind of specific, than J. Edgar. Then again, Hitchcock also kind of sucked. So I’m not sure what would have made J. Edgar work better. But if people got something out of it, that’s awesome.
With the access we now have to virtually every opinion imaginable about movies released each year, it’s becoming easier to identify common threads and the dominating opinion about seemingly everything, not least of which movies. Things like award designation have become less of a surprise because we tend to already know what most of the “experts” as well as the public think about any film that’s out there. This also lends itself to potential groupthink, people simply signing off on the popular opinion without giving it much thought themselves.
In some cases that makes for some really interesting outlier opinions on movies that were widely thought to be of one type, and with one shift in perspective, could be seen another way. So we always have to be open to having our minds opened or changed when it comes to movies we think are dumb. That’s why I’m open to, in fact would welcome, any of these movies receiving an ardent defense from their fans. But from where I sit, I just don’t see their redeeming qualities.
