At The Movies

Last night, I watched L.A. Confidential for the first time.  Yes, I know it's 8 years old.  Yes, I know it won a boatload of Oscars.  No, I don't know why it took me this long.  But it was pretty damn good.  Not quite Pulp Fiction good, but certainly in Reservoir Dogs territory.  IMDb users gave it an 8.3, which puts it just outside of their Top 50.  It's funny though - even really great movies seem to get trashy reviews, both amateur and professional.  It's the amateur reviews that got my attention this week.

Here's a random sampling of IMDb user reviews for some of the top rated films of all time.  I've done some mild editing for brevity and profanity's sake.  Enjoy.

L.A. Confidential (1997)
"L.A. Confidential is one long dull confusing movie with small sparks that quickly fade and burn out, even a stellar cast including Kevin Spacey and Russell Crowe cant get past the convoluted script that makes so many twists and turns you will get a headache, the acting is good except for one person and that one person is Kim Basinger who for some unknown reason was given an oscar, I say given because her performance in this movie was not only terrible but it was one of the worst I have ever seen."
[Editor's note: Very clever use of the run-on sentence.]

Star Wars (1977)

"This is a silly, hugely over-rated, egotistical, boring, contrived, joyless, cheap and morally bankrupt piece of garbage.  There is simply nothing entertaining about this movie."

Schindler's List (1993)

"A fictional account of a character named Oskar Schindler. This traitor is obsessed with disrupting the German war effort.  In one scene a German soldier is seen taking time out from his duties to do roadside barbershop work.  The rest of the movie is mostly about trains in Europe.  If you have ever been stuck in traffic at a railroad crossing, you can pretty much guess the plot.  A real disappointment of a film, but may be of some interest to railroad buffs."

Pulp Fiction (1994)

"God awful, no plot, horrid acting, no reason to have been made. I am extremely sorry for having spent 30 minutes of my life watching it, i was asleep 15 minutes into it."
[Editor's note: hunh?]

"I just managed to stay awake through this load of crappy excuse for a motion picture!  It only contains a enormous amount of words that don´t say anything.  The two main characters are so stupid that they should never have been created.  This is a total waste of time.  And so is commenting on this junk so I will stop now."

Citizen Kane (1941)

"It sucks."

Psycho (1960)

"What's so terrifying about watching blood go down the drain? Any real horror fan knows that it's much more scary when [you] see the wounds.  If Hitchcock knew how [to] actually scare people he would have shown gory breast shots."

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

"This movie is just awful. Everything about it makes me feel sick. I would like to begin my review by saying that Judy Garland did this movie when she was 16-17, well..EXCUSE ME...I thought she was 40! She looked not only as a woman, who had a lot of men in her life, but like a woman whose only pastime was to drink and...you understand me. Garland is not only a disgusting woman ( I can not even call her 'woman', she doesn't not deserve to be called so) , but an astonishingly lame actress, I saw kids in 3rd form act better than her, but no, not only that she lived and was popular, she also gave birth to another monster - Lisa Minelli, her daughter..."

Forrest Gump (1994)

"All retards should watch this movie. I mean maybe they can learn something from Forrest's example, namely, to get off their lazy arses and make themselves usefull. If Gump can do it, why can't they? Instead of being a strain on society and simply waiting for government hand outs, why don't they join the army or go run across the country, or become millionaires or something? Jesus, talk about lazy. This movie should be a painful message to all these freeloading retards."