How to Critique Films With a Hammer

So, it occurred to me that many, many films that frequently make people's "Top X Films of All Time" lists, are colossally overrated. Let us indulge in idoloclasm, shall we?

• Silence of the Lambs. Aside from how the film is very, very gross for no real artistic reason, Hannibal Lecter is proof positive that male characters can be Sues. He's also symptomatic of something terribly wrong with our culture, that we lionize sociopaths—precisely because they've got the emotional range of monitor lizards. Personally I'd like someone to make a movie where one of these ingenious sociopathic serial killers makes the mistake of going after a Mafia boss's kid, and then learns that organization beats genius every time, despite what Ayn Rand will tell you. It'd be a populist feel-good picture, sort of Capra meets Coppola.


• 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the one hand, it's still the single best portrayal of space travel in any movie. On the other, it doesn't actually have a story, and the "alien monoliths that accelerate evolution" (or something) are just crap, as is that whole pass-through-a-bad-screensaver and be reborn as a star-child...or...something... ending. I defy anyone to tell me why I shouldn't just fast forward to the part with the ship, then turn it off when the HAL nonsense starts. There is a very good 40 minute movie there, unfortunately it's 141 minutes long.


• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Watch this movie, and I dare you not to want to kill someone the next time you hear "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head". Also, historical fiction really doesn't benefit from an intentionally ambiguous ending (nor from Goldman's incredibly anachronistic dialog).


• Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Aside from the fact it is very, very, very, very slow, and the characters feel like they were left over from a Stephen King surplus sale (think about it), this film is named wrong. It's largely concerned with close encounters of the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Kind, but the encounter of the Third Kind only occurs incidental to the others. I'm probably the only one who cares, though.


• A Clockwork Orange, Unforgiven, the Shootist, similar films with utterly unlikeable anti-heroes. Your protagonist does not have to be a saint, but he has to be sympathetic, and these ones are, pretty much, inherently unsympathetic to me. In Orange, for instance, the Ludovico technique is supposed to be just awful, but the person it's performed on plainly deserves something cooked up by Roman or Chinese corrections professionals on a really bad day.


• Film noir in general suffers from the same issue, that characters are expected to keep our sympathy despite being utterly reprehensible—it is a weakness in a story if it makes you want to watch the protagonist die horribly, unless watching him die horribly is the point (and that's a pretty messed up kind of story). Even Casablanca has this problem—Renault extorts sex from refugees, which basically makes him a rapist (taking advantage of someone's desperation is morally equivalent to using force). He should, at the very least, have to do a hell of a lot more to earn his redemption than a little bureaucratic obstruction.

My beef with anti-heroes gives me an idea for another post, incidentally—stay tuned!