We've Come To Suck... Why Your 10 Favorite Movies Aren't That Amazing

Posted at 9:00 AM Oct 09, 2008

By Kevin Johnston

Continuing our week of unfiltered hate for Hollywood's sacred cows, we move our focus away from actors and to the films they populate. And the truth is, most of our AFI-approved favorite movies actually suck, or at least relative to the kneejerk hyperbole around them. Which is inevitable amonst a mass culture where Arrested Development gets canceled and Dave Matthews is successful. Here's 10 quintessentially revered films that could benefit from some honest revisionist criticism.

10. Every Woody Allen Movie
No one shoots New York like the city’s favorite pedophile, but can we all get over it already? Allen’s maladjusted, annoying, nebbishy persona can be really entertaining on the screen, but for those of us who live in New York and run into maladjusted, annoying, nebbishy people all the time, it’s just more of the same. Woody stepping off the line in Annie Hall is all well and good until you’ve actually spent time waiting on line behind a guy like that at the movies. You’re trapped listening to someone psychoanalyze the most meaningless aspects of their lives, while they question their own existence in what has to be the most annoying voice of all time. I go to the movies to avoid people like this, not to embrace their idiocy.

9. The Star Wars Saga
Who wrote these fucking movies, a kid who has to wear a helmet because his soft spot never closed up? If you can listen to the shit being spewed out of these characters mouths without laughing out loud, you deserve to keep all of your action figures sealed in their cases on your parent’s basement wall. (Yes, I know you have a separate entrance, so it’s like your own place.) I’ll give you the special effects and all that, but if you think the latter three installments are anything but a way for George Lucas to release more toys, you’re out of your mind. I mean, how bad does dialog have to be to make Billy Dee Williams look corny?

8. Boyz n the Hood
Here's a movie that took a really complex issue and simplified it the tale of three totally simple and stereotyped characters. Dough Boy was a gangster, Tres was caught in the middle and Ricky, well, Ricky’s dead. Boyz n the Hood was like a glass-bottom-boat tour for white people to see South Central as being how they already romanticized it. You can just picture the critics sitting around saying, “It’s so real.”

7. Clerks
Yes, Kevin Smith made this movie for like 32 bucks and shot it in the Quick-E-Mart he worked in, but that doesn’t make it a good movie. Cursing doesn’t make things funnier, putting your friends in a movie isn’t a good idea and no one fucking cares about comic book-reading losers from New Jersey. In fact, no one cares about New Jersey at all. Congratulations on making the most overrated student film ever.

6. Forrest Gump
Can Hollywood stop making movies about how we can all learn more about life by listening to retards? Deep metaphorical musings about a box of chocolates? Bearded cross-country runs? All that footage of Forrest super-imposed in major historical events? And that stupid feather? This is the movie your mom makes you watch when you go home for Christmas, and while she’s crying, you’re wishing she had an abortion.

5. Crash
Remember the expression on everyone’s face that wasn’t involved with Crash when it won Best Picture at the Academy Awards? They looked more surprised than when Marisa Tomei won Best Supporting Actress for My Cousin Vinny. And why did they look so surprised? Maybe it was because a glorified after school special about racism shouldn’t even be in the running for an Oscar. Not to mention the fact that it seemed like Paul Haggis played Mad Libs with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, just replacing racism for sickness.

4. Goodfellas
Hey, Tony from Queens, stop saying, “You keep your fucking mouth shut and you don’t rat on your friends.” Goodfellas may have convincingly showed off the less glamorous side of the mob, but it also committed the unpardonable sin of making every wannabe gangster from the outer boroughs decide that they were in the Mafia because they boosted some kid's bike when they were 10. This movie has a bigger third-act drop off then when they head off to war in Full Metal Jacket. Once Ray Liotta is all coked up, shipping kilos in baby diapers and watching a helicopter in the sky, things go to complete shit. And how about throwing in some Eric Clapton in to cinch the sucking.

3. Do The Right Thing
You been to Brooklyn? Were you there in the late '80s? Which block did Spike Lee film his oh-so-authentic slice of life on? Because ain’t nothing that pretty in Bedford Stuyvesant around that time. And of course the white guy is a Celtics fan… thanks for your brilliant meditation on race.

2. Scarface
Someone needs to remind all kids on the subway with giant Scarface T-shirts, giant Scarface jackets and yes, giant Scarface jeans, how this movie ended. This drug-dealing clown with the worst accent since Jon Voight in Anaconda lost his empire and got his numb face shot up in his tacky mansion. Brian DePalma’s overrated gangster flick doesn’t even come close to holding up and comes off like a bad episode of Miami Vice.

1. Schindler's List
Just because a movie is about something important, doesn’t mean it’s actually important. The American Film Institute ranks this as the ninth best American film EVER. Whether it was the girl in red or the transition to the real-life Holocaust survivors, the heavy-handedness (Speilberg’s trademark) was almost as bad as in E.T. While we’re at it, Saving Private Ryan sucked too.