Napoleon Dynamite

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Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon Pictures 2004.

Before watching the movie:

This movie took my school by storm. I saw nothing that appealed to me, but even as someone whose reaction to hype is to become more determined to avoid it until it goes away, the power and longevity of the hype was starting to wear me down, until a peer whose opinion I respected told me “watching it will take 20 points off your IQ”. So I decided it had nothing for me, and eventually the hype went away. The cult stayed, but they got quieter.

By now, the main evidence this movie was popular is the occasional Vote for Pedro reference drifting by like a tumbleweed. Perhaps that means it wasn’t as formative as some other movies I could have included this month, but when I think of movies my generation loved, this is at the top, even if it never sold me.

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Garden State

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Garden State. Double Feature Films 2004.

Before watching the movie:

I honestly have no idea what this movie is. I think this movie fixed in my mind that New Jersey is called the Garden State, and it stars Zach Braff apparently trying to do something more serious than Scrubs. I seem to recall that it might be a road movie?

Beyond that, the only thing I associate with this movie is that it keeps coming up as an underappreciated failure that millennials love.

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Brokeback Mountain

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Brokeback Mountain. Focus Features 2005.

Before watching the movie:

Among this month’s selections I guess this isn’t the most widely watched. But I still consider it formative to my cohort. Everybody knew about the Gay Cowboy Movie. Many were not kind. But I think the fact that it existed, that it challenged masculine images, and came from a major studio with big name actors, affected our perspective, even if not all at once. The world was changing, and this was part of the background radiation in the course of that change. Almost two decades later, I don’t think anything about this premise seems nearly as controversial as it did back then. Is that representation in action? Is it the confirmation of culture warriors’ fears? Maybe it’s both, or maybe neither.

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(500) Days of Summer

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(500) Days of Summer. Watermark Productions 2009.

Before watching the movie:

This month I’m taking a look at movies that seem to have defined my generation but I missed anyway. So I’ll start off with one that’s been at the top of my list of movies I feel left out about for over a decade and a half.
All I really know about this movie is that it’s about a relationship, I think it goes badly, and it’s one of the defining movies of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character archetype, the millennial-coded hipster free spirit love icon. Also I know it as the movie that made it apparent that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to continue his acting career as an adult.

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Battlefield Earth

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Battlefield Earth. Franchise Pictures 2000.

Before watching the movie:

Among the cinematic debacles, this is one of the most infamous failures. I recall it’s supposed to be ridiculous, and maybe with a heavy handed Scientologist message? All I know for sure is John Travolta hasn’t worked much since.

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Gigli

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Gigli. Columbia Pictures 2003.

Before watching the movie:

I have to confess that I thought this was a completely different kind of movie. I thought it was a carefree European romcom somehow that everyone hated for some reason. I thought it was in Paris, I thought Gigli was the girl’s name, and I didn’t really know anything else. Both of those things were wrong. In preparing to watch I have discovered that it’s more of a seamy crime comedy I guess? I wonder if I was mixing it up with another romantic comedy. I highly doubt it was Surviving Christmas. Probably Gigi.

Picking out posters, I do think that the marketing was partly to blame, at least what marketing I saw with the media I had access to in 2003 for an R-rated movie.

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Waterworld

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Waterworld. Universal Pictures 1995.

Before watching the movie:

Kevin Costner’s boondoggle passion project on the water. A post-apocalyptic bomb. That’s all you hear about this movie. An expensive project nobody asked for, nobody saw, and nobody talks about except for secondhand derision. I don’t really know enough to say any more. But especially in a culture of superlatives, hardly any reviled movie is as bad as they say.

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Hudson Hawk

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Hudson Hawk. Silver Pictures 1991.

Before watching the movie:

I don’t know much more about this than that it’s an infamous, ill-advised flop. I think it’s some kind of throwback to noir or heist movies, but it (the movie) went wrong. All I know for sure is that this is really not what people wanted to see from Bruce Willis.

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Mame

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Mame. ABC 1974.

Before Watching the Movie:

I really have no concept of what this movie is about. I think Mame is an outrageous character and I think this has the reputation of being an overblown production heralding the collapse of the musical bubble like Hello Dolly was.

I don’t know if I’m more surprised to learn this is starring Lucille Ball (not someone I think of as a singer) or that there was a nonmusical stage play and nonmusical film before this show. Or that this version is just “Mame”, not “Auntie Mame”.

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Victor/Victoria

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Victor/Victoria. Ladbroke Entertainments 1982.

Before watching the movie:

I have a dim memory spatially associating the existence of this movie with the existence of Amelie, but I wouldn’t have been in the space I’m thinking about seeing posters of them (elementary school restroom hallway) after Amelie came out, and I don’t believe they would have put, really either of them, in that place. Anyway, I remember very slowly learning of the existence of this show and some time later actually digging just deeply enough to know what the title meant.

I expect some degree of playing with gender roles if the core of the plot is a woman impersonating a man in order to get work, and that’s about all I can guess at. I’ve seen surprisingly little of Julie Andrews’ work for how much she is an institution in entertainment.

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