Adam actually fills out a meme!

[yendi]

Ganked from robyn_ma, and filled out because it's one of the rare memes that I actually have opinions on.

1. You only get to watch one movie for the rest of your life. Which one do you pick? That depends. If this means, "one movie, as many times as you want," I'd say Airplane! If it's "one movie, and after that, you die," I'd have to pick The Cure For Insomnia.

2. You get to completely destroy and remove one movie from existence. Which one do you pick? Harvard Man. Way worse than Van Helsing, and without the snark potential of that or Cube 2: Hypercube.

3. Which movie that doesn't get nearly enough play would you recommend to everybody? Free Enterprise. Still Shatner's best job to date.

4. Which as-yet-unreleased movie this year would you kill someone to see early? That's tough. With Serenity and The History of Violence only a few weeks away, I can't really justify murdering someone. So we have to look ahead to X-mas time releases. And although there are a few films I'm intrigued by (King Kong, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, All the King's Men, The Producers, and, of course, Oscar bait Big Momma's House 2), there are too many question marks around them. That said, I'd gladly amputate a limb or two off someone I don't care for much for an early glimpse at Kong or the Narnia movie.

5. Which movie is the funniest movie you've ever seen? See question #1.

6. Which movie has made you cry the hardest? Big Fish. Sobbed my way through the final ten minutes or so.

7. What's the best ending sequence to a movie that you've ever seen? Hmmm. That's tough (as much because not all movies have ending sequences). I'm a big fan of the ship sequence in The Usual Suspects, and the final fifteen minutes in Tomorrow Never Dies is the best in the Bond series, imho. But I've got to go with the classics here, and Superman 2's ending is just cathartic and fun. Note that I'm talking about sequences here -- Casablanca had arguably the single greatest ending ever, but I'm assuming we're talking about a fifteen-minute sequence, not the final two minutes.

8. What's the best opening sequence to a movie that you've ever seen? Raiders of the Lost Ark. Oh, holy shit, did that movie suck me in. Great, iconic action moments that completely set the tone for the entire movie. Wow.

9. Who's your favorite movie character, and why? Indiana Jones. He's an academic with a PhD who gets into rollicking adventures, cracks great one liners (also cracks whips), and is lusted after by all the ladies. He's who I always wanted to grow up to be.

10. Which movie character do you think has had the best entrance ever in a movie? Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun.

11. Which movie character do you think has had the best exit ever in a movie? I don't know if I can pick just one. Bill Paxton in Aliens, of course, goes down fighting with gusto. And there are any number of great "exits" in horror movies. But the best exit is probably Philo's in UHF.

12. Which supposedly good movie do you loathe? Gone With the Wind. How is this wretched, overblown piece of shit considered a classic? *shudder* More recently, I'd nominate Bubba Ho-Tep. I adore Joe Lansdale's writing, and my strong-but-hetero love for Bruce Campbell is well-documented. But I've tried this movie three times, and gotten three solid naps out of it. I feel more shame over the latter, as too many people whose taste I trust consider it a classic.

13. Which supposedly crappy movie do you love? There are three movies on the IMDB Bottom 100 that, imho, have no place even near that list. Spice World, at #83, is an example of people voting based on spite. Hate the Spice Girls music all you want, but the movie was fun cheese made by people who didn't take themselves as seriously as their public did. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm still petitioning for a DVD release of Gymkata (#79). But #85, Carnosaur, is still, imho, the best dinosaur film released in 1993 starring a member of the Ladd/Dern family. And I proudly own in on DVD.

14. You get to kill one actor/actress and get away with it. Which one do you get rid of? Alas, Uwe Boll has not made any appearances as an actor. So this is a tough one. I'm temtped by robyn_ma's choice of Kirk Cameron, but he's so monumentally irrelevant, I feel I could put my murder card to better use. With that in mind, I can't think of anyone more useless, and more associated with utter crap (with nothing good to his name) than Johnny Knoxville.

15. Which supposedly bad actor do you actually like? Again, Robyn_Ma already beat me to one of my choices -- Brittany Murphy. But based on his three Worst Actor Raspberry Awards, I'd have to go for good old Sly Stallone, who still entertains me.

16. Which supposedly good actor do you wish would just go away? Can we safely assume that, Oscar or not, no one actually regards Halle Barry as a good actor? If we're talking "go away" from on-screen parts, Tom Hanks. He's really good, but just hasn't tried in years, and picks treacly scripts that don't even ask him to do anything other than show up on Oscar night. If we're talking "go away," period, I'd nominate Tom Cruise, an under-appreciated actor who almost deliberately seems to want to undercut his talents with his psycho-scientology babbles.

Comments

[dr-nebula.livejournal.com]

Boy, do I agree with your take on Gone with the crapWind.

I've tried a couple times to watch that dull-assed 4-hour crap-fest of overblown acting. Its almost beyond my endurance to complete!

[terracinque.livejournal.com]

It's got that incredible panoramic crane shot of the wounded soldiers at the train station to its credit.

Otherwise, yeah, I'm right with you. There's a scene in front of a projection shot between Scarlett and Ashley that is so obviously a projection shot that I laughed out loud last time I saw the movie.

[dr-nebula.livejournal.com]

Ms. Scarlett mugs yee camera so much that she'd make a rightly fine addition to one of yer gangs. RRRR!

Methinks I've gotten too much pirate jargon in me brainmeats today.

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

I saw the trailer for A History of Violence last night and man, does that look excellent.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

'Which as-yet-unreleased movie this year would you kill someone to see early?'

Sadly, the operative words are this year, and not, say, August 16, 2006. Because you know we would both kill kittens dressed like teddy bears to see Snakes on a Plane tomorrow.

[yendi]

Hell, yes.

[experimentego.livejournal.com]

I agree with your assessment of Tom Cruise.

There are just some actors who get so easily beaten up by cultural pundits who fail to realize its their antics not their acting that is their weak spot. It's not that Tom Cruise is a bad ACTOR, he's just a bad CELEBRITY.

[unwilly.livejournal.com]

Hey, he's a great celebrity! See all the noteriety and publicity he generates? He's just a bad human being.

[unwilly.livejournal.com]

-un enjoys the brain rummage

I wish I had more time to discuss this.

4, BMH2 oscar bait, bwaaaaahhhahaaa

8, totally

12, ugh, hate that frikkin movie, recycle it for the silver

[unwilly.livejournal.com]

8, Star Wars, Or Jaws are also good picks, as Lucas and Speilberg were doing amazing work, then

[yendi]

Both very good alternatives.

[brak55.livejournal.com]

Thank you for mentioning Free Enterprise. I've talked about that one more than once in LJ with the result always being "I've never heard of that movie."

Great movie and definitly Shatner at his self-mocking best.

[yendi]

It's one of those films that just somehow slipped through the cracks, but I adore it.

[phantom_wolfboy]

Thirded. Also, the soundtrack is great, and includes Shatner rappin' like Willie Shakes.

Uh-oh, Adam and I agreed on a movie. The end times are upon us.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

'Tom Cruise, an under-appreciated actor'

Cruise isn't a bad actor. He mostly plays variations on himself, but so did James Stewart. I'd say there are two different kinds of actors: the Personality Actor (Cruise, Stewart, Hanks, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts, Christina Ricci), who plays one note but plays it well and occasionally strays from his/her usual template (Cruise in Magnolia, Ford in The Mosquito Coast, etc.); and the Chameleon (Sean Penn, Gary Oldman, Johnny Depp, De Niro up until the '90s or so), who tries never to do the same thing twice, often risking disaster and sometimes achieving it, but seldom boring to watch.

[yendi]

Very true. And add Bogie and Bacall to that first list.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

The other thing I would mention i/r/t Personality Actors is that, while they often have a limited range as opposed to Chameleons, they also often work subtle variations within that range. So, with Bogie, for instance, you have someone who can play Rick Blaine or Fred C. Dobbs — very different characters, but filtered through the same basic personality: one skews cynical but heroic, one skews cynical and not very heroic. Or look at the difference between the James Stewart of Harvey and the James Stewart of Vertigo — he doesn't do anything terribly different in terms of style (he doesn't wear a wig or false teeth or whatever, like Gary Oldman might), he just pushes the Jimmy Stewart persona one way or the other, with amazingly different results. I happen to think Stewart is the greatest film actor in history, so I may be a little biased there.

[robyn-ma.livejournal.com]

And of course early, pre-Method examples of Chameleon actors would be Paul Muni and, of course, Lon Chaney. Karloff, too, to some extent, when he wasn't being typecast in monster movies. In fact, the classic contrast between Personality Actors and Chameleons could be traced to Karloff (Chameleon) and Lugosi (Personality Actor all the way).

[emerald-ibis.livejournal.com]

2. You get to completely destroy and remove one movie from existence. Which one do you pick? Harvard Man.

TWO HOURS THAT I WILL NEVER, EVER SEE AGAIN IN MY LIFE.

Ahem. It is an automatic reaction to the mention of that movie.

I agree with you on Spice World and Halle Barry.

[yendi]

Glad to see I wasn't the only one who hated that piece of crud.

[jerel.livejournal.com]

I liked Spice World. It fulfilled my daily requirement of dairy products for the day. :)

[corwinok.livejournal.com]

yay Carnosaur! And props to Roger Corman for beating Spielberg to the screen with his dinosaur movie :)

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

Dude, #8 has got to be Bring It On. No question. I can just sit and watch that over and over. It's hypnotic.

[sainthuck.livejournal.com]

Totally agree on Spice World. It has zero pretensions, which counts for a lot in a cheesy film like that. Doesn't deserve that kind of fate, for sure.