Shakespeare in Love is hardly obscure.

Have you seen The Thin Red Line? Asking for a friend...

SiL was a movie I saw (and wanted to see) multiple times. SPR was a great experience and a masterpiece but I never wanted to see it again. Personally, I rank movies higher when they make me want to see them repeatedly than when they make me want to never see them again.

Everyone knows Ernest is the “ Hey Vern” guy

To be fair, it didn’t come out that long after Born on the Fourth of July.

My local theater ran SPR for three days before replacing it. Life in a small town sucks.

Of all of those, it’s Patch Adams that fills me with the most loathing. Even over Godzilla. 

I feel like TV comedy is much better than film comedy right now and maybe has been for a decade, a few outliers aside.

I’m guessing you’re so very thankful you didn’t have to write about Armageddon instead. I know I am.

The film technique used to represent CPT Miller’s perspective after he presumably was concussed is brilliant. It has become almost cliched now, but was this an innovation at the time? I can't remember a previous film with a similar sequence.

I remember talking with my grandfather about it - he was a Korean War vet - and he said it was really well done, but what surprised him was “Private Ryan didn’t have legs.”

Slight spoilers below for a very old movie, I guess:

Damon does take you out of the movie a bit, and frankly at that point in his career his acting skills weren’t up to scenes like the one of him cracking himself up talking about his brothers nearly burning the barn down (which comes off very forced).

...The Waterboy and Doctor Doolittle and Rush Hour and Godzilla and Patch Adams, all of which were top-10 movies...

Meanwhile the German is “shushing” him, practically begging him to just accept the outcome and let it happen.  The fight’s over, it’s okay.

Hmm. It would have made more sense narratively. Also the fact that after killing Mellish, the German just ignored Upham whimpering on the stairs, because he knew him from before and wasn’t a threat.

The beach assault is rightfully considered a masterpiece of war realism. But the scene that I have never been able to forget and that still gives me nightmares is the hand-to-hand combat between Adam Goldberg’s character and the German. When Goldberg suddenly realizes that his antagonist has enough of the upper hand…

“But there’s also some clear baby-boomer soul-searching going on there—a generation of middle-aged men thinking about the sacrifices their families had made, wondering if they could’ve put themselves through the same things.”

I have weird feelings about the whole plotline of Upham insisting on letting the one German soldier go, only to execute him later; it feels uncomfortably close to an endorsement of war crimes.