Nicholas Schlitt
I tried to make my picks from the heart and off the cuff because there are so many that would fit in each category. Hell, I could give you a top ten for all three in every genre of movie you could think of and still regret leaving some out. Needless to say, I enjoy movies. But for the sake of making it easier on me (and easier on you?); Heart, spur of the moment, BAM. So without further ado, my favorite, underrated, and worst movie picks as requested.
Favorite: A Goofy Movie (1995)
I told myself I wouldn't cheat and name names of other movies I consider for a category as I felt that would be cheating but its hardest for this one since my pick is so out of left field. I want to defend myself by mentioning some classics that are at the top of movie lists to cover up this pick but no shame damn it! A Goofy Movie is my favorite damn movie when picking with my heart. Deal with it.
I grew up with it. Was kind of on the edge of my true childhood as I was eleven when it came out but still I was able to enjoy it then. The classic Goofy skit cartoons were enjoyed of course. And Goof Troop had been on TV for a couple years etc etc. But I was never like a “hardcore Goofy fan” or anything. I still am not. But even as a kid the movie was just special.
It has a little bit different sense of humor than a typical Disney movie which I very much enjoyed then and now. It's a road trip movie. It's a coming of age movie. It's a father son movie. It's short but nonstop. It's well animated with great voice acting. It's got original music numbers. It's got a good story. It's everything you need in a movie.
I dunno, it holds a special place in my heart. I watch it every Father's Day just because my Dad is basically Goofy (Minus the attempts at communication and overt devotion parts. Basically just the klutzy goofy parts.) And I was basically Max as a teenager (Minus the ever having a girlfriend part. Basically just the klutzy, angst, going through changes parts). That's kind of the point though. For the males of the world you can relate to it. A lot. I've always liked it and had a strong connection to it and always will. It means more to me personally than any other movie I could list. For realsies.
Underrated: Untamed Heart (1993)
A Goofy Movie could have fit here too when comparing it to other Disney and kids movies but that would be the easy way out of course! And on the subject, I really wanted to take the easy way out because this is by far the hardest pick to make. I could go on and on about all the stupid movies I've watched that I wish somebody else I knew had seen just so I could talk about it for two seconds. But I gotta pick one and I don't feel great about this pick... But Untamed Heart it is.
It honestly breaks down like any other crappy “romantic” movie where the dude is just a creep and a borderline stalker sociopath but since it happens to be a movie its somehow romantic and the girl somehow actually falls for the weirdo. But the first time I saw it I was an impressionable teenager, a hopeless romantic, Marisa Tomei was all sorts of cute, it was “offbeat”, and there was a small scene with hockey. I used to channel surf and not sleep at that age and I think it was on like USA or TNT at 1:00AM or some such nonsense and I stayed up all night watching it. It really was a little different than the regular and it made the zits on my skinny face tingle.
I don't know what to tell you! It just stuck with me over the years. I still will watch it every year or two just because I like it. In all honestly I can't even really recommend it to everyone or truly say it fits this category. Its just a movie that has always stuck out as a favorite that nobody ever talks about at all so I guess that's close enough! In fact I don't know anybody who has seen it or at least remembers. And then I never bring it up myself. You know, it might even lose some of its magic just by me sharing publicly that I like it. Was always one of my little secrets.
!!!SPOILER ALRERT!!! [Editor's note: gotta highlight the text and it'll show up. This goes for all the upcoming spoilers]
Either way, who doesn't want to die right after catching a hockey puck at a game you went to with Marisa Tomei? Who happens to have just freshly fell in love with you? Now that's the way to go out!
!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!
Worst*: Strange Wilderness (2008)
As a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, I've seen a lot of bad movies. A lot of bad, bad, badddd movies. I cannot fathom watching a great many of these “films” without the hilarious commentary the fellas offer. Then there's all the cliché movies to call bad just because everybody else does. So very many to choose from! So I cheated and finally took the easy route. I chose a “best” bad movie of mine. This one will go down in the record books with an asterisk folks.
Strange Wilderness is bad. It is extremely funny. I like it a lot. The end.
Kevin Phelps
It is impossible to narrow this list down to three. Having just one favorite movie is a hard enough, there are plenty of underrated movies out in Hollywood, and some terrible movies have been made. I am an action buff. There is nothing better than sitting in the movie theater and walking out barely being able to hear yourself while trying to comprehend what you just saw.
This recently happened to me when I saw Mad Max: Fury Road. From the beginning to the end the action is relentless. It just goes and goes and goes. It is so AWESOME!
I’m a sucker for summer blockbusters, even if they are terrible, which I will get to later. For example, Entourage is making its way to the big screen. I loved the series on HBO and even though I know it is going to be bad, I still want to see it. It’s getting the death sentence; lots of publicity, the cast has been everywhere (they were on Monday Night Raw!), and it has way too many cameos. Didn’t Liam Neeson have someone to save instead?
Anyway, this was hard to narrow down, but it happened. Here we go.
Lets start with the worst movie. I’ve been let down by a lot of movies before, but the worst movie I have ever seen and actually watched again to make sure it was that bad was Green Lantern. Such a cool comic book character and could have possibly paved the way for a Justice League movie (I know its happening now, but at the time I thought it would have been a great lead in). Also, how many superheroes is Ryan Reynolds going to play?
The most underrated movie is an easy one for me: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. A lot of people see it as a children’s movie, but watch it again as an adult. It really is messed up. Its dark, twisted, and super witty. Every time it is on ABC family I laugh just because of that fact. It is really messed up.
Favorite: The Dark Knight. Like I said I am a huge summer blockbuster fan. In the summer 2008 I actually saw this movie six times, four times in the theater and twice in IMAX. The Dark Knight changed the way I saw superhero movies. Now I expect them all to live up to this movie. It’s dark and gritty. The action is great but not super over the top. Heath Ledger really took this movie to the next level. The Joker is one of the best villains ever and he brought that to the big screen. The addition of Harvey Dent/Two-Face was done so perfectly, just enough of each of emotion.
“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”
Andy Bakker
Favorite: The Great Gatsby
In high school english class you were supposed to be reading great books. In my high school english class we played the card game P&A (Presidents & Assholes) while our english teacher read out loud to us. Looking back on this, I'm not sure why our teacher was reading out loud to us when we were 18 years old... while we were playing cards? No, I was not in the “slow” class.
Anyway, our teacher read several books to us and I can remember her briefly talking about the Great Gatsby at one point. I still have yet to read the book entirely, but my previous significant other introduced me to the movie and I thought it was great. Why do I think it was so great? He built his life around this grand idea and he made sure everything was perfect, SPOILER but he couldn't have Daisy, the one thing that completed his dream. SPOILER. It reminds me to think more about what I'm doing with my life so that some day down the road I don't come to the conclusion that maybe I have been building the wrong dream.
Underrated: Law Abiding Citizen
Whenever I watch movies that have a rape scene or a scene with sexual abuse or molestation, I feel my body tense up and my fists start to clench. Sometimes I have to turn away until the scene has passed because I just want to destroy anyone that would do something like that. It's incredible that human beings are capable of doing those things to each other. What Gerald Butler does in the movie to the men who murder his family is exactly what I feel like doing when I read an article about rape or molestation. Why do I think this is an underrated movie? I didn't know this movie existed until a year after it came out. A lot of my friends hadn't heard of it either. I don't know if it wasn't advertised well or if I just live under a rock, but it felt great to watch SPOILER that ass wipe get cut into several pieces. SPOILER.
Worst: Anything with Larry the Cable Guy. Enough said.
Benjamin Christopher
Best - Forrest Gump (1994)
There’s a lot to be said for how amazing this movie is. Truthfully, I almost put this one in the most under rated section; because of the “cliche, everybody quotes this film already, vibe it has”. That aside, starting with the story itself, it’s pretty incredible. You have a film that carefully navigates and spans at least four decades. It follows a main character that has a low IQ and good intentions, living in Alabama from his childhood to his old age. He teaches Elvis to dance, becomes a football star, meets JFK, serves in Vietnam, shows LBJ his ass, gives a speech at a hippie anti-war rally, beats the Chinese in table tennis, meets Nixon and uncovers his Watergate scandal, goes shrimp’n with Lt. Dan, gets rich off of Apple, and creates the smiley face t-shirt while spending a few years running across the country… Did I mention he gets the girl? Yeah, in all of this roll polly awesomeness, is a super solid love story. I hate most love stories, but this one is the cats meow. As for characters. Here you have a character in Forrest, who takes this epic journey from the 60’s to the 80’s. Finds himself being a part of many significant historical events, purely by accident. You find yourself building an almost immediate love for the character in the first few minutes of the film, and it holds on to the end. Portrayed by Tom Hanks, this Oscar winning performance is a must watch/own/watch again. As for the cinematography, it was pretty ground breaking, and very period correct. Each era in the film looked like you were watching a movie shot in that particular year. The producers did one hell of a job making this perfect. There you go, kids. The best of the best, come at me bro!
Taylor Hruby
I was watching Dirty Work with Norm MacDonald the other day and I had to text my old man some quotes. It's just one of those movies that I watched at one time in my life and fell in love so hard that phrases have just crept into my lexicon and never left. There's a scene in Dirty Work where Mitch (Norm) is talking to the main bad guy, Travis Cole, and Cole gets a hold of Mitch's tape recorder and tosses it over a ledge. The recorder tumbles down and knocks a reporter on the head. Instantly, this beautiful man unleashes one of my favorite all time expletives, “Son of a bitch bastard”. It's a large scene, plot-wise, towards the end of a pretty amazing movie, but it's such a tiny, throwaway line, from a guy who has one scene. I have no idea why that has stuck with me forever, but I absolutely adore it.
Anyway, as I was texting my step dad I decided that PINM should write about movies. I had been looking for ways to get more people to participate and everyone loves a movie, hates a movie, whatever. So we picked “favorite”, “worst” and “most underrated” and told people to write about them. Here are mine.
(I mention a ton of movies in these next few paragraphs. Watch them all and email me to tell me how right I was about all of it.)
Favorite: Airheads (1994)
Son of a bitch, this could have gone about 30 different ways. I love movies and most of them are all from the same era. But none of those other movies are Airheads. I was 7 when Airheads came out, so this is probably a little bit down the road from release. I was listening to too much 80's hair metal, I was in love with Bill and Ted of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had a musical tour called “Coming Out of Their Shells”. Essentially, I was ready to be a rockstar. I don't remember when I first saw Airheads, but I was probably a little too young to really appreciate it. My aforementioned step father was a pretty young dude around that time, so we always watched the good stuff back then. I saw a lot of movies that maybe I “shouldn't have” or maybe I wouldn't have understood, but I loved them all the same.
Airheads is about a failing “power slop” band that can't quite break the big time. It stars Brendan Frasier, Steve Buschemi and Adam Sandler as the members of The Lone Rangers. They really want to get their demo on the air, so they break into a radio station armed with water guns filled with hot sauce and no idea what they're doing. The comedy may not have aged very well if you're a first time viewer, but the nostalgia hits me so hard that I can't even watch it objectively. I spent a good portion of my youth standing in my best friend's bedroom thinking about covering “Degenerated” by The Lone Rangers in front of millions of people. If you had asked me my favorite bands when I first got my drumset, I probably would have said “Metallica, Smash Mouth and The Lone Rangers”. The Lone Rangers had one song and were not a real band. That is how much influence that movie had on me.
It is absolutely fantastic and you should watch it.
Honorable mentions: Godfather 1 and 2, Swingers, BASEketball, Dark Knight, Dirty Work, Super Troopers, Happy Gilmore, Caddyshack, Bachelor Party, Shawshank Redemption, Mighty Ducks and D2 and a million other movies I'm forgetting.
Underrated: Cloverfield (2008)
Again, this could have gone so many different ways. I wanted to write about Bulletproof, but I couldn't write two things about Adam Sandler in a row. I thought about Voices starring Ryan Reynolds, but I've only seen it once and it's probably not quite as good as I remember, but that movie is gold. Watch it for sure. I wanted to write about Equilibrium starring Christian Bale. Now that's a fuckin' movie. It easily could have been Stealing Harvard starring Tom Green and Jason Lee. Watch all of these movies!
But... it had to be Cloverfield.
I picked Cloverfield for a couple reasons. The main one has nothing to do with the actual film: this movie changed how I thought about movies. I saw a little youtube video back in the day with the “roar” of the monster and some scrambled stuff. I tried to find out a little more about what I had just seen and I ended up on the IMDB.com messageboards. The people there were tearing apart every little thing about this movie and it hadn't even been released yet. I hung around for a while and more and more stuff came out. There were sites for an offshore drilling company called Tagruato. Is that where the monster came from? Tagruato manufactured a drink called “Slusho”. Slusho apparently started in JJ Abrams' ALIAS, but was linked to Cloverfield through this site. In other words, there was just this insanely deep world that I was getting sucked into. It was so creative and so amazing that I didn't care that it was just marketing. I had never seen “viral marketing” like this before. We analyzed the monster from brief flashes in the early trailers, we talked about the offshore drilling “waking up” the monster. One of the producers said something about the Cloverfield monster “being a baby that's scared in a new world” and we all jumped to the logical conclusion: it's mom is coming out for the second one!!! Throw in the fact that the movie ends SPOILER with a voice saying "it's still alive" and you've got sequels for sure, right?! SPOILER. I guess not.
Then there's the movie itself. I really enjoy monster movies; I loved the first person filming (the main characters name is even HUD!!!!); I loved the humor; I loved the monster; I loved Odette Yustman (duh) I loved pretty much everything. There were little easter eggs for us nerds (one of the main guys wears a Slusho shirt!) and enough action to keep most action fans happy. The effects were good, the tension was real, Lizzie Caplan is ALSO gorgeous and she SPOILER EXPLODES for some reason! SPOILER.
Look, if you saw this already and decided it wasn't for you, I can't do anything to change that. This movie is a lot like Airheads where I have other emotions attached to it, but this is my damn list, dammit, and I'll put what I please.
Honorable mentions: Blair Witch Project, Bulletproof, Orgazmo, Cable Guy, Kingpin, Voices, Equilibrium, Flintstones (you heard me), The Omen (the original) and way too many more.
Worst: The Dark Knight Rises
This one was the easy one. I have seen this movie once, in it's entirety, and I absolutely hated it.
I am a huge Batman fan. Much of my love from Batman comes from the Animated Series from the 90's. There were some KILLER episodes of that show and I can't even begin to describe how much it meant to me. Since then, I've purchased way more Batman comics than I ever should have, watched every Batman movie, every Batman animated move, the old TV series, the Clooney era, the bat nipples, played all the games, etc. I've watched shitty student art films, read fan fiction and drawn my own Batman. I really love Batman.
When Batman Begins came out, I was in love. I saw it in the theaters twice, bought it immediately and couldn't believe how great it was. Then Nolan announced The Dark Knight and my life shifted into “how much Dark Knight info can I get before it comes out” mode. I have never been that excited for a movie. I watched the IMAX thing that they released before the movie actually came out probably 15 times. I went to it and I couldn't get out of my seat when it was over. I was in love. That movie, in reality, is my favorite movie ever, but what can I write about TDK that hasn't been said, so I went in a different direction.
Anyway, then Nolan announced The Dark Knight Rises and I heard Tom Hardy was playing Bane. I loved that casting decision from the start. I gobbled up all the info I could, but I avoided all the trailers. I didn't want to see a second of this one before it came out because I knew it was the end. Then I heard one of my least favorite people was in the movie: Hines Ward.
Obviously his inclusion in this movie is super minimal, but I was a little bummed. How could a Batman movie have a Pittsburgh Steeler in it? And have him play himself?! I was disappointed, but undeterred. Then I started hearing about how Bane's voice had to be re-dubbed because Hardy was too hard to understand and I got even more worried. But I had faith! I went to a midnight screening with a bunch of people who don't know Bruce Wayne from Dick Grayson and wanted to murder everyone. Then Bane hit the screen and I was jacked. All my problems went away. Hardy is killing it. As long as I can hear him, we're good. Then he spoke.
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
What was he doing? Was this his voice for the whole movie? Was I being punk'd? I immediately panicked. “oh, no. I don't like this already” it continued. The rest of the movie was a meandering mess full of bullshit plot, haphazard reasoning and shallow everything else. I absolutely hated it. When it finally ended, it was just like the end of Dark Knight. I couldn't get out of my seat, but for much different reasons. I have never been more disappointed in a movie. Since then, I've tried to watch it when it's on TBS or whatever, but the Bane talks and I laugh for 10 minutes as I find something else to watch. I did watch the Bane v Batman battle on youtube without sound and I almost cried for what could have been. I don't want to get all spoiler-y, so I'm not getting too in depth here, but fuck, what a disappointment. Clearly not the worst movie ever, but my expectations were sky high and they were crushed.
Honorable mentions: Hitch (saw this with my wife when we were young. Last chick flick I've ever seen in the theater. True story.), I hated Snowpiercer, Going Overboard and Grown Ups were two monster pieces of garbage from Sandler, anything my wife likes.
BONUS CATEGORY!
Movie I cried at the most: Dear Zachary (2008)
I can't tell you much about this movie. I really can't. Essentially, this boy's father is murdered and the guy's best friend makes this documentary for the son of the murdered guy. If you really, really want to feel bad and cry your eyes out, watch it. But, at the same time, it is remarkably moving and an absolutely beautiful film. I have never cried like this while watching a movie and I honestly kind of hope I never will again.
Honorable mention: The Notebook was sad as hell, anything with a father leaving a son behind hits me right in the feels, youtube videos of autistic kids nailing jumpers in high school basketball games.