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Narrative
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The poster art alone is freakin' huge!
BFM. Big. Fucking. Movie.
These movies are movie movies. These movies are what make Hollywood Hollywood. These movies are what we think of when we think of the stars getting out of limousines to walk down red carpets while being shot by the paparazzi and entering rooms with grand staircases and lit by chandeliers. The grand, gigantic, sweeping, flamboyant spectacles that define and are the triumphs of the film industry. The scope of these Greatest Stories Ever Filmed and the amount of time and money invested in them means that only one comes along every few years. 5 years in the making. 3 and a half hours long. $200,000,000 budget. 50,000 cast members. A+ list actors. 10 or 20 subplots. Oscar Bait to the core. These are the War and Peaces and Moby Dicks of cinema. If they were books, they'd be Doorstoppers. (And if they're adapted from books, said books are normally Doorstoppers too.)
Often, these movies are somewhat hammy and contrived. But that's precisely why they're so successful and why one enjoys watching them. They evoke the feeling of reading one of aforementioned great novels of our time. They are representations of quintessential human fantasies and fables. Such movies are usually darlings of critics and audiences alike. However, if things get too hammy, the movie crosses over the line from charming to silly, and critical reception of them can be lukewarm at best and scathing at worst (such was to be the fate of the ambitious but ineptly executed Caligula, Cleopatra, Pearl Harbor and Waterworld)
Examples:
Parodies and fictional examples:
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