Wow. Talk about YMMV. I agree that it is extremely unfortunate Brokeback Mountain didn't win, but that hardly means this movie sucks and is horrible just because it won instead. Hating on a movie that's against racism just because it beat out a gay romance movie at the Oscars really...doesn't make you look very good. There's plenty of room for both movies to be enjoyed, respected, and praised, since the winning of awards is hardly the only or even the most relevant way of judging a movie's worth and effects on society. As for judging it harshly because you simply think it was badly-written and cheesy, that's a separate issue...but for what it is worth, I thought it was very powerful, effective, and moving, that the message of racism being wrong is an anvil which very much needs to be dropped since people still don't get that even today, and I cried when watching it. And not only am I not a baby boomer, I'm gay, so take that for what you will.
I can corroborate that this was a horrendously cheesy, saccharine and ham fisted movie. They simply took the song Everyone's a Little Bit Racist and played it twenty times louder than normal, on repeat to fill out two hours of running time. The writing is appallingly lazy, manipulative and contrived to the extreme. But I guess it has to be that way, for how else can we learn as complex an insight as "sometimes racist people do nice things"?
And yes, it does strike me as obscene that this movie should be awarded the highest accolades regarding film making. This movie is to complex societal issues what On Deadly Ground was to environmentalism. Ugh, now I feel like I owe Steven Seagal an apology for making the comparison.
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Ughhh....
God i hate this movie so DAMN much. It's the most overdone, cheesy, unsubtle, one-dimensional piece of crap that only won the best picture because the academy wanted to show everyone they weren't racist but weren't pro gay either. Which is a really poor reflection on american society the more i think about it, but about the movie...
EVERYONE IS UNLIKEABLE. I mean, i get that they're supposed to portray racism as an evil thing and etc, but this movie is just so blandly written that everyone comes off as a racial caricature rather than an actual person suffering from racism. Hispanics, Whites, Blacks, and Persians (way to bandwagon the post-9/11 public conscience there, hollywood!), who're all here to show how empty they are on the inside. It's all done in the form of these annoying tracts which comes off as the script writing equivalent of "I'M A BAD PERSON. LISTEN TO MY EXCUSES."
It completely FAILS to engage. You've heard of something being heavy-handed, but the anvil this movie carries was dropped right after the movie made it's premiere and is just now surfacing in china, so the natives can see how little the movie cares about racism if you're asian.
It's cheesy. And not a good, Evil Dead cheesy, more like an eye-rolling till you're fucking BLIND cheesy. What kind of cheese do you like? Take your pick, from a cliched scene of a little girl being shot who tells her father she will protect him, to something cribbed right from Driving Miss Daisy about how the servant was the racist's only friend, you'll be sure to gag on your own bile and get strange looks from people who find phrases like "question everything" deep.
Sigh. Look, i apologize if i'm ranting, but this movie just proves so many horrible things about our society that i can't help but feel a little defeated that this gypped Brokeback Mountain out of an oscar just because we agreed that racism is bad, but gays don't deserve recognition. It just caters to the demographic of baby boomers who cry at the drop of the hat at anything "emotional" but still have to look the other way when a gay couple kisses. And that just eats me up inside. We're a progressive society? This movie told everyone what they wanted to hear, and stole the gold from a moving love story the public wasn't ready for.