Feel free to make suggestions that might jog my memory (or win me over) - better yet turn the disjointed mess that is the Extended Entry into something vaguely resembling structure and order!
On at least one social network my favorite movie is listed as Major League because that's what popped into my head.
Nearly every plausible choice that comes to mind leaves me feeling a bit let-down: "That's THE #1 MOVIE on your all-time favorites??!" And then I start wondering what total gems I just couldn't think of at the time.
For many years I claimed that my favorite movie was The Gods Must Be Crazy. That's got two opposite problems at once: It was a very pretentious claim to make, AND YET when I re-watched the movie a couple years ago I was bitterly disappointed. Maybe the slapstick parts are a lot funnier to a precocious 10-year-old.
Given my genre tastes my "favorite movie" is more likely to be a comedy than anything else. There's also a fighting chance it would be a baseball movie. Major League is the best baseball comedy out there (Bull Durham is good, but have I ever told you how overrated it is? - I've watched it a few times yet always felt a bit disappointed by the difference between remembered quality and actual quality).
Some random possibilities that occur to me:
Better Off Dead? Grosse Point Blank? Both are surely in my top 10.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off? This just feels like the sort of movie one outgrows, and honestly I'd rank Major League above it.
Midnight Madness? I really need to watch soon to see how well it's held up over time.
Is it one of the Pixar blockbusters? But how does one rank those? Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles would both contend (I think Toy Story got massively overplayed). Finding Nemo was also run into the ground but might be so good that it withstands the hype. When I finally get a chance to see WALL*E will I ask "where have you been all my life?"
My favorite Kevin Smith movie is Dogma, for what it's worth (I'm weird that way).
My favorite Will Ferrell movie is Stranger Than Fiction. (Sort of along those lines: I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, hated Fight Club, loved both of the M. Night Shyamalan movies I've seen.)
I wonder how well the Airplane! franchise has aged. (Surprisingly I've never seen any of the "[Adjective] Movie" hybrid spoofs.)
Romantic comedies with Adam Sandler are all far better than they have any business being (sort of the opposite of romantic comedies with Tom Hanks).
I love Christopher Guest across the board but it's impossible to privilege any one mockumentary over another, except maybe Spinal Tap as the ur-example.
Steve Martin's best movies (in my opinion) were HouseSitter and My Blue Heaven, both of which have quite a lower profile than (say) Roxanne or Father of the Bride.
Is Bill Murray's best movie really Lost in Translation? (Or for that matter The Royal Tenenbaums?) I wonder how Meatballs has held up over time. If it hasn't then my favorite 20th century Bill Murray movie might be Groundhog Day, which really really doesn't feel like anybody's all-time #1. (I should love Caddyshack but emphatically... it's not that I dislike it, but that Caddyshack is arguably THE MOST OVERRATED movie of all-time.)
So I already mentioned loving Eternal Sunshine, and the same goes for Bruce Almighty. The Ace Ventura movies are underrated (but still nothing special); I've still never seen Dumb & Dumber because I never forgave the Farrelly brothers for There's Something About Mary (which might give Caddyshack a run for its "Most Overrated" money!).
Oh hey, I just remembered One Night At McCool's! I inordinately enjoyed that movie! But it faded so far into my memory that for a split second I mistakenly thought the title was Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrells. (Sort of but not really along those lines: Julia rented Memento for me while under the mistaken impression that "Memento" was the name of the movie that turned out to be "Unbreakable." But once I finally completely solved Memento it was less than met the eye.)
High Fidelity won't come close to my #1 but I wonder where it ranks. Little Miss Sunshine of all movies might have a fighting chance.
I would have hazarded an educated guess that had something to do with preemptive action; it's unclear how my answer would be graded on a 100-point scale.
To be fair, I'm not running for vice president.
On the third hand, how many times does the phrase "Bush Doctrine" actually come up in educated discourse (as opposed to other phrases that communicate more clearly the elements of the Bush Doctrine one is referring to)?
(I also could not name the current leader of Pakistan, despite almost writing basically that very question barely 12 hours ago.)
(Wow, second straight post that combines our recent Netflix viewing habits with this column!)
Baby Mama! Far worse than Boat Trip, though not nearly as bad as Just Married.
My wife has had very bad luck with mainstream comedy rentals over the years. This has nothing to do with her taste, which I generally find impeccable, and very little to do her ability to predict movie quality. Rather, everything you know about a movie coming into it will set a reasonable quality expectation, within which there might still be some variance. The variance here has been her enemy. A lot.
Now sometimes she'll rent a movie and I can see a mile away how bad it would be, and I'll ask: "You saw that coming, right?"
And in fairness, there have been times where I was dead certain she'd chosen a terrible movie, yet the movie turned out to be quite good. Off the top of my head that includes Failure To Launch, Guess Who?, and especially High School Musical.
But the out-of-nowhere atrocities are what stick in one's head.
Unrelated to the main topic of this post, but wrapping up the commentary on our recent Netflix viewing: What do we think of Shadows and Fog? I'd file it under "OK, I guess," though I honestly wonder how many people my age (or a couple years older) ought to have become big Woody Allen fans yet had that process delayed quite a bit from being exposed to one of his "just humor him" movies before they had a chance to see Love and Death or Annie Hall or such.
Take your favorite narration-heavy Morgan Freeman movie and imagine that his voice-over work was replaced by the same lines coming from Jenna Fischer (Pam from The Office (U.S. version)).
(A reference in this column, plus our recent Netflix viewing, made me think of this.)
A Freakonomics guest poster draws a fantastic comparison.
I think water policy is the most underrated sociopolitical issue, and it's not even clear to me what the second-most would be. Unfortunately, the few people who tend to agree with me about prioritizing it are also often people whose solutions would be uniquely counterproductive.
The 21st century version of Norman Borlaug will be someone who comes up with some brilliant piece of hydro-technology.
Megan McArdle says everything better than I would have. "In Obama's defense, the public schools in Chicago are terrible. [...] What is intolerable to me is when parents who have exercised school choice for themselves then oppose it for everyone else."
"[Sarah Palin's] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."
--University of Chicago Divinity School professor Wendy Doniger, as published by the Washington Post.
I'm a bit underwhelmed so far. There are some nice user interface improvements but pages don't seem to load as quickly as they do on Firefox. (Then again this could be a sample size issue with the specific sites I've hit today: sometimes both Football Outsiders and mail.yahoo.com just under-perform no matter what browser you use.)
Did Steven Jackson start this or is he just the latest in a longer line?
Now we have Jackson, Marshawn Lynch, Chris Johnson of Tennessee, and I'm sure I'm missing a few. Wouldn't you just tackle them by the back of their hair?
Of the 32 most likely starting quarterbacks in this coming weekend's NFL games, there is a 28-way tie for second-most-common first name (at one quarterback apiece).
Can you give:
1. The most common first name among current NFL starting quarterbacks?
2. All four of the starting QBs with that name?
3. At least one backup QB with that name?
(There may be others, but even if so, one is distinctly more well-known than the others. That's even more true now than it was 48 hours ago.)
Before you click the link and read this CNBC article, take a wild guess: what recent event will result in (according to the forecaster quoted in that article) a $150 million shift from one (fairly well-defined) group of people to another (almost but not quite as well-defined) group of people?
Sort of a hint, but not really: I'm definitely not in the first group; there's an outside chance I'll end up in the second group. We'll never know for sure if I actually am in the second group, though we could easily learn for sure that I wasn't.