Against the Crowd Blogathon 2019

Welcome to my entry in this year's edition of the Against the Crowd blogathon, hosted by the estimable Wendell from Dell on Movies. The rules are simple. Pick two movies. One should be a movie that is widely loved, at least going by the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, but that you hate. Conversely, the other movie is one that is widely hated but you like. As usual, I found it easy to come up with a "so bad that's good" movie for one that qualifies for the "everybody" hates it but me half of the blogathon. Coming up with the other one is always a bit more difficult, but I came up with one this year.



Vertigo (1958). I'm cheating a bit in that I don't hate it quite as much as I hate some of my previous selections. But I'm an Alfred Hitchcock fan, and this is a movie I really don't care for and don't get why it has the ridiculously high reputation it does. James Stewart plays a detective who's on disability leave after his vertigo resulted in his partner being killed. A rich man wants him to look after the man's wife (Kim Novak), who seems to be crazy. The wife gets thrown off a bell tower, and then Stewart meets Novak again. It's tediously overlong; the obsession angle doesn't really work here; and there's a massive plot hole about how Novak and the husband escape from the bell tower. There's a second plot how regarding why Novak would humor Stewart after he finds her the second time (that is, after the wife gets killed). Oh, and the special effect used to show Stewart's vertigo is nothing special.



The Concorde: Airport '79 (1979). The final of the four entries in the Airport cycle of disaster movies of the 1970s, this is a terrible movie, but one of those that's so bad it's enormously entertaining to watch. George Kennedy returns, this time flying the Concorde (how he ever moved up from airport maintenance, I'll never know). They're going from Washington to Moscow, but one of the passengers has dirt on a weapons manufacturer (Robert Wagner), so he tries to shoot the Concorde down with one of his company's new missiles. This results in some terrible special effects, before the plane lands safely in Paris. After the layover, the passengers for some reason get back in the plane that they just had a disaster in for the second leg! The cast is as much a mix of big names slumming and people who never quite made it, spouting ridiculous dialog. I think my favorite is when Soviet gymnastics coach Avery Schreiber takes his daughter into the cockpit for a tour. He's doing some sort of bizarre hand gestures to translate what George Kennedy is saying, and as it went on I was hoping Kennedy would ask the little girl if she liked gladiator movies.