Against the Crowd Blogathon 2018

Each year, Wendell over at the blog Dell on Movies hosts a blogathon known as Against the Crowd. the way the blogathon works is that you're supposed to take one movie that has an extremely high reputation (based on the score at Rotten Tomatoes) but that you hate, as well as a movie with an extremely poor reputation that you love. It's a lot of fun, especially trying to come up with the movies that you love but everybody else hates. With that in mind, here are my selections for 2018:

Everybody else loves, but I hate: Gigi (1958).



Gigi (Leslie Caron) is being raised by two aunts to be a courtesan, or specifically, a mistress to Gaston (Louis Jourdan). Things get complicated when Gigi wants to get married. Maurice Chevalier co-stars as an older man who had a relationship with one of the aunts.

Why I hate it: I'm not a fan of musicals in general. The more I watch, the more I find that while Fox's musicals can be tolerable, I have a much stronger dislike of most of the "Freed Unit" musicals over at MGM, which seem over-produced and increasingly charmless as the 50s rolled on. (Singing in the Rain is the big exception.) The songs don't particularly excite me either.



Worst, however, is the presence of Maurice Chevalier. I wasn't a particular fan of the movies he made at Paramount at the beginning of the sound era, but a quarter century on, it's even worse. Chevalier is particularly creep in the film's opening, when he's going aroiund a Parisian park singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls". The scene makes Chevalier look like a pedophile, and I wonder whether the movie wouldn't be better served with Chevalier riding around in a windowless carriage emblazoned with the words "FREE CANDY". And the movie drags and drags and drags.

Everybody else hates, but I love: Endless Love (1981)



David (Martin Hewitt) is in love with Jade (Brooke Shields), despite the fact that she's underage. Jade's dad (Don Murray) finally puts his foot down, and David gets the brilliant idea to try to show his good character by putting out a fire on their porch. Except he has to start the fire himself, and the fire gets out of control, resulting in David's forced placement in a mental institution. David pines for Jade, and when he is finally released, goes looking for Jade.

Why I love it: Endless Love is endlessly tawdry. All of the main characters are nuts, with a good glimpse of this being seen early on when Jade's mom sees her daughter making sweet sweet love to David -- Mom hangs around to watch surreptitiously, seemingly pleased with her daughter's budding sexuality! And it seems as though, Graduate-style, she's trying to seduce David too. As for David, he doesn't get on so well with his own parents (Richard Kiley and Beatrice Straight), so he's obsessing with making himself a part of Jade's perfect-to-him family.

The movie goes from mildly nuts to careening off the rails with the fire scene, and then even more once David gets out of the mental institution. And the ending is so fabulously wrong. Is Endless Love a good movie? Not really; Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt make for one of the most wooden couples in screen history. But my word is it fun. Over the closing credits is the famous Lionel Richie/Diana Ross version of the Oscar-nominated title song, which was a huge hit in the summer of 1981, spending nine weeks at #1. Of course, everybody thinks the song is about love, when the movie is really about obsession.