Oh yeah, I love your little art-house offbeat indie comedy starring Parker Posey and that guy with the strange nose from that one Wes Anderson movie. But sometimes you just need a big-ass, big-budget epic monster of a movie. How the fuck else are you supposed to waste all of Sunday afternoon on the couch?
So for today’s QOTD…
What’s your favorite epic movie?
First of all, let’s agree on what constitutes an epic film. I love how Wikipedia’s pedantic encyclo-Nazis volunteer editors tried to define it:
As popularly applied to motion pictures, the term epic refers less to a set of generic qualities than to a vague sense of “epic-ness,” a quality more or less synonymous with enormity. The “epic” movie is often set during a time of war or other societal crisis, and covers a long span of time, in terms of both the events depicted and the length of the reel. Typically, such films have a historical setting, although fantasy or science fiction settings have become common in recent decades. The central conflict of the film is usually seen as having far-reaching effects, often changing the course of history. The main characters’ actions are often central to the resolution of this conflict.
And then the world’s coolest dude ever, Ebert, chimed in:
The word epic in recent years has become synonymous with big budget B picture. What you realize watching Lawrence of Arabia is that the word epic refers not to the cost or the elaborate production, but to the size of the ideas and vision. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God didn’t cost as much as the catering in Pearl Harbor, but it is an epic, and ‘Pearl Harbor’ is not.
Oh snap, Affleck! You gonna take that shit from a guy with no jaw?
Anyway… this is a tough one. I have a well-known love of “Doctor Zhivago” and “Spartacus” is the bomb-ass shit. But my absolute favorite epic is probably “Indochine,” with Catherine Deneuve. This movie is fucking bonkers and will hit you like a runaway Toyota Avalon driven by by a dementia-addled granny who thinks she’s hitting the brake pedal.
