Quite dull. I don't get the love.

Rating: 5/10 (17 February 2014)

The only Best Picture nominee from 1989 that I hadn't yet seen. It was a real bad year for the Oscars, I think. Of the five, I like Born on the Fourth of July a lot. Or at least I used to like it. I haven't seen it in years and I'm not sure it would hold up that well. The other four are quite mediocre, with one of the most mediocre winners of all time, Driving Miss Daisy. If you can extrapolate the general IMDb voter's opinion, Dead Poets Society should have won. It's the highest rated of the five, and has about 140,000 more votes than the next most voted on title. That's pretty amazing, really. I don't get it, frankly. Dead Poets Society to me was probably the worst of the five, just complete sludge. The film is about a group of rich white boys at a boarding school who become enamored of their free-spirited teacher, Robin Williams, who teaches them to "carpe diem," or "sieze the day." The boys (who include Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard) form the Dead Poets Society, where they meet at night in a cave to read poetry. This is, for no reason in particular, highly looked down upon. And woe unto you if you ever want to act in a Shakespeare play, as Leonard eventually does. His father, Kurtwood Smith, does not approve of such frivolities. The final act of this film is pretty ridiculous, with Robin Williams incurring blame for something that clearly had nothing to do with him. The ending, which is supposed to be uplifting, just feels extremely unsatisfying. The performances are actually quite fine. Williams certainly didn't deserve a Best Actor nomination, though. This is clearly category fraud. There is no clear lead, but both Leonard and Hawke probably have more screen time than Williams, who seems like he's barely in the film for it being such a well loved performance.