The third best movie of all time!

Rating: 10/10 (9 August 2005)

The Lion King, Fight Club and... Ed Wood. Yes, these are my top 3 movies of all time, and Ed Wood had to be pretty awesome movie to get up there. It's easier for a movie to be depressing. There's more "street cred", or "critical cred", generally, in an incredibly depressing movie (take Million Dollar Baby, for example.) It's the simpler route to striking an emotional chord among audience members. If something is indescribably sad, then you can't poke fun of it. You can't laugh about it-- people DIED, dammit! And Ed Wood is one of the rare, non-depressing, actually inspirational, great movies. Somehow Ed Wood skirts cheesiness with its darker, implied undertones and sincere but rather campy dialogue. The movie is uplifting- it shows how an opus (Plan 9 from outer space) can be created just out of ambition and self-confidence and determination. It shows the success that sprouts from self-acceptance. And the film is about the so-called worst director of all time! And he died of alcoholism-related things in the seventies! And yet Ed Wood still manages to be an inspiration! So it's easy to call a happy movie clichÃ©. Especially a happy movie with an old-fashioned, less than subtle or minimalist directorial style (like the scene about Dolores' angora sweaters- she says something like "why are my sweaters stretched?" and Ed turns over toward the camera with a guilty look on his countenance). But it has deep themes of friendship and it really questions society itself. The people in the movie- the freaks and outcasts- were rejected by society and then demonstrate their spark and vitality in the little movie world Ed makes. So to conclude, it's funny, it's sad (but not overly so, almost in a textbook-like sense is it sad. What I mean by that is it shows the facts, but it doesn't dwell on them) and it's inspirational. Plus Johnny Depp is hot.