2. Star Wars (I, II, & III)
Hold your venom, just for a moment. I know the wounds still havent healed from the greatest mistake in modern film history (unless someone gives M. Night Shyamalan another chance) because I feel them too. The Star Wars prequel trilogy is wrong in so many ways. It stained the reputation of one of the most beloved film franchises of all time. It gave Hayden Christensen a career. It turned George Lucas from a film prophet to a film pariah. The movies themselves have a lot of bad. The aforementioned Christensen is a natural stiff, but making him deliver all his lines to big green boxes and xs on the ground made him catatonic in these films. The Gungans are silly and more unfit for the series than the Ewoks were with their goofiness and poorly considered racial subtext. And lets not forget Darth Vaders big reveal at the end of Revenge of the Sith being one of the most laughably bad (not in a good way like some of the other picks on this list) film scenes in recent memory. These are all well established reasons the Star Wars prequels have been deservedly written off by the masses so far. If you publicly admit to enjoying them youll be shunned. This is why theyre the quintessential guilty pleasures though! It's not just the "go against the grain" mentality that should motivate you either. Let me make the case for for why you should be enjoying these not-so-classics of film.
They are freaking AWESOME! Who cares if Lucas didnt recreate the magic of the originals. When you give these movies a fair shake theyre a flat out blast. Sure they are bogged down by pseudo-political intrigue and acting weakened by the Kryptonite-like green screen, but everything else is so damn cool. George Lucas may not know much about emotion and honoring your own work, but the man has a bold imagination. The pod racer sequences of the first film are dazzling (and the N64 game was pretty fantastic too), there are many more lightsaber duels which never get old, and Lucas never fails to direct the ambitious battle scenes in anything but the most enjoyable way. From a purely visual standpoint these films are top of the line.
Then you add Natalie Portman who, by the third film, has established herself as one of the most beautiful women in the world (I guess that's still visual). You add supporting parts by legendary badasses of film like Liam Neeson (Taken) and Samuel L. Jackson (the
GOAT of cinematic badasses). You add Ewan McGregor who gives a performance thats almost good enough to mask the stink of Hayden Christensen - what Im saying here is there is a lot to like. Star Wars I, II, and III may not fill any meaningful void in your life, but that doesnt mean they dont have value. These movies are wildly imaginative and entertaining from start to finish.