Most award or reality TV shows wait until the end of the show or for the season finale to reveal the ultimate winner of any given competition. The "Subversive Reformation Writers Guild Film Awards" however is neither an award/reality TV show nor a competition. Rather, the SRWGFAs exist to rearticulate the goodness of good films. All bad films have already been completely dismissed.
The Greatest Film of All Time is...
BRAVEHEART (1995)
Here are the reasons why BRAVEHEART is the SRWGFA Greatest Film of All Time:
Narrator: I shall tell you of William Wallace. Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.
Narrator: In the Year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland - starving and outnumbered - charged the fields of Bannockburn. They fought like warrior poets; they fought like Scotsmen, and won their freedom.
Princess Isabelle: The king desires peace.
William Wallace: Longshanks desires peace?
Princess Isabelle: He declares it to me, I swear it. He proposes that you withdraw your attack. In return he grants you title, estates, and this chest of gold which I am to pay to you personally.
William Wallace: A lordship and titles. Gold. That I should become Judas?
Princess Isabelle: Peace is made in such ways.
William Wallace: Slaves are made in such ways. The last time Longshanks spoke of peace I was a boy. And many Scottish nobles, who would not be slaves, were lured by him under a flag of truce to a barn, where he had them hanged. I was very young, but I remember Longshank's notion of peace.
William Wallace: There's a difference between us. You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it.
William Wallace: It's all for nothing if you don't have freedom.
Malcolm Wallace: Your heart is free. Have the courage to follow it.
William Wallace: Every man dies, not every man really lives.
A very good movie I agree, but the greatest movie of all time?
ReplyDeleteTravis...I liked Braveheart as well, but when I first watched it, I thought it was a silent film, only to realized that I had accidentally pushed the mute button at the beginning of the movie. Boy did I feel stupid.
ReplyDeletelol that's awesome
ReplyDeleteWhat about the idea that the film glories in retributive violence...redemptive violence even.
ReplyDeleteThe whole arc of the movie is that we will accomplish what we want by violence. And on the micro scale, we have scenes where personal retribution is carried out by murdering the perceived transgressor. Wallace ties up the man who killed his wife and slits his throat. His friend who was married earlier in the film confronts the man who slept with his wife on their honeymoon and beats him to death with a flail, spitting on the dead (or dying) body.
Seems enough at odds with the gospel that we wouldnt name it best movie ever...