Home Featured Content

6 Great Movies With Dumb-Sounding Pitches

Zach Braff’s Kickstarter campaign has been scrutinized from nearly every angle by now, with people seeming to be evenly divided between those who think he’s a rich scumbag exploiting his fans into paying for a whimsical new project and those who think he’s found a game-changing way to help finance movies without having to cater to cumbersome studio demands with the added bonus of making a group of fans feel even more involved in a movie’s production. Of course, there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around, following the generally positive response to a similar campaign by Rob Thomas and the Veronica Mars people. I don’t doubt that much of it is personal animus towards Braff himself, which would be totally fair if more people would just be up front about it.

1) The Impossible

Recommended Videos

The Impossible

If I had been reading about a Kickstarter campaign back in 2011 where the only information offered detailed the story of a British family vacationing over Christmas in Thailand when the disastrous tsunami hit back in 2004, and chronicled their great white survival tale in the face of this horrible event that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions more losing their homes, I would have promptly closed the tab and, I don’t know, written a snarky tweet or something. In fact, when I first learned about The Impossible, that’s probably pretty much exactly what I did. Because in the abstract, this sounds like a fairly insensitive story that glosses over a horrific tragedy by showing a rich white family that came out of it ok. Happy endings all around.

That would be the pitch; the reality was that the movie was a tremendously sensitive, self-consciously narrow in scope story that a real life family actually experienced during the tragedy. The film does not hide the fact that this story is exceptional, nor that it depended greatly on tremendous fortune in the midst of terrible suffering. In the end, it’s not exactly satisfying.

It’s deeply affecting, to be sure, thanks to the direction of Juan Antonio Bayona, the director behind the underrated The Orphanage from 2007. This is a story that very easily could have been made as a cheesy family story that ignored the devastation of this real life event. Instead, it handled it with a tragic sense of awareness and sadness, finding the faintest glimmer of a happy story deep in the heart of one of the deadliest events in recorded history.