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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.

5) Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

I’m not sure there’s even a way to describe every wonderful little detail of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, from Ewan McGregor’s incredibly subtle but endearing performance, to the atmospheric quality of the fishing scenes, to the gradual progression of the relationship between the McGregor character and the one played by Emily Blunt, without making it sound anything but dull, dull, dull. Like the world record for dullness, alongside blue ribbons for cheesiness and eyeroll-inducing romantic dreck. And probably some racism thrown in there for good measure, who knows.

This movie is such a little charmer, though. It doesn’t try to be anything it’s not. It shows signs of a director who’s been around long enough to know what to do and when and how, and how that will affect us emotionally from one moment to the next. Seeing fish jump has never been so exciting. There’s no way of describing that to capture how exciting it is to see those fish jump. But pitching a movie based on the suspense built up by waiting to see fish jump out of water? Don Draper couldn’t sell anybody on that.