Quick meara: I love The Fifth Element and Moulin Rouge. I like Big Fish, but am not gloriously in love with it. The Apple is splendiferously ridiculous, and I think we are all the better for having seen it.

And since Nutty and I disagree so often:

I would call The Thin Red Line about 80% narrative-free, focussing instead on the beauty of the landscape (that the soldiers are churning up as they cross it). The other 20% was dress rehearsal for The Passion of the Christ, so I coulda lived without it anyway. But, you know, some people did like it. (Me, I like Malick more when he can make his sense of beauty serve a story.)

I hate The Thin Red Line with a fiery passion.

P-C and I are one! Perhaps for this movie and no other.

I hate The Thin Red Line with a fiery passion.

Me, too. Therefore, P-C is less dead to me now.

What do folks hate about The Thin Red Line? I liked it when I saw it, but I don't remember much at all of it.

A military historian says that the movie version suffered from "Hollywoodization" when compared to the original book, which is considered one of the greatest military novels, and an accurate portrayal of the fighting on Guadalcanal. (I haven't read the book, but it's on my list of books to buy.)

What do folks hate about The Thin Red Line?

It's relentlessly boring, there's no narrative flow, the characters spout faux poetry as if it were profound, and I want those three hours back.

I didn't like The Thin Red Line because it didn't feel like it had a plot (or for that matter a point), because it fetishized nature, because (more criminally, to me) it fetishized the local peoples as part of nature, because it felt like a collective "we're arty!" wank, because as far as I could tell there was little reason for it to be set during World War II.

James Jones has quite the rep as a WWII author (having written the novels From Here to Eternity and A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries as well as this one, so I imagine that this movie adaptation would be the same thing as if someone made The Caine Mutiny Court Martial or Mila 18 into a tone poem. Kind of like making ice cream using liquid nitrogen: cute, but not really an efficient use of nitrogen.)

Well, I don't think a story of a military compaign told from the point of view of a soldier needs to have a plot. As for the other stuff - well I'll have to hop into my time machine and ask my younger self why I liked it.

DeepDiscountDVD.com has The Apple for $9.12. I think I need to buy it so I can show it to everyone I know.

Especially since From Here to Eternity shows that Jones's novels can be turned into good movies. Even great ones.

What do folks hate about The Thin Red Line?

It's relentlessly boring, there's no narrative flow, the characters spout faux poetry as if it were profound, and I want those three hours back.

What P-C said. Also, it perpetuates the Noble Savage myth, or comes damn close.