Matt Damon and Good Will Hunting still stink

I don't know if it's surprising that my mother liked Good Will Hunting so much. It was made over twenty years ago. She watched it the other night. I didn't like it back then and I really hate it now. All the main characters were male, they were extremely vulgar which would have been fine if they had been people who happened to say disgusting things, but the movie clearly regarded this as wit. There was the scene where Robin Williams go on at length explaining how he had to think of some reason to not be in awe of Matt Damon's superior intellect. In a courtroom scene, a judge says that he had previously accepted some legal argument Matt Damon had made based on some obscure document, which is absurd.

From Esquire:

Throughout the film, moments of sexual harassment are played for laughs. Will humiliates a series of therapists with homophobic jokes. A gay prostitute character in prison is presented as a punchline. The second scene of the film finds the older Affleck’s affably coarse character, Chuckie, shouting at a woman about sex across a bar. Soon thereafter, Stellan Skarsgård’s foppish and regularly emasculated Professor Gerald Lambeau is found propositioning one of his young female students. It’s a recurring theme. At another point, Minnie Driver’s Skylar gets a silent phone call late at night while studying a Sexual Dysfunction in Neurological Disorders text and asks whether it’s one of her professors calling again.

It turns out that vast swaths of the population has never heard the expression "How do you like them apples" and thought Matt Damon and Ben Affleck made it up for the movie. He shouts at a Harvard Boy, "DO YOU LIKE APPLES? DO YOU LIKE APPLES? I GOT HER NUMBER! HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES!"

But how did Matt Damon know the guy liked apples? I've never liked apples. I remember when I was four years old. Even then I regarded them as a lesser fruit.

I don't think Harvard boys go around trying to impress people by talking about what they learned in class and I don't think they really learn that much. The people who go to Harvard usually admit that the education you get there isn't very good.

Matt Damon's character fit all the criteria of being a Mary Sue, a super intellect with a traumatic past.

Matt Damon himself seems kind of below-average. He's supposed to be a liberal, I guess, but he keeps having to apologize for saying stupid things. There was the Project Greenlight outrage. Here's from an article on Buzzfeed:

Twitter went off on Damon, coining the term #damonsplaining. The actor ended up apologizing with a statement to Variety. He said that the scene was part of a broader discussion and shown out of context, and concluded with “I am sorry that [my comments] offended some people, but, at the very least, I am happy that they started a conversation about diversity in Hollywood.” What’s disappointing about this apology is that it does not reckon with the source of the problem. Damon talked over his coworker, a black woman surely more attuned to the potential fallout of a stereotypical black female character in the script. His vague comments about diversity didn’t really address the paucity of it in Hollywood. Not to mention the arrogance assumed in his presumption that he “started” a conversation about diversity in Hollywood. (Project Greenlight Season 4’s final product, retitled The Leisure Class, has a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes.)

That article, it goes into other things. I really don't keep up with this stuff so a lot of it is new to me. It might be old news to those reading this.

One thing that really disgusted me was Damon's soliloquy in Saving Private Ryan which he obviously wrote himself. He felt he needed to explain to the audience that Private Ryan felt bad that his brothers were killed so he tells a story that reveals that the world was probably just as well off without them. The story involved one of them hitting a girl over the head a knocking her unconscious. He thought this was charming or amusing.