So what makes a great movie?

So what makes a great movie, a movie that you will always remember? For me, I remember the very bad and horrible movies almost as much as I do the great ones, which unfortunately are very few and far between.

A very rare instance of seeing two movies in a row, one very bad and one great happened yesterday when I saw one of the best movies I have ever seen right after seeing a very bad movie happened. I don't remember ever seeing two movies in a row before that were so different in quality.

The bad movie was the Interview, the controversial movie that was banned from theaters because of terrorist threats and even received some comments from the President of the United States. This movie was supposed to be a comedy and committed the cardinal sin of a comedy, it just wasn’t funny. There were grotesque scenes of human defecation after death, people biting other people's fingers off during fight scenes and a plot and most scenes which just made no sense at all. What a tragedy that a movie this bad, one of the worst I have ever seen has received so much publicity. What amazes me most is that a movie this bad could have been funded by Sony Pictures in the first place.

The great movie I saw yesterday was the incredible story of Alan Turing, who during World War 2, literally saved the day by inventing a machine that was able to break the German code and because of that one event, shortened the war by 2 years and save 14 million lives. Turing was gay and was able to keep the secret that he was gay for most of the time they were building the machine, but at the end of the war, his secret was revealed and he was forced by the British government to take hormone pills to try and change him to be heterosexual. Soon after this, he committed suicide at age only 41. Turning probably had Autism but his brilliance was profound enough to save the world. I thought the story about the hard work and frustration over a period of 2 years with a team of 8 people trying to break the code very compelling. The final break through when they finally figured out how to get their machine called Christopher to figure out the billions of combinations in a much shorter period of time was one of the best parts of this great movie.

So the question is what makes a great movie? In this case, the first thing you need is a great story, and this is one World War 2 story that should have been told many years ago because in my opinion, it’s the best story about that horrible war I have ever heard. For a great movie of course you also need great writing and acting and this movie has that as well. The Imitation Game will definitely be nominated for best picture for 2014 and if I was a member of the academy I would vote for this great movie to be the best picture of the year.