Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
Much of this thread be like…
Pretty much all of the Avengers films.
They aren’t engaging in any way. The characters are unintelligent and full of self importance. The whole franchise is Just loud noises and shark jumping.
I find nuggets in them. Iron man 3 had issues, but I was fascinated by the portrayal of Tony stark’s ptsd after the battle of new York. Sure, seeing a bunch of robots is fun, but it’s not really engaging. The intersection of everyday life, mental trauma, and super powers and responsibilities is fascinating to me.
I mean they’re silly by default. They are not supposed to be high art. I like half of the MCU. Raimi spiderman Is as silly yet I consider it a masterpiece of a film, 2 even more.
In the spirit of this post, drag doesn’t like Spider-Man 2. The first half of the movie is just watching Peter suck at his life and be punched down down down. It’s torture porn. No wonder he lost his mojo, being Spider-Man sucks. And if Peter isn’t Spider-Man, then people die in burning buildings. Peter’s arc is realising that he needs to intentionally ruin his life and suffer, because the alternative is worse.
It’s maybe a good piece of ethical philosophy and it makes us admire Peter, but it’s just fundamentally unfun and depressing.
My problem is witg cg fights. I feel like I’m just watching a three hour long cut scene.
Kind of agree with you. I liked it until endgame, but it was a downward slope afterwards
I liked the MCU, at first, but it had no business continuing after End Game.
I feel the same. Everything up until Endgame had some entertainment value. Most of what’s after is a low-quality cash grab
With so many a-list actors, they all get different story arcs, and fight for screen time, so there isn’t time to tell a nuanced or interesting story, and when they’re together it’s just an orgy of showing off how cool they are
It makes me feel snobbish to say you have to be literally juvenile to enjoy it. I just don’t get it. There’s no suspense at all, no surprise in anything. They’re all boring, intelligent characters. Even as films aimed at kids they’re bad, but I’m eternally surprised at the traction they get with 20s-30s…
I like these threads when people complain that “old classic movie” is formulaic and trope ridden or unoriginal… seemingly forgetting these films set the tropes, formulas and genres that all subsequent film makers hopped-on. That’s why, in retrospect, it appears clunky.
In another similar thread somebody said the band Queen were boring… yeah, maybe now. But fifty years ago when they first released? Not so much.
Not one comment in here about Lord of the Rings.
Which I agree with. Amazing movies. Glad everyone’s on the same page.
For me, it’s James Cameron’s Avatar. Visually stunning, especially for its time, but the story has to be the most cliche, predictable, boring, lazy piece of writing to ever have existed. It’s like they held an environmentally conscious 11 year old at gun point and made them write a story. The cigar chomping military guy working for corpos wants to pilfer a beautiful planet for its resources with disregard for the native populations that live there. Where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, ALL AROUND ME, EVERY FUCKING GOD DAMN DAY. Get an original idea.
Fuck this stupid piece of shit dumbass movie. It’s intellectually insulting. It’s a disgrace.
/endrant
Marvel movies. Yes all of them. They’re trash. It’s just cgi slop, badly written one-dimensional characters, cliché tropes, formulaic stories, plotholes bigger than meteorcraters and brainless action sequences. A cashgrab.
A saw a couple; I gave them a fair chance. They’re all the same. The appeal is beyond me. Brainrot at its finest.
Saw.
It is on the very tiny list of movies that I am actively angry I watched because I’m never getting that time back. It is one of the single worst movies on “Tell don’t show” that I felt like I was being actively gaslit by the writers because what they were telling was opposite of what they were showing.
“Jigsaw tricks people into killing his victims” says the cops, and says all the people watching the movie. NO. He kills people and gives them a potential for a way out. Setting up a maze with cutting wire and a door sealing off if you don’t make it in time isn’t “tricking someone” it’s killing them with extra steps. It’s like blaming fucking landmine victims “Well if they didn’t step there they’d be okay”. Legit the logic that movie gives I find my blood pressure rising just going into it again.
And the ending. I guess spoiler if you haven’t seen the movie, I’m not gonna bother to figure out the formatting for it so here’s your warning to stop reading. The surprise twist was why my friends made me watch this movie, the logic above was explained and how clever Jigsaw was they said I’d like it. I’m not a horror guy but I love Scream because holy fuck it was clever and well done. Saw, the victims are looking for where Jigsaw is watching them and I just said “He’s the dead guy in the middle of the room.” and questioned why would I come to that so early in the movie my reasoning was simple. It was a dumb movie that was up its own ass so much to say that it was clever that was the obvious “clever” haha we got you option it could be. Anything else would have actually been clever.
I compare Scream and Saw so much. Scream is a very clever movie masquerading as a dumb movie that deconstructs a genre and pulls of a fantastic twist that if you didn’t see it coming will shock you and when you go back there’s all sorts of clues. Hell, part of the twist is realizing they put thought into the killer instead of just “slasher villain #85” that the genre had done for so long, but if you know what’s happening the movie is winking with you with such amazingly dumb and clever things like “He’s behind you Jamie”. Saw is a dumb movie that masquerades as smart, it wants to be clever and philosophize at you and wants to pull off a twist that is unearned because there’s no clues for the twist, so unless you watch a lot of movies and realize this one is up its own ass, of course you’re going to be surprised. It’s like a guy who built a tesla coil and (think he) knows how it works and no one else does so he shows up in a cheap top hat and a wand and expects everyone to applaud like he’s David Copperfield. Sure, everyone loves tesla coils, but that reaction is unearned.
From what I understand from others who’ve seen the rest, even what little cleverness goes away on the character and it just becomes a show to watch more elaborate ways to see people get hurt. It’s the only way I can comprehend that the series is loved by as many as it is. I work in healthcare, I can see plenty of that on the day to day basis.
James Cameron’s Avatar series.
Then again… Does anyone actually like it? It seems to have all this online hype when it’s such a boring visual spectacle.
It’s like the opposite of the other Avatar franchise, which wasn’t a commercial hit, and seems less popular on paper, but seems to have a massive cultural impact.
Deadpool.
I’m not sure if I absolutely hate it, but I definitely don’t get the hype—especially with Deadpool and Wolverine. There were some funny bits, but I feel like most of it is almost Family Guy-tier reference humor.
The plot feels as unimportant as ever—there are no real stakes or anything significant going on. It’s all about the “jokes,” fourth wall breaks (which get tiresome almost immediately), and Ready Player One-level “recognize the character” moments.
Maybe the last part is the biggest reason why I don’t connect with it. I’ve never really been into comics outside of film and television. But I feel like that shouldn’t be the main driving force for a movie anyway—or at least not for a good movie. Like, Ready Player One was fun, but not good.
Harry Potter.
Before JK went mask off, I had dropped the books about half way though for being increasing annoyed with how they ended. Never any change to the status quo except Harry actually regressing in character development. I watched the first movie, but that was around when I dropped the books and never looked back.
I was able to just quietly keep my opinions to myself, but with with JK becoming increasing unhinged with both her tweets and books, I haven’t felt the need to be polite with the “separate the art from the artists” types. Especially when they just assume that you’re a fan if you don’t correct them.
Anything by JJ Abrams. He only knows how to start his shitty mystery box plots but never finish them.
Ted.
Juvenile fratboy humour done badly, very badly with lots of fan services to get the brainless cheering.
Made me laugh once in the first few minutes (I can’t even remember the joke) and walked out of the cinema after about an hour.
Elf.
Once you’ve seen the first 3 minutes and get the premise, then the entire rest of the film is so predictable in its jokes and situations that I derived absolutely zero pleasure from watching it and it just grated the entire way through.
Films can be funny because the initial premise leads to really entertaining, unexpected or clever situations… or a film can super straight up and shallow in its humour.
I really don’t get why Elf is so incredibly popular.
The Greatest Showman is a masterclass in style over substance—a glittery spectacle that sacrifices depth and integrity for catchy tunes and flashy visuals. Beneath its feel-good facade lies a shallow, formulaic narrative that romanticizes P.T. Barnum’s exploitative history while failing to give meaningful voices to the marginalized characters it claims to celebrate.
The musical numbers, though undeniably infectious, feel jarringly modern and out of place, prioritizing audience pandering over authenticity. Despite its popularity, the film’s sanitized themes and lack of emotional nuance reveal it as more empty circus than cinematic triumph.
If you’re looking for substance, you’ll find the tent empty.
Forest Gump. The 1994 Best Picture nominees were some of the most highly competitive the Academy has ever had, and they went with the one that was just a straight-up terrible fucking movie. It has no value except as nostalgia bait for Americans and propaganda for those who want to believe in the myth of American individual exceptionalism.
Its musical score is also probably the worst thing I’ve ever had the misfortune of performing in an orchestra. Dull and repetitive.
And its most famous line is straight-up bullshit. I’ve heard the book does it differently, but the movie puts “something that kinda sounds deep to a 14 year old” over a level of rationality that stands up to 20 seconds of thought from an average person. A box of chocolates tells you precisely what you’re going to be getting.
A box of chocolates tells you precisely what you’re going to be getting.
This is probably one of the weakest arguments against this movie—and there’s plenty to criticize. Labeling the chocolates was not always a common practice. It’s something mass produced chocolates started to do. There was a time people bought from a confectioner and there wouldn’t be labels. That’s the context of the line. You can criticize this line but the labeling isn’t the problem.
The book is WILD! Gump goes to space, there’s a lot more racism and sexism in the book, and Gump doesn’t come off as a lucky mentally challenged, but overall nice guy. He ends the book looking like a racist asshole, and criminal, IIRC. I read the book as a teenager after seeing the movie and that was the first book that I decided that the movie was actually better.
It has no value except as nostalgia bait for Americans and propaganda for those who want to believe in the myth of American individual exceptionalism.
If anything, Forrest Gump is a satire of The American Dream^^^TM
Only guy to have such a successful life without doing anything unethical is a mentally challenged, politically unaware, and extremely lucky, who does everything he’s told without questioning it.
It’s truly a film about not judging the book by its cover and allowing for that to happen instead of taking the film literally you can see the themes and especially satire/parody of the American dream as described above.
It’s white exceptionalism mixed with conservative narratives about Murican history.
Can’t help but love that you’re criticizing the line as faux-deep when it was delivered by someone with a mental disability.
Yeah, but a lot of the point is how despite being mentally disabled, he’s supposed to have deeper insight into things. That’s certainly how the cultural perception of the movie is. The problem is that the “insight” he has and which both the movie itself and the cultural memory of the movie treat as genuinely meaningful is actually fucking dumb.
I had listened to the audio book before I saw the movie. The movie is so off the mark on the ridiculous life of Forest Gump. My favorite part of the book is that Jenny leaves him, she doesn’t die, she leaves him because he becomes a major pot head.
she leaves him because he becomes a major pot head.
Why do I know wanna see a modern remake of the film where Forrest Gump gets baked and goes on Joe Rogan? Then says some shit that accidentally fixes the Left-Right Divide and leads to Trump being kicked out of office?
that would be spot on!
There’s a YouTube video that’s like “What if Forrest Gump took place in modern day.”
And it’s wonderful, he gets beaten up during the George Floyd protests by police and thinks it was because he called for a cab not knowing calling for a taxi was illegal. (The cops misheard him and thought he shouted “ACAB”), then later he decides to go on vacation to the Capitol because he’s a patriotic American and he’s always wanted to see it, he goes there and meets other excited patriots who seem to be having some kind of a party (It’s January 6th 2021)
Titanic.
The hype here was insane, when I finally saw it the experience was… underwhelming. Such a boring slog of a movie, mediocre CGI when disaster finally struck and that stupid end… Get on the piece of wood that is obviously big enough to hold you both, you dolt.
Only upside is that I watched it on TV, so apart from some hours of my life I’ll never get back it didn’t cost me anything.
