To begin with a hijack: one of my ultimate pet-peeves is when I’m told by the fan of a movie “You just didn’t understand it.” The fact that I didn’t LIKE the movie doesn’t mean that I didn’t UNDERSTAND it- yes, I know that the elephant represents the proletariat, the butterfly represents the oppression of women in a patriarchal society, and the talking fern stand is a Christ figure- I got all that- I just thought it was heavy handed pseudo-intellectual nonsense.
That said, what movies did you “fully get” but just couldn’t stand because they were so pretentious? Some of my pics (there are many):
Prospero’s Books- a staging of The Tempest that looks like a co-production of David Lynch, Merchant-Ivory, and the producers of Queer as Folk. It contains more male nudity (including the nearly 90 John Gielgud) than you’ll see at the White Party, opens with Gielgud swimming in a pool beneath a little boy peeing, contains some artistic gross-out imagery and all dubbed to the “silver trumpet muffled in velvet” voice of Gielgud reciting Shakespeare. (One scene that was almost inspired, though, was the pregnant woman who peels her skin down to reveal the fetus.) Just dreck.
Speaking of David Lynch, Lost Highway- I know there are people who enjoyed this movie, but I thought it was absolutely abysmal. The film-school “look what I can do” lingering close-ups of still objects, Robert Blake as a bi-local demon, and a plot that goes absolutely nowhere just don’t for me a great movie make.
Pi- contains every arthouse cliche: dripping water, black’n’white (for no apparent reason), gratuitous sex scene, and dialogue exposition that sounds like it’s being read word for word from a college termpaper. This movie had a brilliant basic plot (a secular Jewish mathematician becomes involved with a plot to reveal the name of G_d by using computers) and could have been great, but instead it devolves into pretentious pablum with some Kabbalah thrown in to lessen the pain.
I won’t include David Lynch, since I’d be lying if I said I understood them and disliked them, but…
Sex, Lies and Video Tape and Full Frontal. This is what happens when someone gets a hardon about the Seinfield theory of “a show about nothing” but makes movies instead. Total waste of tape.
Man, I am so with you on David Lynch. I swear I’ll never waste any more of my time* on his crap again!
*after I watch Dune, which I bought for the wife for her birthday, and maybe the hot girl-on-girl action in Mulholland Drive occasionally. Hey, I’m only a man!
I think David Lynch is for film what writers like Faulkner and Pynchon are to novels. Their work exists not to be enjoyed, but deciphered and then discussed. If you put a Lynch movie in the DVD player expecting entertainment (and have not taken the three tabs of acid you were supposed to) then you are going to be let down. Although the girl-on-girl in Mulholland Drive was REALLY hot. Almost as good as in Bound, which was a more entertaining movie to boot.
Today’s Penny Arcade actually goes after the same topic. If you’re viewing this post after the 24th of March, you’ll have to flip back a few days.
Dancer in the Dark. Characters that stupid don’t deserve to be played by Bjork. Gah.
I’m also on board with David Lynch. To mis-quote Fame: “That’s not movies, that’s masturbation.”
I usually love Pedro Almodovar’s movies, but I also have to nominate Talk to Her. Why? The awful, awful dancing. If you’re going to resort to pretentious tricks like that, at least it should be done well.
You know, I didn’t think the girl-on-girl action in Mulholland was really all that hot. Especially when you compare it to a movie like When Night is Falling, which is, to be precise, hotter than liquid f*ck. (And a pretty good movie, to boot. And NOT a porno, which means it actually has redeeming value if you watch it. )
Ranchoth
(Viva the Sundance channel!)
I totally agree about Full Frontal. The whole time I was watching it I kept getting this “well, aren’t we clever” vibe from the actors. It was a turn-off for me. I feel that way about a lot of movies that it seems are made with the intention of kissing the Academy’s ass.
Any one ever see Last Supper? Bunch of whiny liberals decide to start inviting people with conservative views over for dinner, and then poison them? It’s like someone made a movie out of one of december’s threads.
I’ll probably get flensed for this, but I despised The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. I was pretty young when I watched it, and I recently rented Drowning By Numbers which I kinda liked, so I decided to give The Cook… another chance. All that did was make me hate it in new ways I didn’t consider the first time. (Like the beat-you-over-the-head criticisms of Thatcher’s class system).
It’s like that angry clove-smoking beret-wearing twit that sits at your local bar writing inane musings in a notebook was given a multi-million dollar budget to surround himself with incredible industry talent so that it could be attached to his twee dark poems.
I’m totally in agreement with you on this one. I’ve described this movie as the one where there was nothing better to do than compare the sized of the male genitals during the “parade” scenes. Who’da thought that could get so boring!
I love that movie. But then, I’m a conservative, so liberals being portayed as egomaniacal idiots probably doesn’t bother me as much as it might some other people.
)