A recent Crash thread popped up in CS with links posted to previous discussions. The threads linked had some pretty intense backlash. Same thing happened to Juno. Google will lead you to scathing reviews of both films.
At the time of release there was huge adulation for both films and then the pushback came, especially after Crash nabbed the Best Picture Oscar.
I’m drawing a blank on other movies that had this happen. Help a brother out. And were you a fanboy/girl or a hater?
Titanic?
Dances with Wolves? It’s a perfectly good movie, but it wasn’t, you know, that good. Kinda bloated and preachy, really.
I think both of those would fit and I’d add Forrest Gump, which is despised by many.
Especially compared to Goodfellas, which ended up losing the Best Picture Oscar to it that year.
Anyway, there’s the English Patient which got a pretty big backlash after the Seinfeld episode about it made it OK to hate it.
Avatar seems to have many haters as well.
I actually liked all the films mentioned so far: Juno, Crash, Titanic, Dances with Wolves, Forrest Gump and the English Patient. None of them is a masterpiece but they are all quite enjoyable IMO.
I suppose a film which received a bit of a backlash which I disliked was Lost in Translation.
I think one of the reasons for the hate is that it was one of the first movies and the first blockbuster to portray Indians in an even marginally sympathetic light and to portray all honkies (with the exception of Costner’s character) as dumb/crazy/insane/retarded/bigoted/racist/filthy/stinking/unwashed/uneducated scum. Which was semi-accurate but the liberals in the country once again showed their true cowardly colors and let conservatives like El Blimpo endlessly attack the movie, and said attitudes have spread into and around the country vis-a-vie this movie.
Shakespeare In Love is hated by many because it won the Best Picture Oscar over Saving Private Ryan. I liked both, but I think SIL is a much better film than SPR, largely because of the screenplay. The arguments by many of the haters boiled down to “SPR should have won because it’s a tribute to the men who served during WWII.” Okay, but that doesn’t make it a better movie.
I could happily watch Shakespeare in Love repeatedly. I got 40 minutes into Saving Private Ryan and turned it off in boredom. Which gives the greatest honour to dead soldiers is not a criterion for deciding which is the best film for the Academy Awards.
Silence of the Lambs
American Beauty
Lost In Translation
Pulp Fiction
Match Point
Little Miss Sunshine
the Hurt Locker
And just about the entire ouvres of Woody Allen & David Lynch have gotten intense backlash by haters.
Oh, and one more - ironically the film that inspired a lot of the backlash aimed at “Crash” - Brokeback Mountain.
Apparently I missed the Juno backlash - what’s the deal with that?
Who the fuck is El Blimpo?
I hated it because it was way too long and boring.
I don’t think Avatar had adulation followed by push-back though. Even before it was released, it was already being derided as “Dances With Wolves/Ferngully/Pocahontas with Smurfs”.
Absolute nonsense. For one, Little Big Man did the same thing at least 15 years before, and even John Ford’s Fort Apache portrayed the Indians and sympathetic and at the mercy of greedy and stupid white men. You even had John Wayne spending almost the entire film supporting the Indians case.
More of a backlash against the writer, Diablo Cody. She appeared in articles sounding beyond full of herself - she formed a gang of grrrl screenwriters who claimed they were taking over Hollywood. You get the idea. So when that Megan Fox horror movie she wrote tanked, it generated big schadenfreude.
At a guess, Rush Limbaugh (sp?).
Backlash happens for many reasons. I think a lot of it has to do with hype. Titanic probably fits into that category. I liked it - it was a good film - but given the hype you would have thought it reinvented movies. It didn’t, it was just a good movie.
Another reason is adulation poured on so-so plot and dialog movies. Forrest Gump and Avatar fit this mold. I didn’t like Avatar because the plot was SO trite. And the dialog actually made me laugh out loud (side note: when I posted that opinion here, I was asked if I saw it in 3D. I didn’t but I don’t see how that would have helped the plot or dialog.). Now if it was presented to me as a “cool animation” film I probably would have rolled with it. Best Picture nomination? No way.
Same for Forrest Gump. At the 67th Academy Awards it won (among other things): Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay. Really? It didn’t even have a driving plot.
Now if these movies speak to you in some way, fine. If you like over-sentimental tales, OK. But lets not make these movies something they are not - great movies… especially at the expense movie that really deserve these awards.
Just my 2¢.
Toss American Beauty onto the same bonfire, PJ. It was lauded as so deep when it came out - deep it ain’t, but that flying bag sure is purty.
Right. In fact the Broken Arrow TV series in 1950 showed a Indian in a very positive light. Hell, even F-Troop in 1967 showed a different take on “paleface and redskin”.
We used to have the myth of the “savage redskin” now we have the myth of “the noble, environmentally friendly, Native American”.
Oddly both “paleface and redskin” are humans, and humans have always had a mix of evil and noble, greedy and generous, etc.
I like DwW, but I’m a sucker for movies that show Indians at least remotely realistically, and I love listening to the Lakota language. I would have preferred a different actor over KK, especially since his nasaly voice is very irritating as a narrator.
American Beauty, I thought, was one big Hollywood sneer at middle America. But I still enjoyed watching it.
Avatar was laughable, as a movie. Maybe the 3-D version was a cool Disney ride, but movies are movies, not Disney rides.
Hurt Locker was OK, but Best Picture???
Forest Gump was great fun. I didn’t see the other movies it was up against, so I can’t really judge.
I liked Juno a lot.
I also really liked Crash. I liked the way it took all the people, and then had them end up in a way you’d least expect when you first met them. And I thought the scene where the Iranian guy thinks he may have shot the little girl to be one of the most powerful scenes I have seen on film. My one complaint is that it was a bit of rip-off of House of Sand and Fog, which I also liked quite a bit.