They should save him until Ron Howard directs the live action version of Green Eggs and Ham.
I absolutely hate it when people say they won’t watch subtitled films. I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but if someone says that to me, I tend to think far less of them afterwords.
Why? They’re both stupid, emotionally manipulative movies that demand an unearned payoff at the end.
How about refusing to watch a movie just because it’s in black and white? I think we’ve had some Dopers cop to that one.
I have a co-worker who equates “a movie with violent acts” with “bad movie.”
“Emotionally manipulative” could describe any movie that makes you feel something, though. That’s a major goal of all fiction.
I agree. Movies and books (or comics) are different media. Changes need to be made sometimes, and if you can’t deal with it, you should just stick with the original version.
I knew someone who hated The English Patient but it “glorified adultery.” I always thought that was pretty stupid.
But the worst of all is when someone dismisses a movie as “pretentious” when they clearly don’t really know what the word means. It ends up meaning that there was something about the movie they didn’t get; it becomes sort of a sour grapes-style epithet.
Possibly, except good movies have more interesting characters with reasons behind their actions that can be understood in the context of the story. Both The Shawshank Redemption and Forrest Gump are centered on characters that are one-dimensional pieces of cardboard: In Shawshank, it’s the villains. In Forest Gump, it’s the protagonist. (Admittedly, in Shawshank nobody is especially fleshed out, but the villains are extra-thin.)
I’ve read the source material in both cases, and I can’t say the movies were unfaithful in any meaningful way. (Forrest Gump was trimmed substantially, but the novel was a failed picaresque POS that should have been trimmed by an editor.) This isn’t a case where you can blame the filmmakers.
I guess that depends on how you define “slavish.” The changes in League of Extraordinary Gentleman are all to the film’s detriment, I’d argue. Contrariwise, the organic webshooters are actually an improvement. Both mechanical and organic webshooters are impossible by the laws of physics, but that’s allowable in a fantasy mileau. A teenager in a public school, from a family that’s just barely making ends meet, inventing mechanical web shooters FROM SCRATCH, in UNDER A WEEK, is hugely improbable, and, as Douglas Adams pointed out, improbabilities are harder to swallow than impossibilities.
Only if you don’t recognize the extremely loaded nature of a word like manipulative. Movies that make you feel something without being emotionally manipulative can range from touching to heart-breaking. IMHO emotionally manipulative is a term normally reserved for a particularly ham-fisted attempt which is simultaneously transparent and unavoidable.
My touchstone for emotional manipulation in movies is Mississippi Burning.
No, Forrest Gump sends a message far more seductive and far more pernicious: That virtue is more important than intelligence, not on any abstract scale of values but in terms of achieving material success. Forrest Gump gets rich just because he always does the right thing and does what he’s told and works hard and deserves it and has God on his side (which obviously is why his is the only shrimping boat spared by the hurricane), while all around him more intelligent persons destroy their own lives and others’ by running after kicks and causes. The latter part of that is plausible, but not the former. Real-life Forrest Gumps never get rich save through connections or inheritance.
Some critics panned Trainspotting for “glorifying” drug use, even though the junkies are shown as living in utterly squalid conditions and wrecking their lives.
I know many people who will not watch black & white movies. I also know peole who will nto watch movies that are “old”. Frequently they are the same people.
For this reason, I still have a certain contempt for Terms of Endearment, but at least I’ve seen it.
For those who hate Forrest Gump, have you tried watching it as a tragedy? I know there’s joy in little things, like having a child, but there should be joy in big things, too. The movie is a chronicle of some of the most singular and special opportunites of the last few decades, wasted on someone who can’t appreciate them. That’s a tragedy.
You win the thread.
If there were a “Like This” button on the Dope, I would have clicked it for you!
I agree completely. It is a difference between major themes and minutia. If you listed the most substantial elements of the Spiderman mythology, the fact that he BUILT his webshooters would likely rank relatively low.
But, as you say, when LoEG turned a literary GN with sophisticated humor and plots into a Sean Connery action flick, you have insulated critics from the charge of demanding “slavish” attention to detail.
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I respectfully disagree. This is a very common argument so I won’t hijack any further but I can’t help but offer that I find this attitude particularly “pretentious”. Sometimes a movie just doesn’t appeal to an individual. Sometimes it just plain sucks (in someone’s opinion) regardless of what the critics and hipsters are saying. No need to be insulting; everyone’s mileage tends to vary.
That’s fair. It seems, then, that documentaries are much more likely to abuse one’s emotions than fiction. Does that make sense?
Which is all well and good, but calling a movie ‘pretentious’ because you didn’t like it is rather prattish.
If you didn’t like the movie, you didn’t like the movie, that’s that.
What if I don’t like black-and-white movies because I am not good with faces, and I have a really hard time telling the characters apart without the extra cues of hair and clothing colors? It’s worse in old movies where all the men wear suits most of the time, too- then I don’t have different kinds of clothes to tell them apart. All men in suits with approximately the same haircut look alike to me in black-and-white movies. Movies tend to be confusing and not very much fun to watch when you can’t tell the characters apart.