I agree with you, but with perhaps a different result of my feelings: I believe books and comics should almost never be made into movies. All my acquintances know I love books, comics, and movies, and thus except me to love movies based on books and comics. Their eyes usually glaze over when I try to explain to them why I don’t.
See, that’s just a bizarre interpretation of the movie, to me. And still a strange reason to hate it, regardless.
This is much closer to what I got out of Forrest Gump.
Mine is The Green Mile. Talk about ham-fisted.
Next to ham-fisted in the dictionary should be the poster for Crash.
I think you’re both overthinking it. It’s just a fun story, nothing more. Had Forrest not gotten lucky, he would simply have kept plowing along, doing his thing. He was poor, he was rich, he never really knew or cared about the difference - and that’s part of the reason people liked the character.
Good one.
That’s also a lot of what I got out of it. I also felt like it was largely a vehicle for reminiscence about the era.
Not if the reason I don’t like it is because I do indeed find it pretentious. 'Tis a perfetly cromulent word, y’know:p Seriously, is there some preapproved list of adjectives that one is allowed to use? For the record, it’s very seldom that I don’t enjoy a movie, and I see a lot of them, but if my opinion is that a movie is pretentious then I’m not sure why that judgement should be challenged. Would you (general you) doubt someone’s motivations if they deemed a given film sophomoric?
A reason for me: If Ben Affleck is in it, the movie is shit.
The Subject title is “Dumbest reasons to dislike a movie”, not “Perfectly rational reasons to dislike a movie”.
Perhaps it would help if you gave us a few examples of movies you consider “pretentious,” and how and why they are pretentious.
For bonus points: What do wine snobs mean when they call a wine “amusingly pretentious”? I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere.
Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.
Totally, and I agree 100%. In my experience, documentarians are true believers about whatever subject matter they’re documenting and thus much more prone than other storytellers to be of the “I believe this to be true and so should everyone else!” persuasion.
In anticipation of this very good and reasonable question, I tried to think of some examples but I’m at work and a wee bit distracted (I hate when work takes me away from the Dope!). If I think of something in the next few minutes I’ll post, otherwise I’ll see if this is still alive tomorrow. To be honest, I’m usually the one who *likes *a movie that is being *called *pretentious and I it always chaps my hide a little when I hear someone else say that the person “just didn’t get it”.
Most of the really pretentious films I see are shorts. If someone (err, actually a very large team of people) is going to invest their time and money in a feature, they typically want it to have some manner of broad appeal. Even the David Lynches and Jim Jarmusches of the world. That said, I found the recent Doubt a bit pretentious. I felt the point of the movie was essentially, “look how good Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep can act.”
You have read this in a cartoon by James Thurber, or in a reference to it. Either the snob in question is joking or utterly clueless.
Oh, and I liked Daredevil.
I know this is a TV show, but I can’t stand it when people say, "I don’t want to watch Battlestar Galactica. I don’t like SciFi. "
:mad:
Yabbut, they got to be in a MOVIE!
When’s the last time anybody thought your life was important enough to make a MOVIE out of it?
Some of my Dumb reasons why I’ll dislike a movie:
-it has John Wayne in it and its not a Western.
-someone must explain it to me afterwards (or feels the need to over and over) - in the media, in the car on the way home, wherever. Example - “Eyes Wide Shut”
-the casting is all wrong, at least according to my imaginary casting. For example, one of the many reasons I dislike the movie version of “South Pacific” is that Doris Day is not the female lead. Similarly for “West Side Story”, “Fiddler”(Zero Mostel should have been up on that screen is all I can think), and “Camelot”. If they had only gone along with my casting preferences, I could have liked the movies.
How about when I say “Cylons are supposed to [del]be boxy and shiny[/del] look like they’re made out of toasters.”?
But I do like science fiction.
I refuse to watch movies with (in my opinion) stupid titles. But I saw Kill Bill anyway.