Films Which Have The Opposite Effect On You To That Which The Makers Intended

Cafe Society
41

I certainly didn’t get that impression from the film. If you read the book, especially, you get a more concentrated form of the feelings of the POWs. But:
1.) It’s a prisoner’s duty to escape, as they made clear in the film. No arrogance needed.

2.) Although Americans were originally in with the British, the Germans later separated them because the Yanks and the Brits 9who the Germans hoped would end up fighting with each other) got along too well. So, although Americans contributed to the escape efforts, they weren’t around when the Big Break finally came. The movie ignored this, and plunked down Americans in the roles actually played by British pilots.

3.) Although most of the characters were based on real people, or amalgams of them, there really wasn’t anybody quite like the Steve McQueen character. If anyone had tried the arrogant and cocky things he did – going after a baseball that went behind the warning wire, escaping to be deliberately recaptured (to bring back info about the land near the camp), dressing up in a captured German soldier’s uniform (!!!), assaulting a German motorcyclist to steal his cycle (!!!), or trying to jump barbed wire fences with that cycle (!!!), he WOULDA been killed in pretty short ordeer.

42

I don’t know if this is an appropriate nomination because I haven’t a clue, really, as to the intensions of the folks who made 'em, but…

The Mummy (1999ish) was promoted and billed as a creepy CGI-powered edge-of-seat shriekfest, probably quite a bit over the top… but… it’s a genre spoof? A farce?

I wasn’t in the mood for rolleyes satire. Not terribly far into it there was some scene in which a hapless mortal-type comes eyeball-to-eyesocket with reanimated skeletal remains. Mortal’s eyes bug, mortal freaks, and runs stage right. Reciprocally, Mister Skeleton drops jaw, arms go akimbo in skeletal fear, and terrified skeleton hauls bony ass stage left. Sheesh. I punched the eject button and looked for something else to do.

I see they are advertising a sequel, or I guess it’s actually a Part III? The posters show a sphynx-like head/skull dissolving into dust on the viewer’s right. Expression on face is a combo of supreme boredom and :rolleyes: . Jaw is cracked open in a massive yawn. I think I’ll pass.

43

[QUOTE=Scissorjack]
Another pet hate: Dead Man Walking. It was so smugly assured that we’d automatically be cheering for Susan Sarandon and her liberal sensibilities that it didn’t touch once upon the genuine ethical issue of whether a society is ever justified in taking a life as punishment: nope, the death penalty is wrong because Janet from The Rocky Horror Show says so. Me, I wanted to swing on the fucker’s legs.
[/QUOTE]

I didn’t get that from Dead Man Walking at all.
I was really surprised that they didn’t judge the death penalty as good or bad, but leave it to the viewer to make up their own mind.
If you watch it as a pro-DP movie it works just fine as when you watch it as an anti-DP movie.

44

Nobody can tell me they weren’t cheering for the Nazis in Shining Through.

45

[QUOTE=Sublight]
Nobody can tell me they weren’t cheering for the Nazis in Shining Through.
[/QUOTE]
Another example: “THE ATTIC! SHE’S IN THE ATTIC!”

(OK, it likely never happened. Still a good story.)

46

The biggie for me would have to be Das Boot. Watching the sub that sunk a British ship and refused to rescue the sailors get hammered by Spitfires in the harbor while her crew watched and died slowly?

BWAHHHHHHH-HAH-HAH-HAAHHHHH!!! Yeah, that broke my fucking heart!! Now you guys have something to cry about.

Also in Gangs of New York, I was actually kind of disappointed that Bill the Butcher didn’t wind up breaking every bone in Amsterdam’s lying, back-stabbing, upstart, punk-assed skull. Say what you want about Bill’s racism (In real life, I doubt that street gangs back then of any flavor were made up of social progressives any more than they are today), he earned his stripes, and he knew how to respect an enemy. Why was Amsterdam any better?

47

[QUOTE=Baldwin]
In the James Bond movies with Roger Moore, I always found myself rooting for the villain.
[/QUOTE]

I was watching one of the 90’s bond movies (Goldeneye? You Only Live Twice? Whichever one had him doing the sidestroke to swim into the airplane falling in midair), and for about the first third, I was listening to his sleazy lines and stupid jokes and watching him get all the beautiful women, and I was thinking, “What the hell? This guy is dumb and sleazy and completely obnoxious? Why are they all sleeping with him?”

Then I remembered that he’s a stone cold killer who’s a deadly shot with his pistol, and I realized the women were all laughing at his stupid one-liners because they feared he would kill them if they didn’t laugh. I watched the rest of the movie as a portrait of a serial killer with a too-high opinion of his own charm, and enjoyed it a lot more.

Earlier this week I watched Darjeeling Limited. Now, you know how From Dusk Til Dawn starts off as a standard boilerplate Tarantino crime drama, and then about halfway through it changes to vampires slaughtering everyone? Darjeeling Limited has these three completely unsympathetic brothers get on a train in India and be awful to each other and everyone around them. I think I was supposed to develop sympathy for these poor little rich boys over the course of the movie. But at some point they’re camping outside the train, in a region rumored to be patrolled by a man-eating tiger, and my god I was hoping it was going to follow From Dusk Til Dawn.

Hated that movie.

Daniel

48

[QUOTE=Linty Fresh]
The biggie for me would have to be Das Boot. Watching the sub that sunk a British ship and refused to rescue the sailors get hammered by Spitfires in the harbor while her crew watched and died slowly?
[/QUOTE]
They didn’t refuse to rescue the sailors. They were unable to rescue the sailors. You saw the Captain cursing because he could do nothing.

49

Judgment at Nuremburg - I saw it with a school group in elementary school. The portrayal of Burt Lancaster’s character was sympathetic, and I was young and unsophistocated about history. By the time the movie ended, with the notice that none of the convicted Nazis served more than a few years, I was glad. I saw it again in high school, and was appalled at my earlier ignorance.

50

While I absolutely loved Napoleon Dynamite there seems to be a group of people this movie really rubbed the wrong way.
I loved the fact that the misfit kids didn’t mope around wishing they were like the cool kids but rather embraced their quirkiness and in the end a few of them (Pedro, Napoleon, Deb) found eachother and became really good friends. You grin and laugh at some of the things they do because you can see yourself in them.
Unfortunately some people thought this movies sole purpose was to poke fun and laugh at the kids who were different missing the intent entirely.

51

[QUOTE=Scissorjack]
For me, it’s movies in which a “lovable” workshy loser takes on a challenge out of selfish short-term interest, and ends up transforming his own life and the lives of those around him, sticking it to “The Man” in the process. An Officer And A Gentleman set the template, and everything from Police Academy to Good Will Hunting - as well as every Adam Sandler movie ever made has followed the same basic formula.
[/QUOTE]

You are wrong on every point about Will Hunting. He was not “lovable”, workshy, or a loser. He was an abrasive, hard-working guy who also spent tons of time reading, and was enough of a “winner” even at the beginning to put a Harvard smart guy in his place and get the girl. And he doesn’t stick it to “The Man”. Quite the opposite; he starts as a janitor, denying “The Man” the use of his mind, but by the end he accepts a job with “The Man.”

[QUOTE=Scissorjack]
The one that really pissed me off, though, was School Of Rock, with Jack Black mugging and gurning as the supposedly charming out-of-work muso who touches the lives of the children he teaches, challenging “The System” and triumphing: he was an irritating, irresponsible oaf, a sponger who in real life would be universally loathed. He leeches off those around him, he blithely commits fraud in his friend’s name, he scams his way into a responsible job he has no intention of doing: and yet we’re supposed to fall for his antics because he’s remained true to his dream. And the one character who dares to point out that he’s a useless slovenly mooch, his flatmate’s girlfriend, is portrayed as a shrill and uptight bitch.

God, I hated that movie and its blandly packaged notion of rock as rebellion, where fucking around was rewarded and the idiot was king, and I hated Jack Black and his smirking smugness: a happy ending for me, rather than the treacly redemption of that concert where the kids triumphed in front of their newly adoring parents, would be one where they were bottled off stage by angry drunken louts and Jack Black went to jail.
[/QUOTE]

This is also wrong. Jack Black’s character was a useless slovenly mooch. That is exactly what you were supposed to see him as. He wasn’t supposed to be charming. He was an irresponsible sponger who thought he could be a rock star but wasn’t nearly good enough. But he was funny to watch. It’s a comedy about a guy scamming a school, you aren’t supposed to be supporting his actions, you are supposed to laugh at them.

We’re not supposed to admire him for staying true to his dream, we’re supposed to laugh at him for not realizing how ridiculous his dream is. And at the end of the movie, his dream dies. He realizes he isn’t good enough to be a rock star. But he is good enough to give music lessons.

52

I can’t watch Mister Smith Goes to Washington without reflecting on what a complete idiot the title character is and how it’s best that the whole system is set up to keep people like that out of politics.

53

Twelve Angry Men. I got the impression that the accused kid actually did the crime and ended up getting off scott free because one juror didn’t feel the defence lawyer did a good enough job.

54

[QUOTE=Spectralist]
Twelve Angry Men. I got the impression that the accused kid actually did the crime and ended up getting off scott free because one juror didn’t feel the defence lawyer did a good enough job.
[/QUOTE]

The point wasn’t that the kid was supposed to be innocent; the point was that the prosecution had failed to present a case which eliminated reasonable doubt, and therefore the jury was duty-bound to declare “Not Guilty”, even though the kid might well have done the crime nonetheless.

55

[QUOTE=AHunter3]
I don’t know if this is an appropriate nomination because I haven’t a clue, really, as to the intensions of the folks who made 'em, but…

The Mummy (1999ish) was promoted and billed as a creepy CGI-powered edge-of-seat shriekfest, probably quite a bit over the top… but… it’s a genre spoof? A farce?
[/QUOTE]

I think you may be misremembering. The first Mummy trailer features the scene where Brendan Fraser is shooting at the sandstorm Mummy head from a biplane and the extended trailer includes a lot of the jokes.

And it wasn’t a spoof. It was an awesome homage to the Indiana Jones series while still being kickass on it’s own. But I’m scared for The Mummy 3, so I’m going to wait for the DVD.

56

[QUOTE=Spectralist]
Twelve Angry Men. I got the impression that the accused kid actually did the crime and ended up getting off scott free because one juror didn’t feel the defence lawyer did a good enough job.
[/QUOTE]
This goes to how you view the justice system. The correct view, espoused by the movie, is that it’s better to let the guilty go free than punish the innocent, so returning a verdict of Not Guilty due to an incompetent defense is correct legally and morally.

57

[QUOTE=Indistinguishable]
The point wasn’t that the kid was supposed to be innocent; the point was that the prosecution had failed to present a case which eliminated reasonable doubt, and therefore the jury was duty-bound to declare “Not Guilty”, even though the kid might well have done the crime nonetheless.
[/QUOTE]

Just to add to that—Henry Fonda’s character makes the point a couple of times that “I don’t know if he’s guilty or not,” implying that he’s not convinced that the kid didn’t commit the crime, only that he thinks the prosecution didn’t make a convincing case. And since they are potentially talking about the kid’s life (and possibly death), that they at least ought to discuss the case.

58

Signs. The aliens were supposed to be creepy, but I just found them hilarious. Then, when I realized all that build-up had been for naught, that the whole plot made no sense, I just felt really annoyed.

59

[QUOTE=AHunter3]
I don’t know if this is an appropriate nomination because I haven’t a clue, really, as to the intensions of the folks who made 'em, but…

The Mummy (1999ish) was promoted and billed as a creepy CGI-powered edge-of-seat shriekfest, probably quite a bit over the top… but… it’s a genre spoof? A farce?

I wasn’t in the mood for rolleyes satire. Not terribly far into it there was some scene in which a hapless mortal-type comes eyeball-to-eyesocket with reanimated skeletal remains. Mortal’s eyes bug, mortal freaks, and runs stage right. Reciprocally, Mister Skeleton drops jaw, arms go akimbo in skeletal fear, and terrified skeleton hauls bony ass stage left. Sheesh. I punched the eject button and looked for something else to do.
[/QUOTE]

I’ve seen The Mummy about a dozen times. And the scene you just described? Doesn’t exist.

60

[QUOTE=Spectralist]
Twelve Angry Men. I got the impression that the accused kid actually did the crime and ended up getting off scott free because one juror didn’t feel the defence lawyer did a good enough job.
[/QUOTE]
I have to echo the others. The point isn’t about whether the kid actually is guilty or not, the point is about whether there’s reasonable doubt.