This has happened to me more times than I can count. I see a movie, and at the end, I can’t decide if I liked it or not. This time it was the movie Hard Candy. I agree with a review I saw that said it would have made a better short film; it felt padded out to get to full feature length. Aside from that, though… I just can’t decide how I feel about it.
Does this happen to you? What movies have you seen that you can’t decide your reaction to?
I felt this way after Observe and Report. It was just such dead pan insanity, it was like it was daring me to not like it or to not get it. But I think I kind of did. Actually it’s easy to feel this way about any movie that’s well made, or thought provoking, or otherwise spins your brain or nerves or heart around, but isn’t ‘feel good’.
Harry Brown, which stars Michael Caine as an ex-Marine who gets pissed off at the local chavs and starts killing them off. I saw a trailer for it on the DVD of All Saints Day and I though “Awesome! Michael Caine kicking ass, quipping and killing punks!”
Unfortunately the actual movie is horribly dark and depressing. It’s a great movie but not one I want to watch again anytime soon.
Children of Men was similar. Great movie, depressing all the way through.
Weird that I was thinking of Hard Candy as soon as I read the title. My feeling is that it was much stronger in the beginning and middle than the ending, which didn’t quite seem to fit. And yet the final section is inextricable from the rest of the movie, so it’d be hard to say, “just change the ending and it’d be good”.
I think that’s possibly a common thing about movies like this. There’s something wrong with them, but it’s not an obvious flaw or particular shoddy work in one area.
Along the lines of Children of Men is Blindness. Very similar themes, and I can’t quite decide which one I like better than the other, either.
The Brothers Grimm. I thought maybe watching it a second time would help. It didn’t. Then there’s Tideland, which I don’t think I’ll watch again…
I saw only part of The Brothers Grimm and I think I had the same reaction.
Sometimes I watch a movie and leave with the feeling that I didn’t “get” it. That I just wasn’t seeing what the filmmaker’s intent was. And if I’m not sure what the filmmaker was trying to do, I can’t tell if he did it.
I consider myself a reasonably intelligent movie viewer. So if I don’t get a movie, I feel that’s partly the filmmaker’s fault. But I’m not omniscient so I’m aware the problem could be me.
My vote is still out on There Will Be Blood. I love P. T. Anderson and have loved all his movies, so my issue is largely one of confusion over why I’m not loving it. I think I just like it, and that’s a strange reaction for me.
Agreed about Hard Candy. It’s an intelligent treatment of fairly taboo subject matter, visually brilliant and has some great moments of performance, but at its moments of greatest emotional intensity it seems to go one step too far and suddenly cheapen what’s come before. I’m thinking of moments like the bit where he stabs a picture, all “Thank you for showing me who I am, Haley!” or “Or not” at the end of the movie.
Another I find it hard to make up my mind on is Million Dollar Baby. It’s another jumble of good performances and moving isolated scenes in the midst of some fairly by-the-numbers screenwriting and plotting. But it almost feels like that’s deliberate, as if Eastwood was shooting for a quality of allegory mixed with gritty realism.
I always thought Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger was a potentially great movie that was dragged down by a handful of pointless or idiotic scenes (the one where he tries to get through airport security is an example of idiotic). Loved the premise, hated the execution.
“Once” had some great songs and some interesting elements, but then there were some very annoying musical passages and an unsatisfying ending. I’ve never decided whether the good outweighed the bad or vice versa.
Pink Flamingos and Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill fall in that category for me.
The Lion In Winter. It’s very strange. The acting is pitch perfect – a joy to watch (even if I’m not a fan of Katharine Hepburn). The script is bursting at the seams with fantastic lines. Production values are superb. Yet I’ve thus far been unable to watch the entire movie in a sitting. In fact I don’t think I’ve seen the ending more than once. Perhaps the story arc doesn’t grab me. Maybe I just get sick of all the bickering, witty though it be. I’m not sure what it is. But around about the 90-minute mark, my attention just drifts away.
Was it the darkness? Because that’s what you get when you watch Gilliam. I sort of agree with Tideland, except that I couldn’t even get past 15 minutes. The DVD didn’t have subtitles, and Jennifer Tilly was hard to understand and the girl was impossible. Don’t know if I’ll go back.
I guess I sorta liked Frailty, although I don’t really want to watch it again. If I do, I’m getting a clicker and counting how many times they say “demon.”
There’s another category of movies you genuinely liked, but don’t really want to see anytime soon due to length and/or emotional content.
Inland Empire. I like Lynch, love Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive’s one my of all-time favorites. But somehow I found Inland Empire so hard to sit through. It wasn’t that I was bored or didn’t ‘get’ what was going on. I thought Laura Dern did a great job and there were several scenes and lines of dialogue that were thrillingly creepy, but there were also several moments where I felt really uncomfortable watching it.
And I don’t know why.
Burn after Reading. I just can’t figure out what wrong with it but it missing something. Personally I would have enjoyed more of a role for JK Simmons.
Fantastic Mr. Fox was great in terms of animation, and I even loved the (seemingly) deliberately lazy voice acting, but it was just so weird that I don’t know if I really liked it or not.