Seconded. Though I did finish it, I wanted my 2 hours back.
[hijack]
This is a slight hijack, and I haven’t seen this movie so I’m not commenting on it specifically, but it seems to me that we as a culture have a hard time actually identifying criticism, irony, and social commentary. We always seem to like characters that are meant specifically to be unliked or ridiculed, as long as they’re funny, sexy, interesting, or nice.
It reminds me of one of my English classes in college; I was floored at how many women in my class didn’t think Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights was such a bad guy. 'cause, you know, he loved her and would do anything for her. Way to miss the freaking point.
[/hijack]
H3Knuckles, something doesn’t have to be preachy to be pretentious. The primary criterion is “characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.” In that respect, The Matrix can easily be considered pretentious, as it can be said to have assumed an air of being far more profound and epic than it had any business being. (Caveats added to allow for various opinions.) There’s no strong preachy message that comes through, no, but all something has to do to be pretentious is pretend that it’s better than it really is.
I thought The Girl in the Cafe and The Constant Gardener were exceptionally preachy. Neither film had any subtlety.
And I’ll chime in on Magnolia and Crash.
Anything Spielberg has done in the last 15 years or so.
The funny thing about Sideways was that the character was at times loveable.
But, also. . .if his “foil” was decent, we would have been given more of a chance to see that Miles was an ass. But, he was supposed to be the opposite of pretentious, and that wasn’t appealing either.
The movie didn’t make anything easy on the viewer. That’s why I think it’s such a great movie, and I defend it against what I think are first-impression criticisms. Let me add that part of the reason I’m passionate about it is that I didn’t like it the first time I saw it. I caught it on cable at a later point, and it started dawning on me how interesting it was. Shame that it gets this pretentious label, because a lot of it is beautiful. The multi-frame sun-dappled jazz montage scene is art. (ok, that sounded pretentious)
Titanic. There’s little substance to this film, like cotton candy for the mind. Hated it.
Being There
On a related note, I submit that our culture has a problem dealing with meaningful statements or depictions in a way which is not ironic or pretentious. In that manner, even the most testosterone-laden straight-up action flick may actually say more than a “deep” art-house movie.
So you didn’t get far enough in for the mass sing-a-long? Lucky you 
Some of these puzzle me. There’s a difference between being pretentious and dealing with serious subjects seriously.
I assume you mean 2001: A Space Odyssey (and that you were under the mistaken assumption that your 38-year-old joke was clever). The movie deals with the emergence of our species from starving man-apes to space-traveling technologists, and our ultimate destiny in a vast universe we don’t understand. Exactly how would you have done it differently?
I didn’t think Sideways was a pretentious movie, just a movie with a pretentious protagonist who finally can’t keep pretending to himself. Not an admirable character on the page, but Paul Giamatti can’t help but bring out something likeable. A nice, small movie, overhyped by distributors and critics.
The first movie I thought of was Field of Dreams. Maybe I just don’t get the mystical cosmic wonder of baseball.
Stealing money from your mom is alll it takes to get beyond the pale for you? You must think that every tragic character in history is an irredemable villain worthy of not but scorn…
(And you don’t think she knew???)
I don’t know, as I am not a movie director, but I wouldn’t have done it like that. I had to watch that film for a class and was nearly clawing the walls by the time it was over. I preferred Contact, which wasn’t the best movie dealing with the subject, I’m sure, but at least it didn’t have long stretches of classical music set to backdrops of the Earth seen from space.
Using a MAD magazine movie parody title counts as an “homage” not a 38-year-old-joke.
Like this would have done.
35 posts and nobody’s dropped Tarantino’s name yet? Well then I will, as in “Oh look how clever I am decorating all my movies with sly little ironic references to blaxploitation/martial arts/gangster/etc. films of yore.”
I’m going to be lynched for saying this, but everything Peter Jackson has done from LOTR on.
Nooooo! Am I the only one who owns a copy and has watched it a few times? 
The song, for the lucky ones who haven’t seen Magnolia, was Aimee Mann’s “wise up”, which repeats the lyric “It’s not going to stop.” At this moment in the theatre, I seriously considered the idea that I had died in the parking lot, and that this film was my ironic punishment in hell for a lifetime of appreciating mainstream cinema (I’d often argued that quality-wise the mainstream could be as good as arthouse fare, and that arthouse films could be as bad as mainstream ones; there was no inherent quality reason to prefer one type over the other other than personal preference).
Really, the movie tried to dress up its thin, soap-opera plot with the pederstian theme that “There are no real conincidences”, a fig leaf to justify the ridiculous final climactic moment (despite my utter loathing of this film for stealing 2+ hours of my life, I respect the SDMB rules too much to give it away unspoilered…I never knew I had such strength, although I beg anyone who hasn’t seen the film to please read the spoiler text, lest you also waste your time with this garbage):
Frogs literally rain down from heaven at the key, conincidental moment when every character is about to make some fateful decision, e.g. as one man is about to commit suicide by blowing his brains out, one of the raining frogs falls thru a skylight and knocks the gun from his hand as it fires. Utterly, utterly insulting and ridiculous.
Really, Magnolia is the patron saint of this thread; no other film need apply.
Only if you say it in slow motion under weird, unnatural lighting.