How is that backlash? The main audience still loves it, and the people who hated it still hate it.
And I’ve never heard anyone hate Twilight due to jealousy. It’s always been about the poor writing and the message. And perhaps the complete hypocrisy of people saying Harry Potter was evil but saying this is fine since it promotes abstinence, despite both being the same basic type of fantasy.
I’ve never seen the movie, but the short story it’s based on is outstanding. (It’s by E. Ann Proulx, who also wrote “The Shipping News” - which I also didn’t see because I hate Kevin Spacey. Yup, I’m the one.)
I’m VERY pleased to see “American Beauty” on this list. Never have I felt so ripped-off by a movie. I obviously put my hatred of Kevin Spacey (AND Annette Benning, for that matter) on the shelf because I’d heard it was so mind-blowing. What a disjointed, lame piece of tripe!
That having been said, I LOVED “Shakespeare in Love” and I HAAAAAAAAAATE Shakespeare!
For a long time there was an extreme sensitivity among gay communities to any negative portrayal(real or perceived) of gays in film.
It probably backfired and just helped keep gay characters out of movies.
The film Cruising starring Al Pachino was subject to gay activists disrupting production even, its about a serial killer targetting gay men in hook up bars. The film bombed on release but that likely had more to do with the fact is a very strange movie that candidly follows a cop going undercover in the gay bar scene and questioning his own sexuality, I was shocked how far the film goes and I saw it a few years ago! The film is actually sympathetic to gays, while showing a rather graphic look at gay bars and clubs which could cause public backlash.
In my experience, Crash and BBM tend to segregate its fans based on which of the civil rights battle is more important to you.
I found BBM incredibly boring and dull, but to be fair it did give me an idea of what it must have been like to live in the middle of nowhere watching a herd. 
The problem is that its way too reserved for a star crossed lovers story, one saw a man killed for being gay as a small child and that is why he refuses to try to make a life together. Too much happens off screen, if this movie was a straight love story it would have gone totally unnoticed.
I don’t see the complete undying love for Saving Private Ryan. It had an excellent opening sequence, a lot of open space wasted, and not a bad ending sequence. If they’d done something better in the middle, perhaps.
Heaven Can Wait, Breaking Away, Gandhi, Amadeus. When these came out, they were huge at the box office and were all presumed to be on greased skids towards the Pantheon of Great, Important Movies. All are largely forgotten now, and I don’t personally know anyone over 40 who has seen any of them twice, or anyone under 40 who has ever seen them at all. Back when I had cable, none of these ever turned up on it.
I always assumed guys didn’t like it because of the effeminate “vampires”. Had they been NW Pacific fairy-creatures or something, I think much of the mocking wouldn’t have been there.
I watched parts of it with my wife when it was on TV and every one of my passing jokes was vampire related.
Surprised M. Night Shyamalan’s name hasn’t shown up yet-then again perhaps in his case it’s all self-inflicted.
I’ve never seen the film but read the book, and it’s quite categorically one that tries to treat gays as people and understand a gay perspective, even though the two major characters are a) a gay-killing murderer and b) the cop trying to catch him who is openly bigoted against gays.
As you say the examination of gay subculture of the time (just before AIDS hit so the New York gay scene in full sexual abandon) was no holds barred which I considered pretty ahead of its time for a book published in the 70s. Even more so when… (spoiling the ending)
you consider that it turned out the killer was targeting gay men who looked like him in an attempt to extinguish his own homosexuality. Moreover, because of spending so much time immersed in the gay scene leading him to question himself, the cop investigating him ended up going down the same route and starting up as a copy cat killer.Nothing anti-gay in this, it was if anything a book about sexual pathology.
Other than The Sixth Sense, his movies have been bombs. Against what would there be a “backlash”?
Please do (briefly). I love that genre and I’m always looking for good movies I haven’t seen yet.
I liked Unbreakable.
Maybe you need a better class of friends. None of these movies are forgotten among people who love movies, all four are still quite rightly considered classics, all four are still played by revival houses (I saw Amedeus in the theater a couple of years ago, missed the others when they played, including Breaking Away a few weeks ago), and all four, even if none of that were the case, are excellent films that deserve to be seen, even by, especially by, young’uns who don’t think any movies were made before they themselves started watching movies. Btw, I’ve seen each of those movies, with the exception of Breaking Away, multiple times. They really are wonderful films, entertaining and fun.
Edit to add the next great movie that will be backlashed is The Artist.
Heh. I dislike a lot of the movies mentioned in this thread (the ones I’ve seen, that is - and Titanic I quite liked, though it really wasn’t Oscar-worthy. I hated SiL because of the postmodern misinformation in it). And because they’re such big films and lots of other people do like them, there are threads about them, and I might participate, unless doing so would be threadshitting.
Often they’re ‘issue’ films which means people will discuss the film because the issue is interesting even if they disliked the film.
Some of them are also more worthy of posting a negative review or comment about because they’re supposed to be so damn good. What’s the point of posting a negative comment about a film that everyone else also agrees is bad?
They also get a hell of a lot of press and sometimes you’re kinda ‘tricked’ into watching one. ‘Oh, you’ll love this!’ Or you get given it for Christmas on DVD, or your family insist you watch it with them, that sort of thing.
Like, I was lead to believe Juno was a comedy. People who know about films apparently thought it was brilliant (I’ve since learnt - or re-learnt - my lesson). I thought it had an interesting storyline and was well-acted, but man, it was pretentious, and it wasn’t actually meant to be a comedy, was it? Hopefully that was just inaccurate publicity. It seemed like a short film made into a full-length movie by making everything slower.
I’m sure there is some childish ‘I hate popular movies!’ anti-sheepism going on, but there are lots of other reasons too.
Me too. His best.
I thought that was brilliant. But it’s not one for this thread. Is the Sixth Sense, even? I mean, there was a good reason why some people didn’t like it much a while after it had been released.
I’ll agree on the first three, but I think Amadeus is still fairly well-known and highly regarded. I’m under 40 and in my experience a good number of my peers have seen it or are at least familiar with its premise. Heck, it was parodied on Family Guy.
Well, that era is really when all the classics came out so you’ve probably seen all of these:
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
The Great Escape (1963)
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
Tora! Tora! Tora (1970) (This one was a flop at the time and some people dislike it, but I think it’s one of the most historically accurate war movies ever)
Patton (1970)
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
The Longest Day (1962)
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
When Spielberg released Saving Private Ryan you started to see more WWII films again, and to be honest most of them do not hold a candle to the better WWII films from 1960s/1970s which is when some of the better ones were made. A lot of WWII films got made in the early 50s and late 40s but most of them just weren’t very good and were just being pumped out because the public still had a great deal of interest in the war since people of that time would have lived through it.
After SPR, you had Pearl Harbor, Enemy at the Gates, and some other big box office movies, most of which were much worse than Saving Private Ryan (Pearl Harbor and Enemy at the Gates are, imo, especially bad.) SPR is a good film overall but its problem I feel is the story/flow gets weak about halfway in and on repeat viewings I find that I lose interest about halfway through.
While not traditional war films I feel some of the best WWII movies to come out in recent years focused on more unexplored areas. The German-language movie Downfall is very good, and primarily focuses on Hitler’s last days (from the perspective of his secretary.) I thought Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima was very good as well, and is a rare look at that battle from the Japanese POV (it was also in Japanese/subtitled.)
What was wrong with Enemy at the Gates? Not historically accurate?
I guess I’m the only one who wasn’t much of a fan of Goodfellas.
The acting was top notch, but the subject matter doesn’t thrill me. The Soprano’s was popular, too.
Do people really fantasize about being hoods?