I was born nearly a decade after it came out in theaters. As a child, E.T. scared me. As an adult, the movie bores and slightly creeps me out. I work with children. I think this movie has fallen out of favor. Very few children know what it is if an adult brings it up.
Speaking of alien movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind hasn’t aged well either. I saw it for the first time last year and found it boring.
I can’t watch more than ten or so minutes of the first Star Wars movie.
Avatar was so bad on so many levels, I have a hard time believing it’s a real film. It reminds me of a film you would see in another film/television show or some type of SNL parody.
I have so many more, but will end with this one. American Psycho. I don’t actually hate it, but it super overrated. I don’t understand why so many guys my age (early 20s), think it’s cool to imitate Patrick Bateman. It really became like a big pop culture thing and I don’t get why.
Likes:
The new Star Wars trilogy. I don’t love the new trilogy, but they’re a lot more enjoyable and easier to get into.
Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. I don’t love it, but it’s not as bad as people say. The makeup was awesome.
Everyone says they’re garbage, but I love The Evil Dead series. I don’t think they’re the best movies evah, but they’re pretty good. Considering the first two are the same movie.
I liked *Dune *but it didn’t do well and IIRC it got poor reviews. I really liked the first *Dune *book and the movie brought it to life. But I will agree that if you had never read the book, or didn’t like it, the movie would be impenetrable.
I walked out of *Prince of the City *because I was so incredibly bored. It was the only movie I have ever walked out of. It was nominated for an Oscar (didn’t win).
I’ve got your back, I loved that one. I went in with some…concern, because the person who recommended it has often questionable taste, but I laughed the whole way through.
I have also been reminded by this thread of how much I LOATHED Napoleon Dynamite with every fiber of my being.
Big Lebowski…a smattering of humorous dialogue among a lot of sawdust filler
Kill Bill…should have been condensed into one movie
Shawshank Redemption…merely above-average in an unthreatening Ron Howard-esque paint by numbers way.
New votes for:
Napolean Dynamite…way more cruel and mocking than sympathetic or funny
The Bourne movies…a movie dependent on action destroyed by close-up quick cut shaky cam editing.
Stuff I like that most people don’t (some reminded from others’ lists): Xanadu
*Unbreakable *(the spouse calls it Interminable. I like it a lot.) The Last Action Hero
The Timothy Dalton Bond movies (I think he was the best Bond, and I might be the only one on Earth who thinks so–I’ve made my peace with that. )
*Flowers in the Attic *- the book was a teenage guilty pleasure, and I like the movie just fine too
Stuff I didn’t like that most people do:
The latest Batman movie (dull, grim, and full of plot holes)
*The Princess Bride *- I tried to watch it twice. Fell asleep both times.
*Young Frankenstein *- I love Gene Wilder. Everybody told me how good this was. Watched a special theater showing of it a few days ago, on Halloween. Spouse had to keep poking me to keep me awake. Sloooooow!
Any of the Superman films - I just don’t like the character, and haven’t liked any of the movies I’ve seen. Maybe if they’d just accept the fact that everybody on the planet knows Superman’s origin story and stop @#$%ing retelling it…
I’m with you there. I remember that everyone raved about it, both audiences and critics. I rented it and was bored through the first two-thirds and then turned it off.
I did laugh at the bear in the ice cream truck because, hey, bear in an ice cream truck. That was about it, though.
I have no idea if this is your specific problem with the film, but many people seem to think that American Psycho is a horror movie, when it is in fact an intentional comedy. The joke being that anyone who fully embraces the shallow, materialistic, hyper competitive yuppie lifestyle must actually be a psycho. The film isn’t in any way a character study or analysis of the mind of a serial killer. It’s simply a hearty fuck you to kind of people who are obsessed with designer clothes, exclusive restaurants, trendy pop music, etc.
That’s what confuses me. A lot of people quote Bateman like he’s something to look up. Maybe it’s because Christian Bale is popular and handsome. Maybe people are stupid.
I think Borat is one of those films you need to see with a crowd. I first saw it in a packed cinema and it was funny as hell. Watching it as a rental on DVD was awful.
I found The Ring amazingly boring, everyone I knew was going nuts about it but I was completely unimpressed. Trim the story about a haunted video-tape down to 45 minutes, add Mulder & Scully and you’d have a cracking X-Files episode. As a full length film it dragged.
We need to start an “I hated Pulp Fiction” club; for a long time, I thought I was the only one. I wish I could say I haven’t seen the whole thing. It still ranks as the single most disgusting movie I’ve ever seen.
Except me. I saw it when it first came out, and walked out of the theater thinking it was the dumbest thing ever put on film.
Oh, god, Memento. Hated, hated that movie. Do people like it because of the “groundbreaking” way it told the story in reverse? It still stunk. Not a single likeable person with any redeeming qualities in the whole thing.
I’ve said it before in another thread, and I’ll say it again.
Nothing But Trouble is one of my favorite, goofy, cheesy comedy movies. I absolutely love it and I’ve seen it more times than I care to admit.
I found it in the Penny Pincher bin at Wal-Mart one night because my college room mate had built it up to be the worst movie absolutely ever made. So I was prepared to heckle it and laugh at it. But, I ended up loving it!
I feel the same way but I fully accept that this is probably due to me seeing it first as an adult after it had been very much hyped up to me. My expectations were never going to be met and I was no longer in the target market.
Exactly the same with me! Passed me by as a kid. I was on a roadtrip to Wales with some friends when the movie came up in conversation and I said I never rated it much. The driver stopped the van to express his incredulity!
It is quite a common thing when people have a broken concept of irony. I seem to remember Warren Mitchell (who played Alf Garnett, the British original of what became Archie Bunker) saying that he’d often be stopped in the street by people that agreed with what the character had been saying, expecting Mitchell to be Garnett. They never seemed to understand that the joke wasn’t what Garnett was saying, but Garnett himself.
I shove it in the same category as people who wear Che Guevara shirts (“because he was so peaceful, man”) or (non-Brits who) quote “Remember Remember the 5th of November” as a celebration of liberty after V for Vendetta came out. The latter is especially fun because people seems to think it was a poem supporting V, when in fact it’s a poem recited AGAINST Guy Fawkes, who V was emulating. (I think the writers of the film/comic understood this and intentionally invoked the irony/reclaimed language, of course, it’s just the viewers, I think, getting an odd misconception.) I’ll grant the latter is probably more excusable than the former though.
Anyway, I liked Heathers, but I suspect I liked it for a different reason than most. Most people I’ve met seem to eat up the dark comedy-ness of it. While that aspect was okay, I liked it for the way it took an exaggerated magnifying glass to the way people react to suicides.
I really disliked Inception though. I “got it” just fine, mind you. I really would have appreciated it more if they had just stuck with “Oceans 11 with dreams instead of a Casino” but then they had to throw in all the stuff with totems, which make less sense the more you think about them, and the plot with Mal which was competing for main plot privileges with the perfectly reasonable heist movie going on. I think it really needed to pick a focus: the Mal thing or the hesit thing, and trying to do both weakened the movie immensely. I didn’t want a dumb popcorn heist movie, as is the usual insinuation. I would have been thrilled to have a brilliant, well thought out, internally consistent heist movie in a cool universe. I would have even liked a philosophical exploration of reality, and lost life. What I’m not convinced about is that these two things mix. At all. Also, the totems STILL made no goddamned sense given the rules they presented.
There was also Black Swan, which I didn’t really dislike, per se, but I found it was more thoroughly “just okay” than a lot of people. It had a good plot and character dynamics. It even had decent symbolism, but the tone was weird. Rather than switching between emotions and tone naturally, or doing it so abruptly as to cause a deliberate feeling of unease or comedy, it took some weird third option that I’m not sure I understood and made me feel like the script went through 10 rewrites more than anything else.
On the flip side, I liked Shutter Island, which everyone else hated. Maybe I missed something obvious, but I thought it was left up in the air whether or not the main character was really insane or not – not the “obvious twist” everyone else talks about.
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