I watched this the other night after not seeing it for a while, and Favreau’s character makes me want to see someone in the movie punch him in the face. He has the most amazing, understanding male friends on the planet, because if that was me or one of my friends back in the day, we would have stopped listening and inviting that person to go out until they could control themselves.
I know the message the movie is trying to convey, and for the most part, they get it right. And Favreau plays the perfect wuss. But after a while, you just want to reach into the screen and slap him. That movie has some great dialog in it, but with the mopey Favreau rain clouding every scene, I just couldn’t praise it as I once did.
Not entirely sure if I am correctly interpreting your meaning when you say “don’t age well that should have” but . . .
I remember always thinking Heathers would always hold up as one of the all time great black comedies. I watched it several times on video in the 90s and it was a popular favorite with me and all my film buff friends.
A few months ago, I saw the DVD on a $5 rack. At this point, I hadn’t seen the movie in probably about 15 years. I bought the DVD and watched it that very night and I was amazed how much I thought it sucked.
Spoilers
Spoilers
Spoilers
yeah, I know it’s a 20+ year old movie but we currently have a Thread crucifying Anne Hathaway for spoiling Les Miserables
Spoilers
Spoilers
What we the audience are supposed to feel:
[ul]
[li]Everyone who gets killed was a jerk anyway, so it’s o.k. to kill them[/li][li]Even though it’s o.k. to kill the jerks, we are still supposed to think Christian Slater’s character is a horrible psychopath because he’s killing all these jerks- even though we don’t mind that the jerks get killed because they’re jerks.[/li][li]We don’t hold Winona Ryder’s character responsible for her part in the murders because Christian Slater’s character always tricked her and she didn’t realize they’d actually be killing anyone (even though it is explicitly shown that her character is really smart) and we also don’t hold her responsible because the people they kiled were jerks.[/li][/ul]
Black humor is fine. Having the audience enjoy and root for a character doing horrible things is fine because we really do understand that these horrible things would not be o.k. in real life and we know the character is horrible- just that s/he is enjoyably horrible.
Where Heathers fails is that we the audience are supposed to relate to Winona Ryder’s character and give her credit for ultimately doing “the right thing” and this is supposed to somehow let her off the hook for taking part in multiple murders. Of course, the other reason we are expected to let her off the hook is that she was tricked into participating in the murders- she was “tricked” multiple times by the same person AND YET WE ARE ALSO MEANT TO ACCEPT HER CHARACTER AS BEING VERY SMART!?!?!?
And the whole “make friends with the fat ugly kid everyone was picking on” bit at the end is entirely inauthentic and cheesy.
But it’s not just that I think it’s a horrible movie, it’s that I think it’s a horrible movie after having previously though- UPON MULTIPLE VIEWINGS- that it was one of the BEST movies of it’s genre and would remain so for all time.
So, Stink Fish Pot, is that what you’re looking for?
Credit where credit is due: Winona Ryder was a beautiful 17 year old.
Star Trek should by all rights be unwatchable, 60s era special effects along with the attitudes of the time should make it laughable to modern audiences right?
The Next Generation is only 20 years old but it seems like more of an out of time artifact than TOS, everything from the hairstyles and clothes to the so politically correct its nuts stuff(the hell was with those manskirts?) makes it barely watchable at least early on. Not to mention it managed to make a episode where a planet of black men kidnap a white woman.
By some odd turn of events I find TOS more timeless and undated then TNG.
You failed to exclude period movies. Those will keep indefinitely. I keep watching the following because they are better than any movie since Pulp Fiction:
Gone with the Wind
Singing in the Rain
The sound of Music
Dr. Zhivago
West Side Story
The Godfather
grude, I agree. TOS, while still clearly of its time, is much more viewable now, on average, than TNG. I wonder if it is because the idealism of the sixties has a more innocent quality and so is an easy pill to swallow, while the idealism of the late 80s is too self-aware and holier-than-thou.
Depends a lot on the individual as well. I know a lot of people whose minds shut down if the movie is black and white, even though something like Casablanca is just as powerful today as back then.
Isn’t this an age thing, though? As in, your age? If the last time you saw it was 15 years ago, you probably have a more mature perspective on the world now. Heathers is much more a teenage/young 20’s movie, I think, and I bet it would still completely hold up with that age group now. Not so much for the old folks.
It could’ve been worse. Early concept art of the bridge featured live plants & crewmembers drinking coffee. And let’s not forgot the race of Ayran areobics instructors tried to execute Wesley for tripping over a flower garden.
Not entirely sure if I am correctly interpreting your meaning when you say “don’t age well that should have” but . . .
I remember always thinking Heathers would always hold up as one of the all time great black comedies. I watched it several times on video in the 90s and it was a popular favorite with me and all my film buff friends.
Spoilers*
I loved that movie back in the day. So, I played it for Fella. (look, I was not a happy camper back in high school).
This was now post 911, post Columbine.
him:Why is this funnY?
Not a hit in the Brassy Phrase household
After he just wanted to cry.
It has nothing to do with the idealism. TOS simply had better scripts; when you compare the first three years, there’s no contest. TNG improved by season three, but there was still far more crap.
Movies that were once thought great but upon a later viewing, were found to have many flaws and/or personal moments of WTF was I thinking? This movie is awful!
I had thought the original mention of Star Trek fit the OP, since I thought the focus was that The Next Generation didn’t age well though it should have. Then the focus kinda shifted to points that the original series did age well.
I was thinking more along the lines that we should deny ice cream to posts such as these:
and
and
and
Pretty much the majority of the Thread missing the point of the OP.
“Should Have” is an interesting phrase. It brings to mind something I’ve written here about music.
In each of these parings, who’s more likely to be embarrassed about the music he/she loved in the Seventies?
A 50-something woman who loved the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” back in 1971, or her husband who loved King Crimson’s Lizard?
A 50-something woman who used to worship Donny Osmond, or her husband who used to worship the Peter Gabriel-era Genesis?
A middle aged woman whose favorite Seventies album was the*** Saturday Night Fever ***soundtrack, or her husband who loved ELP’s Works Volume 1?
In the Seventies, the art-rock loving males would have been SURE that THEIR favorite albums would last, while the cheesier pop stuff the girls liked would fade away forever. In reality, the cheesier pop stuff tends to hold up better.
Why?
It’s partly the nature of being a precocious, intellectual teenage male. A bookish 14 year old male nerd who find J.D. Salinger or Kurt Vonnegut or Ayn Rand or J.R.R. Tolkien for the first time may feel as if he’s made an earth-shattering discovery, as if he’s stumbled upon an artist of unparallelled brilliance.
But if, by chance, he picks up his favorite books again and tries to read them as a 45 year old, will those books STILL seem so profound? Maybe, but… he may suddenly find for the first time that Holden Caulfield is sort of an asshole… or that Ayn Rand’s prose is, well, corny… or that Tolkien’s poems are a bit pompous… or that Kurt Vonnegut’s deep insights are a bit banal…
The point is, a book or song or movie that was never meant to be anything but FUN is likely to REMAIN fun forever. Something that was meant to be profound and inspiring, and that WAS profound and inspiring to us formerly precocious teens, may start to ring hollow when we’re no longer teenagers.
The stated purpose of the movie was actually a critique/satire of the way the media sensationalizes teen suicide. The director was actually rather disturbed that people liked it for the reasons your mentioned (the dark glee people took in the comeuppance of the bullies). Of course, now that I said that I can’t find a cite anymore (aside from TV Tropes)…
I tried to rewatch “The Dark Crystal” with my kids. I remember seeing it as a young teenager and thinking it was pretty good. It created a whole world of puppet creatures that was unlike anything else. Now, obviously the puppets and such can’t compare with the CGI creatures nowadays. But the old school puppeteering has a better chance to age well than standard special effects that were good for the time but totally outdated now.
But on rewatching, the plot is just terrible, the sound is terrible, the dialog is terrible. It’s a standard chosen one plot that’s been done to death. The puppet character designs are pretty good, but they spend their time going “Aaaaaah! Hmmmmmm! Eeehhh? Oooh!” The world-building and set design and character design that seemed so innovative back in the 80s didn’t hold up at all. Really disappointing.
And again, this was not because puppeteering and physical sets can’t compare with modern CGIfests. The use of practical effects can often look better than crappy CGI. Look at puppet Yoda from “Empire”, and how he looks better, more real, more physical, than the CGI Yoda from the prequels. And this was Henson’s workshop at the height of their powers. Compare “The Dark Crystal” which doesn’t hold up at all with “The Muppet Movie” which is still amazing 30 years later.
