I haven’t been able to force myself to watch it. I have, at the very least, the most awful reservations about it, in spite of the fact that I like Ron Howard and would’ve married Christine Baransky at any point.
But everything I hear about it seems so wrong – like “The Cat in The Hat” which I couldn’t finish watching it was so wrong.
Maybe they’re through trashing Dr. Suess and have moved on to “Curious George.”
That’s right, we did love that part. Mr. Bunny and I were both shouting at the TV “HIT HIM HARDER! AGAIN!”
I’ve just spent so much time listening to people try to defend this movie with the argument “Well of course they’re jerks, that’s the point!” It all brings to mind a tale of several years ago when I met a group of friends for drinks, and one of them brought a pal of his who proceeded to be a belingerent dicksmack to each and every one of us throughout the night. I mentioned to my friend that his friend was a jerk, and his excuse was “Oh, he’s just like that, that’s (guy’s name) for you.” My response was “Well then why on god’s green ass would you want to hang out with him?” He could think of no answer.
Sorta the same thing.
I haven’t seen all of this movie but I’ll pit it anyway. I’ve seen bits and pieces of What the Bleep Do We Know?, a movie that makes you ponder the deep question “Just how hard is it for Marlee Matlin to find work?” This is the cinematic equivalent of every stoner alternaguy who’s ever bored the hell out of you at a party because he thought he was sooo deep because he knew the name Kierkegaard (didn’t know what he wrote about exactly, but knew the name), who tried to convince you he was an expert on Quantum Physics even though he knew nothing about any math higher than division and thought he was the first person to ever stumble onto the ‘when you look at stars you’re seeing the past!’ type stuff. Just horrendously stupid with an editing job of the “experts” that would raise Michael Moore’s eyebrows, and when I heard the jawdroppingly stupid part about how the Indians couldn’t see Columbus’s ships because they had no concept of one ('well this would have been a good time to make a concept for one, wouldn’t it? Why does anybody see anything after birth because prior to the Uterine Slide we have no concept of anything other than warm darkness= and what did Pocohantas see when she went to London, a Green Screen?) that’s when I stopped watching.
I saw “An Evening with Kevin Smith” recently, a compilation of several question and answer series at universities. He described how he was writing a script for a new superman movie with producer Jon Peters and how Peters pushed him to include a giant spider because it was the, “Most fearsome killer in the insect[sic] kingdom.” The deal eventually fell through and Peters went on to produce Wild Wild West. Suddenly scenes in the movie begin to make sense.
“What the hell is wrong with your friend?!”
“Oh, he’s just like that.”
“That’s pretty much my point.”
In my book, there are few things that are inherently evil. And, usually, in a work of fiction the authors try to bring home one or two ideas they have.
Therefore in most works of fiction the evil characters usually are straw men to vent the authors frustrations on. The difference is that sometimes the evil characters in cinema become eeeevil because it’s a plot point, not because we have seen anything that justifies that characterisation.
In this particular movie we have a perfectly valid transition from an annoying character to an annoying and evil villain, since he commits truly unjustifiable actions for his own benefit (drawing supers out of hiding and sicking his killer robots on them).
… just my two cents worth…
Yeah, there’s a LOT of bullshit in this movie. It was funded by the Ramtha institute; one of the “experts” is actually Ramtha being “channeled” right into the camera. Still, I watched the whole thing because I have a friend who has been totally seduced by this bullshit movie. And by the end, I was glad I had. There is a LOT of bullshit, but there is actually some little nuggets of value scattered through it. If your bullshit detectors are up to snuff, it’s worth sitting through.
Although I haven’t seen it - Alberts Brooks’ Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World. I thought is was going to be a documentary. Someone could easily make that documentary, which would be rewarding and teach us about other cultures and maybe our own, and would be genuinely funny in all likelihood.
I’ve lived in a couple of Muslim cultures and visited others, and naturally people have senses of humor.
I was about to buy a ticket to this film when I happened to catch a review that it’s not a documentary, but a comedy made with the apparent presumption that the concept of looking for comedy among a billion diverse people is funny because it’d be hard to find. I hope this isn’t true but given the gap between what I thought this movie was going to be and what it is… I’m pissed off at it.
(I was just joking about this, in fact, with an Iranian-American co-worker of mine, who is Muslim… and has a sense of humor…)
Have you looked at the White House lately? 
Not to nitpick (“Wild Wild West” made such a huge blip on my shitdar that I never saw it, which is the reason I don’t get to agree with you that it pisses me off), but he didn’t call the spider an insect, and most members of the insect kingdom do indeed find one variety of spider or another pretty fearsome.
Movies that plain piss me off, by virtue of their very existence:
Curious George
Bambi II
Every stinkin’ one of the Disney let’s-treat-our-classic-catalog-like-a-franchise-farm-but-get-the-television-animation-division-to-crank-them-out-to-save-money films (Cinderella II, Little Mermaid II, Peter Pan II, etc., etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum).
Funny, your interpretation is different from what I remember:
The French had sold a faulty supercomputer to Iraq, so they could conduct “virtual” nuclear tests. The Iraqi bomb design was fatally flawed, but the computer reported it would succeed, hence the Iraqis had never conducted an actual test. The former President knew about the deal and told his Veep, Kevin Pollack, shortly before dying. There is a scene where Pollack takes his two advisers out of the diner to the “APC” where, presumably, he tells them. They express doubts, knowing that the late President was a little nutty in his last days, though the whole situation is fairly contrived to keep the audience and the diner patrons in the dark until the last second. Pollack’s character knows (or at least very strongly believes) the Iraqi nukes are duds, so he plays a rather extreme form of chicken with Iraq, ending with the Baghdad crater.
I’ve never been able to sit through five minutes of Gone With the Wind. Too much shrieking from every female character.
I forced myself to sit through it, and I wish I hadn’t. I hated everyone in that movie. Every single damn last one of them. Every frame, in fact.
The two worst movies of 1998 (IMHO)–*Armageddon * and Godzilla. Not a shred of writing or directing talent on display.
Showgirls–sleaze for the sake of sleaze. Ditto Basic Instinct.
You must have this confused with another movie. In the first 5 minutes of GWTW, the only thing any female character says is “fiddle dee dee” and “waw, waw, waw. If I hear anymore talk about the waw I’m going inside”.
Interesting. Albert Brooks was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross a week or two ago. He seemed to think the complete opposite: that the movie was about our inability to understand that there is such a thing as a sense of humor in such a foreign context. But he just made the movie, what the hell does he know better than a guy who hasn’t even seen it?
And people wonder why previews give away every single plot point.
Since the OP asked that we delineate between bad movies and movies that pissed us off… I won’t bother with Moulin Rouge, it was just a bad movie, and didn’t particularly “piss me off”.
Forest Gump pissed me off for a lot of the reasons that others have mentioned, but what really bugged me was the fact that it seemed to be set up so that each scene lasted just as long as the classic rock song playing during it. Enter the music video movie school of filmaking that directly followed Forest Gump.
The Incredibles pissed me off for the same “uberman” reasons already amply stated here.
Peter Greenaway films (with the exception of Drowning By Numbers) for being pretentious piles of poo that seem to think that merely looking good is a substitute for any real substance.
[C]Constantine** pisses me off because all they would have had to do is change the name and I wouldn’t have had to worry that they were ruining a prefectly good comic book series.
You know, I totally agree with this. I was so damn angry at Virginia Woolf by the end of the movie that I wanted to kill her myself. I’m sure this was not the intention of the screenwriter, though I have no idea how accurate a portray of Woolf it was.
Have you looked at Great Debates or perhaps The Pit lately? Because that’s where political discussions belong, right?