I prefer to think of **True Lies ** as 2 movies; one I hate (the first half: with Bill Paxton, and the scene where Ahnuld interrogates JLC), and one (starting where Ahnuld and JLC join up, captives of the Bad Guys) that I like a lot.
That doesn’t piss me off, in and of itself, but it does sort of baffle me. I like the rest of Weir’s films – to varying degrees, true, but they’re always interesting and complex and thought-provoking.
Dead Poets Society? None of the above.
I’m not a fan of Forrest Gump, but I think everyone’s missing the point. Not ‘it’s good to be stupid,’ or ‘it’s good to have conservative values,’ - the message is ‘don’t just talk about things - do them.’
That’s why Gary Sinise’s character is in the movie - he’s a foil for Forrest - he’s all talk but Forrest shows him how to actually live.
Be a doer - that’s more important than being a thinker. I don’t hate that message - I just hate the ham-fistedness of the movie.
The movie I hate is Philadelphia. Denzel Washington was the protagonist of that movie, and the people who made the movie didn’t seem to get it. Plus it had a prestigious law firm with partners stupid enough to testify they have histories of homophobia.
I have an earlier version of the Dead Poets Society script - and it was better.
The implication in the earlier script was that Robin Williams’ character was gay. Makes all the nonsense plot points make sense.
You’re probably right; I only watched it once, during its initial theatrical release. I still didn’t buy that grown men would willingly go in for it.
So basically, you want to seperate the Bond parody (which is what the film is supposed to be) from the Bond movie?
The Schwarznegger character wants to approach marital problems as he does national security ones–set up survellience, go in with a strike team, harass and interrogate suspects–only to have this backfire on him dramatically. When he coerces his wife into pretending to be a stripper, he’s being a complete, out of control nimrod, as his Tom Arnold-sidekick continually reminds him. The scene is supposed to be uncomfortable; allegorically speaking, it’s what happens when you take foreign policy and apply it internally. (And yeah, I believe Cameron threw a couple of layers into the screenplay below the surface action and underlying parody.)
Stranger
Except the girlfriend went out and just did things and her life went to pieces and she needed, in the words of Forrest, “to go back to [???], Alabama.” Which would be the opposite of being a doer.
Second-best movie of the year it came out. The best being Hedwig and the Angry Inch. When someone has a reaction like yours to ML, it generally tells me their taste is all in their mouths.
As for a movie that pissed me off: the first Lord of the Rings. So hideously overrated. To be fair, it’s not entirely the movie’s fault. Some of the blame lies with the mewling fanboys.
The ongoing animosity of his pending divorce, probably.
The obvious nominees have been taken (add me to the Forrest Gump haters), so I’m going to pick something a little bit obscure and offbeat: Albert Brooks’s Mother.
Up until the very end, it’s one of Brooks’s better efforts. He’s sort of an acquired taste, to be sure, an odd mix of nice-and-harmless but-nevertheless-edgy, where nothing really bad ever happens but he’s still asking awkward questions and making uncomfortable observations about the details of life and behavior. When he’s on, he’s great (Lost in America), but when he’s off he’s nearly unwatchable (The Muse).
Mother feels like it’s in the first group, with a subtle, extremely well-observed relationship between a middle-aged man and his batty mother. All of the details are on the money; you really buy the decades of history between the mother and her child. It’s just the right blend of bitter and sweet, wacky without being implausible. The characters grow, but not radically; they take the smallest baby steps forward, exactly as they would in the same limited slice of real-world time represented by the film. They’re still who they are, but they’ve learned just a little bit more from their experience. Nicely done.
Until the very, very end of the movie, which gives us a scene where the Albert Brooks character (if my memory is accurate) is pumping gas, and somebody asks him a question about something, and he gets this wistful look in his eyes, and he has a short speech about everything that’s happened to him, what it means, how he has changed as a person, and what’s going to be different now; and roll credits. It’s not a monologue or anything; it’s just a short little blurb. But it is so totally on the nose, so obvious, so blatant, so completely wrong given the tone of the film to that point: it’s a moment of writerly desperation, summing up the film and giving us a fortune-cookie moral, and it utterly destroys the film that precedes it. I actually jumped to my feet, barking at the television with anger and outrage, when the scene finished. My wife can attest, because she was startled when I flew off the couch and into my tantrum.
If you ever see the movie, press Stop when you see Brooks pumping gas. Absorb the movie as you’ve seen it. Pretend that’s the ending. Enjoy it. Then, a few minutes later, press Play, and pretend you’re watching a deleted scene from the DVD. Say to yourself, “Boy, it sure is a good thing that scene wasn’t actually in the movie.”
Grrrr.
The American President. Good God, Aaron, couldn’t you do any better than this? The man who brought us *Sports Night * and *The West Wing * resorting to this kind of tripe?
Young, good looking, perfect father, Democratic POTUS = good; old, fat, balding, cigar-smoking-in-shadowy-rooms Republican senator = bad. Wait a minute Aaron, I didn’t quite get the symbolism. Can you make it a little clearer?
And just to make certain it gets flushed thoroughly down the toilet, let’s cast the overacting, hyper-emoting Annette Bening as the love interest.
What a pile of crap.
She’s a foil, IMO, in a different way - her purpose is to show that you shouldn’t fall into the “victim” mentality - you have to assertively go through life.
A conservative philosophy, sure, but not on the order of ‘be Christian or you die.’
That was exactly my main objection to this this movie: cowardice.
In both movies, there’s a fertility fetish on a table in the living room. It’s offensively prominent male member needs to be dealt with before the girl’s parents arrive for dinner. In the original, running around, having way too much to do before their guests arrive, they quickly and violently knock it off. The member, off the statue. WHAM! and it clatters to the tabletop. In the American, they quietly turn it to the wall. Also in the original, as a front, they put a HUGE baroque crucifix on the wall. In the American, not so much. The American preparation was mostly about denying who they were; the French was a satire on a completely different lifestyle. They didn’t want to offend anyone with a satire of piety, so they just dumbed it down.
We should never, ever go to a movie together.
Moulin Rouge bad (even daughter knows, as she watches for the umpteenth time, that no ML and me in same room - I’ve yet to learn how to program my cable boxes against specific shows 
).
Fellowship of the Ring good. Very good.
'Nuff said.
The original works better, even now, because it’s actually a product of its time period. It’s unfathomable to me that no one associated with the update figured out that it needed to be, well, updated.
Although Nathan Lane’s line about abortion did make me bust out laughing in the theatre.
I despise Dazed and Confused, that classic among twenty-somethings everywhere. I hate its glorification of bullies and its revelling in the high school pecking order: how popular and strong triumphs over nerdy and weak. I didn’t find it funny at all (and it was presumably a “comedy”), most of it was boring, but most importantly, there wasn’t anything to like about any of the main characters.
I agree with the complaints about *Meet the Parents/Fockers * (DeNiro was a horrible bully, and either Stiller or the other family members should have stood up to him – not that Stiller’s parents were much better), *The Incredibles * (Syndrome was a misunderstood populist hero and the family reinforced an exclusive, elitist status quo) and *True Lies * (creepy and misogynistic).
I fail to see how that would account for his blinkered view of poetry.
But DPS kind of reminds me of an old Twilight Zone episode: “The Changing of the Guard.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changing_of_the_Guard_(The_Twilight_Zone) An elderly English teacher who has worked for decades at an elite boys’ prep school is forced into retirement. He’s depressed and contemplating suicide at the thought his life has been wasted – he didn’t really inspire the boys! He is visited by ghosts of boys he taught in years long past, who tell him what they achieved in life, and how it was all because the poems he made them study taught them about duty, honor, loyalty, self-sacrifice, commitment, etc. Which makes him feel better and accept retirement with a sense of accomplishment. I couldn’t help thinking, "Og, man! You weren’t their fucking pastor! Didn’t you ever teach them anything about poetry?!
Yeah, that scene horrified and disgusted me. It permanently changed my view of Cameron as a filmmaker. Before, I was a fan; since, still not.
Yeah, the original is a masterpiece, on my Desert Island List. The remake just didn’t get it at all, and made a truly horrible film out of a truly great film.
I dunno . . . I’ve never seen the French original, but I’m pretty sure the American version was at least loosely based on its central plot – so they were pretty much married to what you’re describing. Change that, and they would have been making a different movie entirely.
Dude! Twelfth Night?! To name but one example. You’re bitching about one of the most venerable plot devices in the history of comic theater – imposture! It goes back to Plautus, even Aristophanes! Don’t try to tell us it never works!
Oh, well, that - in the script, he doesn’t have them tear out a dry essay about poetry. He has them rip out the poem Little Boy Blue.
So it’s not about serious poetry=bad, passionate poetry=good.
It was part of the largest statement “it’s OK - it’s important - to question things.” Don’t think it’s a great poem just because it’s in a textbook.
So fair enough - the professor’s gayness doesn’t explain that. I mean more like “why are the parents so hellbent on getting him out?” “Why are the parents so psycho about their kid not getting into drama?” “Why the hell does the kid kill himself?”