Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe the real reason wasn’t dramatic enough to write a review around. I have no idea.
Not in the descriptions given by people here of movies that made them angry. It’s pretty much a synonymous relationship.
Now that’s a critique of the movie I can get behind. It was a comedy and it didn’t make you laugh, that’s cool. It did make me laugh. Everybody’s different.
I suppose though, that I should check myself in with a head doctor because I found the cat pissing on the spilled ashes of revered Mother to be hilarious.
Juno made me angry.
I don’t care how cute, quirky and off-beat the girl is, she’s not going to be that blithe about having a baby and handing it over. If she can do it that easily, she should just have had an abortion and been done with it.
In fact, that’s what she should have done all along.
Way to take a movie and turn it into an anti-abortion screed.
Color me pissed-off yellow.
Forgive me, I haven’t seen the movie…did she have a long debate with herself (or someone else) about whether she should have an abortion? Was it mentioned as an option? How prominently was it featured in the movie?
She did consider it, talked to the father about it and went to a clinic, and was apparently mildly squicked out at the idea.
So she decided to have the baby and find a couple who wanted a child and give it to them.
Riiiiiiight.
So the part that you find unrealistic is that she would decide against abortion but then would be able to give up the baby? If so, I guess I don’t understand…that kind of thing happens, doesn’t it?
I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what lissener was saying in the first place: he had an emotional reaction to the film, he analyzed his reaction, and he came up with an explanation for it. What I don’t understand is why the time lapse between seeing the movie and coming up with an explanation for your reaction to the movie is significant. You figured out why you disliked Jurassic Park 2 right away, and that’s a valid analysis. Someone else needs to think about it for a while, and that’s rationalization, and is in someway dishonest or not real?
You’re never going to get very far in this sort of discussion if you can’t at the very least grant people the assumption that they’re being honest about their subjective reactions to a work of art. Why would someone need to invent a more “dramatic” excuse for disliking something they already dislike? What would be the point of lying about something like that?
Hence the use of the phrase, “to me,” in the part of my post you quoted.
Are you suggesting that this would never happen in real life? Because if you are, you really ought to check out this book by Dan Savage, describing how he and his boyfriend went about adopting a kid. The birth mother was a teenage girl who wasn’t in a position to raise the kid on her own, but didn’t want to have an abortion, either. So she decided to have the kid, and give it to a couple who wanted a child. Great book, too. The bit at the end with the priest choked me up.
I’ll mention Birdcage again, but for slightly different reasons. The film was funny- I’ll give it that- but it was also cowardly. You never believe, as you did in the original version, that the main characters are really a couple. Albert is just a comic relief histrionic drag’n’drama queen that you can’t imagine why in the hell Armand would put up with or the son wouldn’t be embarassed to introduce to his fiancee’s parents even if they were charter members of P-Flag.
In the French version it was clear that
1- they were a couple
2- Albert did have a non “shrill bitch” side
3- the son accepted, and always had since he was a baby, Albert as a co-parent and, conversely,
4- Albert accepted the son as his own
In Birdcage Albert refers to (Futterman’s character- name eludes me) as Armand’s son- he’s not really a co-parent but more an Auntie Mame step-parent. Albert falls to pieces in any type of crisis in the movie- thus it makes no sense almost when he pulls it together to “meet the parents” as a dowdy housewife (and I cringed when Son introduced him finally as “my mother”- he’s not transgender, he’s a co-father). In La Cage Aux FollesI think the fact that this was adapted by elderly straight screenwriters showed the prejudice. They played the couple solely for comedy (e.g. in the original the reason Armand got into a fight in the bar was losing his temper for a homophobic slur against the Albert character- this and almost all other things that show them as an actual couple are removed from the movie save for the park-bench scene that seemed just sort of thrown in and wasn’t at all convincing).
Pity they didn’t go with Fierstein (who helped adapt it for the stage musical) as I think it would have been just as funny and more “real”.
Nathan Lane has expresssed disappointment with the characterization in interviews and even though it really launched him as a screen actor (he had credits before but it was his first big budget starring role) said that ironically today, now that he’s a lot richer, he wouldn’t take such a role unless they made the character more believable. He said that he and Nichols fought over the character constantly, with Lane wanting to show someone based on the drag queens he knows: campy drag on stage, flamboyant but male offstage, and a very tough little s.o.b. who’s stood up to bullies all his life underneath the drama queen exterior (with gay men as with women, effeminate and weak are two very different adjectives).
Sorry, I digress.
Speaking of drag:
Damned near any movie by Tyler Perry. When there are so many talented black writers and filmmakers, why the hell is TP the one who’s always getting the greenlights? Why the hell does his one-dimensional melodrama crap make money? (My favorite moment was I think in Diary of a Mad Black Woman- I may be wrong as everything he writes is interchangeable- but a woman is LITERALLY drug by her hair out of her mansion by her evil cheating husband while his girlfriend LITERALLY taps her high-heeled foot waiting for it.)
Every damned movie he makes (that I’ve seen anyway) has the same stock characters:
-Successful but evil bastard, who’s the lamentable love interest of
-The goodhearted heroine who learns she doesn’t have to put up with the above once she meets the
-Blue collar guy who’s just too wonderful for words
-The great guy whose family has been torn apart by his wife, who is
-the She-Crackhead, and of course like everyone else she’s related to
-M’dea (don’t even get me started- that character’s greatest hits could supply 5 funny minutes but damn… I’d just as soon see Vicky Lawrence star in MAMA’S FAMILY: THE MOTION PICTURE as M’dea)
There’s no nuance, the Christian overtones are about as subtle as an elephant bull seal breeding a harem, the resolution is so perfect as to be more shallow than any sitcom other than House of Payne, and all the “but seriously folks” earnest moments that are like one of the let’s talk about alcoholism episodes that ruined GRACE UNDER FIRE.
Then there’s the “Tyler Perry’s XXXXX starring Tyler Perry written by Tyler Perry produced by Tyler Perry proofread by Tyler Perry wet nursed by Tyler Perry from a concept by Tyler Perry based on characters by Tyler Perry” credits. DUDE WE GET IT! Just how small is your penis?
Lot’s more movies but I’ll let those stand for now.
No Country For Old Men. There was not a single character I cared about. I kept waiting for someone to show some sort of redeeming quality but the sheriff was lazy, the dumb red-neck was a dumb red-neck to the end, most of the people killed were beyond stupid, and the killer wasn’t even the fun kind of psychotic. The ultimate slap in the face, the movie didn’t even really end.
To me it says a lot that many of the reviews I’ve read focus on scene pacing, inner conflict, character tension, or, my favorite, the use of silence – cinematic properties often projected on to the movie by viewers.
The reason why the ‘comedy’ doesn’t work for many is that Greg Fokker (and almost all Ben Stiller’s characters for that matter) is not so much placed in impossible situations as he sets about creating them for himself due to his complete inability to think on his feet and his unwillingness to stand-up for himself.
I apologize for writing my last post in a snarky manner. It may be a fine line here, but I don’t think that the movie made you angry because you didn’t get it. I think that the movie made you angry (for whatever reason), and, also, you maybe didn’t completely get it.
Saying the movie is pretentious, overwrought, and manipulative is fine – I don’t exactly feel the same way, but those are totally subjective distinctions. And the movie might possibly be a “cautionary tale,” but it’s not a cautionary tale about drugs, any more than, say, Eyes Wide Shut is a cautionary tale about super-secret rich-guy orgy-cabals. (Which is not to that that Eyes Wide Shut was a good movie – it’s just the first thing that came to mind.)
Oh, and if anyone wants to rag on my subjective impressions, I had a visceral, strongly negative reaction to Very Bad Things.
I wasn’t crazy about “Forrest Gump.” I gave it a tepid thumbs up, nothing more.
But I think I know the exact moment many people started to loathe it. No, not while watching it. No, not while thinking about it a day or so after watching it.
Millions of people undoubtedly DISLIKED the movie at those points. But the moment people began to LOATHE it was… the moment it won the Oscar as Best Picture, over two very good movies that are excessively adored by fanboys: “Pulp Fiction” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”
MANY movies worse than “Forrest Gump” have won the Oscar, but very few have won the Oscar over two movies that have rabid hoards of fans in the film geek community.
It’s exactly the same reason so many people hate “Dances With Wolves” with every fiber of their being. Many people disliked it after seeing it, but most of that film’s bitterest detractors only started DESPISING it after it beat out “Goodfellas,” a very good movie that is ALSO overly adored by the film geek community.
Rabid HORDES! Sorry. I hate it when I misspell words I know how to spell.
I wouldn’t say that Forrest Gump made me angry, but I really didn’t get what people liked about it. I remember hearing people say it was so great because he had all these terrific experiences, even though he was this below-average guy, and that it was very inspiring. I found it to be just the opposite…depressing. He might have had great experiences, but he really didn’t give a crap about any of it…they were things that had no meaning for him. The only thing he ever wanted was love, and that was the one thing he never got. I can’t really think of anything more depressing than that.
The movie I’ve seen lately that made me mad was The Family Stone. I saw Sarah Jessica Parker on the Tonight Show, and she said she played an unlikable character. Well, when I saw the movie, sure, the character was supposed to be a little uptight & awkward, but her boyfriend’s family did NOTHING to try to make her feel comfortable, and in fact acted like complete assholes to her because she was a little on the conservative side (wore suits, didn’t think it was appropriate to sleep in the same room as her boyfriend in his parent’s house, etc). Basically, they treated her like shit because, in their perception, she was “not like them.” But they were supposed to be the open-minded ones! The whole movie just pissed me off.
A play before it was a movie, but West Side Story. I know it’s based on R&J (a play with some major plotholes obviously but we’ll not discuss it), but Maria is a jello-spined cold-hearted selfish silly bitch.
A boy she met two days ago has killed her brother— again, he KILLED HER BROTHER. He destroyed the lives of her parents and of her best friend Anita, and she’s known him for two days… so when he shows up at her place what does she do?
Lets him in, spends the night with him, lies to the cops about him, and agrees to run off with him. Uh… yeah… that should help your parents grieving.
And then Anita, who just saw her lover’s dead body, says basically (after the “a boy like that/will kill your brother/(as evidenced by the fact/he killed your brother”) she basically says “Eh, Maria’s in love, I know what’ that’s like… I understand hon”.
Blair witch project. Minutes in to the film I was saying, dead serious: “Can somebody *please *kill these morons?” I’ve never seen people on screen so annoying in my whole life – and we never saw them getting killed. It just went on and on and on, the most boring film in history with the most irritating persons on earth stumbling around in a forest going “fuck shit man” for hours, as it seemed. Jesus, I’m still mad. I want my money back. Or see them getting killed.
I often find myself impatient with “true love will conquer all” story lines. It usually seems like the message really is “true love doesn’t have to give a shit about anyone else who might get hurt.” Like that movie My Best Friend’s Wedding, where Julia Roberts is trying to break up her friend’s engagement, or that John Cusak movie, can’t remember what it’s called, where he’s trying to find some girl he met once who he thinks is his soul mate, while the whole time he’s engaged and planning a wedding with someone else (and then, as I recally, leaves her literally the day before the wedding). I find nothing romantic about that kind of premise.
(OK, that point doesn’t really have to do with West Side Story, but what you said reminded me of it!)
Since you really like the Cronenberg Crash, Rachel you may want to consider this offer carefully
Made of Honor was shown on the flight I was on yesterday. I felt very angry afterward. It was a ridiculous, pathetic excuse for a movie.
Lot of Wedding Crashers hate here. Huh. My feeling is that I would happily watched a film that was much more the kind of thing in the first 10 minutes.
But I don’t hate it. Vince Vaughn is a bit more comedically awkward on film than he seems to think, but that movie still works for me on some level.