No need to snark. I have godkids, nieces and nephews and love them all to bits, and I love watching their parents with them and the pure joy they get from their kids. But kids aren’t for everyone. It’s the idea often perpetuated in movies that life is just so much shallow bar-hopping and casual sex until you do the ‘real’ thing - have a kid - and then that makes you finally grow up.
But of course, if it makes you feel better to pretend that my saying I didn’t like Knocked Up means that I hate kids and think their parents don’t love them, go right ahead. Sheesh, I thought this was a fun debate about movies. I’ll bow out now.
I agree that it didn’t live up to the hype and that no one really stood out as being good, but I’ll disagree about the sheriff. Sheriff Bell wasn’t lazy. He was just outclassed. Chiguhr they psychopath was just too crazy and too quick for law enforcement to keep up with. He represented the new generation’s criminal, and Sherrif Bell represented the old generation’s law, and the old could not defeat or even understand the new (Hence the title of the movie).
Yes, of course that sort of thing happens. But they had a chance to make a movie where abortion was a difficult but sensible choice, and they didn’t. No, they let the girl have the baby, and it went to a rich couple (well, to a single mother at the end).
Just makes me mad that movies always show having the baby as The One Right Option.
Drugs are a cypher in that movie for addiction in a more general sense, but… you have to admit, it’s the drugs that make everyone into an institutionalized degenerate, so… you can say RfaD not “about” drugs, the way people say tsk tsk and say No Country For Old Men is not about Llewelyn Moss, but unfortunately for your pretentions, the majority of the movie is quite literally about that. The intelligent viewer realizes there is a subtext, but the actual text also has meaning and when people dislike it, telling them they didn’t “get” the movie is missing the point of their criticism. Telling people what the movie is REALLY about as a way of invalidating their reactions to the actual text of the movie is a kind of meta-writing the movie after the fact that really annoys me.
I realize the above is probably incoherent. Hope someone understands at least the text of what I’m saying, if not the subtext.
Are you seriously trying that hard to misunderstand? or are you just that spectacularly ignorant? How can you possibly dismiss a person’s attempt to understand and explain their emotional reaction–to anything–as inherently dishonest “rationalizatioin”? I know you hate my guts, dude, you’ve made that clear many, many times. But this kind of irrational, illogical, nonsensical behavior, just for an opportunity to insult me under the mod radar in CS, is a bit bewildering. You can’t honestly believe that it’s impossible to examine and understand one’s emotional response to something in an intellectually honest way? Seriously, what *else *do you think an expression of artistic opinion is?
Movies that leave you sitting in your seat at the end going “WTF was that?” piss me off. No finer recent example, at least in our viewing history than There Will Be Blood. Actually with this one I was going WTF early on…
Broken Arrow with Travolta, Howie Long, and Christian Slater… I saw it in the theartre when it came out and I am still pissed about how horible it was. I am pretty sure Slater teleports from a river to the enemy base at one point… sigh.
Much worse then that: Man Bites Dog. I have never hated a character more…though that may have been the point.
This movie infuriated me beyond reason. Most egregious moment: in the original, when the gay couple was frantically trying to sanitize their apartment of anything gayish, one of them took the African fertility fetish and, in a panic, snapped its phallus off. This was violently funny, and put their whole predicament in sudden, disturbing (but still funny) focus. In the remake, they chickened out, and simply turned it to the wall.
Another movie that really irritated me was Chasing Amy. OK, protagonist gets a woman who claims to be a lesbian to date her, allegedly her first relationship with a man. Later, he finds out she screwed a ton of guys before him, gets jealous, reacts by suggesting a threesome. Yes, that was totally idiotic of him, and made him not likeable. BUT, the movie makes him seem completely in the wrong for having a problem with her sexual history. He’s not. She told him she was a lesbian who had never been with men. She lied about her sexual history, which was prolific, and that alone would have been sufficient reason for him to revile her and never speak to her again. But this is never addressed, and he’s made to seem like an asshole for losing out on such an awesomely wonderful girl. Bullshit. The ending of that relationship was not a tragic loss, because it was screwed to begin with by her manipulative lies (and not helped by his immaturity).
Kill Bill–they do nothing but leave a bad taste in one’s mouth.
Gone with the Wind and Gangs of New York: within the first ten minutes, I wanted everyone in them to die.
Crash, already bashed several times here and deservedly so, for being smug, self-righteous, predictable, and incredibly implausible.
Good Will Hunting–troubled math genius bawls on shrink’s shoulder and then everything is cool. Hey, I saw that before…'cept it wasn’t about a genius, it was called Ordinary People, and it was a better film.
What makes me angry during movies is when they turn out to be misrepresented by the previews or recommendations. Misleading previews make the film experience confusing and turn me into an angry critic. And I have friends whom I have banned from giving movie recommendations because it turns out that too many of their “great” movies are, in my opinion, insults to the audience. What they call “deep,” I call offensively dumbed-down with low expectations of their audience. Fortunately, they violate that ban frequently, which gives me a nice Films-to-Avoid List.
Forrest Gump has come up on these boards before and the dislike for it has also baffled me. One of the interpretations which I recall being mentioned was that God was rewarding Forrest because of his virtue. I think this comes most directly from the point where Forrest joins the local church and the storm wipes out all of the shrimp boats except his. I remember a shot where a net dumps all of the shrimp onto the deck of the boat and you can hear the sound of the church choir played over it.
My interpretation of that scene, however, was that Forrest was lucky and, in his innocence, credited God for his random luck. The potential for multiple interpretations for that is punctuated later when Forrest talks about destiny vs. “floatin’ around accidental, like on a breeze.” For me, it’s a film about how we ponder that very question, further reiterated by the fact that we, the audience, experience only that which the feather experiences, which may have landed by Forrest by sheer happenstance.
Ooh, thanks for reminding me.
What pissed me off most about that movie, besides the fact that it was supposed to be funny but wasn’t, was when Jeremy Piven goes frantic with remorse over killing the security guard without ever displaying a drop of remorse for killing the prostitute.
But the security guard might have had kids! Hey, you know what, maybe the prostitute did, too. Maybe her parents loved her. Maybe she gave generously to charity. Just because she’s a prostitute doesn’t make her disposable.
A woman (and it’s always a woman) seems to have defeated the evil rapist/killer/psycho/etc and he’s lying there, seemingly dead, and she lets her guard down, and then of course the bad guy is not really dead and he grabs her and attacks her again, etc, etc, or…
There’s a situation (home invasion, rape, robbery, zombie attack, whatever) that could have been easily solved if the victims had the forethought to have a few firearms lying around, but of course they don’t, and so are helpless against their attackers.
Uh… huh? What percentage of people in the country have “a few firearms lying around”? How is that at all unrealistic? The only one of your examples you really have a point with is zombie attack, and even then, if it’s the first wave, my previous point still applies.
My Best Friend’s Wedding pissed me off, though not the first time I watched it. I distinctly recall that my dislike came about after I’d been married a while. It wasn’t Julia Roberts’s character that pissed me off, since she did get the comeuppance she deserved. It was Cameron Diaz’s character. This was a woman who was willing to give up her education and career for her husband, even though it became painfully obvious she didn’t really want to. That’s no way to start a successful marriage! I kept expecting a sequel, My Best Friend’s Divorce.
Well, I think people should always be prepared, and that includes owning a firearm. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be a gun hobbyist but I think it’s wise for everyone to have at least a shotgun or a handgun in a closet somewhere just as a common sense precaution. I mean, the average person never has to deal with a fire in their house, but you’d still be an idiot to not have a fire extinguisher around somewhere.
So it bothers me to see people in movies who could have been prepared to deal with a bad situation, but were not.
I don’t want to hijack the thread with gun politics, I’m just trying to get my point of view across.
That is a perfect synopsis that I was about to write myself until I saw your post. It is just a vehicle to present American history through the eyes of a clueless person. If you want a better medium, watch 100 hours of documentaries. If you think the movie is bad, check out the book. I have no idea how the writers got inspiration to make a movie out of the book yet they did a great job.
People also make fun of Titanic as well. Let’s just disregard the fact that it is the highest grossing movie of all time. Some people that pretend to like obscure French films and attend poetry readings with an audience of 5 say that it is all crap.
Yes. The movie blandly, blindly celebrates the mindlessness that the book viciously satirizes. Probably the greatest example of “not getting it” I’ve ever seen in an adaptation.
