Déjà Vu: It’s been a while since I saw it, but IIRC there is a scene where the investigators use their look-anywhere time window to watch a victim of a crime while she’s in the shower. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t appreciate the good guys abusing government surveillance to perv on people being played for laughs.
Well, i guess the movie presents American history, although it’s a history completely shorn of context and complexity, and reduced to a series of aphorisms and didactic admonitions.
As for the adaptation, they did a “great job” if doing a great job means taking a book, grabbing the main characters and their experiences, and completely inverting the central and overriding message of the original text. Sort of like making a movie of Romeo and Juliet in which the central message is that, if young innocent people love each other enough, they can overcome every obstacle and end up married and living happily ever after.
If you liked the movie, that’s fine. And if you prefer it to the book, that’s also fine. But by no stretch of the imagination was it a good adaptation, IMO. I don’t quite agree with lissener that the adaptation was an example of “not getting it.” I credit Zemeckis and the movie studio with enough intelligence to “get” the book; i just don’t think they had the courage or the talent to do it as the author intended.
The movie itself didn’t make me angry; i just found it dull and uninspiring.
Woah, mhendo, you’re in San Diego now? I thought you were in Baltimore!
Does anyone else feel a Dopefest coming on? (Or did I just totally miss it?)
Any movie produced/directed by Mel Gibson, the man should be sorting his personal issues out with professional help not inflicting his bizarre predudices on us via movies.
Any film where Robin Williams feels that he has some sort of special saintliness of character that gives him the right to lecture us on right and wrong and life generally(Which is every film he’s ever made) I can probably think of a few more but now its back to work.
Alzheimer’s seems like an arbitrary line to take when deciding what not to make movies about. What about movies involving forced cannibalism–better or worse than Alzheimer’s?
“The Squid and the Whale” made me angry, but I did recognize it as a good movie. Mostly just watching two awful people fuck up their kids’ lives got to me.
Also, I agree with “Donnie Darko”–I hate pretentious, hipper than thou films.
Yep, arrived a few days ago. Staying with friends in Del Mar while we get settled. Once things are less hectic, i’ll post more details in a new thread.
Jerry McGuire and Purple Rain push my buttons. “Cool guy” continuously treats girl assholishly, and girl keeps crawling back because, deep inside, “he really loves me”. That Hollywood considers this to be romance is repugnant to me. Visiting them 5 years later, I’d expect to see the characters in spousal abuse counseling.
If it helps, movies about Alzheimer’s and genocide aren’t made to be “enjoyed” in the traditional sense. They are made partly for educational purposes, and partly to make people empathize with a subject matter they don’t have any emotional connection with. People want to feel empathy, and it’s hard to connect empathetically with a medical journal or history textbook.
The original Funny Games had a much more effective undercurrent of dark humor than the remake. The American version was downright meanspirited, through and through. It actually gave me a headache to watch. :mad:
To address the OP, the movie that pissed me off the most was Lean on Me. The way Morgan Freeman’s character got treated in that story was reprehensible, and the fact that it was based on a true story makes it even worse. I can handle just about any movie (as long as it doesn’t suck) but I hate films that leave me filled with impotent rage. At least Dead Poet’s Society ended on a message of hope.
I don’t remember how that film ended. I would have said, if asked, that it ended well for Mr. Clark, but would I have been wrong?
Also, though, I wanted to ask, wasn’t Mr. Clark, as portrayed in the movie, kind of an ass? And didn’t he actually do something illegal? My memory is hazy…
-FrL-
ETA: Oh yeah, didn’t he fire that choir teacher? I remember being kind of upset about that.
It’s been a long time, so I don’t recall any details other than how the principal did all these wonderful things for that inner-city school, but the school district was so embarrassed by his success that they got him fired over some minor infraction they could have easily let slide. I think that’s the gist of it. Whatever it was, it really pissed me off at the time.
I’ll have to go with Bridge to Terabithia. I loved that movie. Leslie Burke, played by AnnaSophia Robb, was an amazing character. During the movie I came to wish I had a friend like that. Seems like she was just about everything in a friend and person that I could want. I’ll not actually post the ending, but for anyone that has seen it, what the hell?! I know that it was based on a book, but I would like to find the person that decided to turn that into a book and punch him right in the stomach and ask him how he likes it. That is what I felt like after the ending of the movie. I love movies, I’ll watch almost anything, but that movie got me emotionally involved and then bitch-slapped me. So, I’ll restate that I loved the movie but after I watched it I spent the next few days wondering why and being totally pissed off.
I did a quick search of the pages of this thread for “Uwe Boll” and didn’t get any hits.
So I’ll say it:
Any movie that Uwe Boll makes, makes me angry.
I think you were watching a different movie. There certainly wasn’t any fulfillment in the one I saw. In any character.
I didn’t see the movie but I know it preserves the ending of the book, so I know what you’re talking about. What’s worse, the book was read out loud to us in fifth grade. Yep, imagine a bunch of 10 year olds trying not to cry in front of their friends at that sad, sad ending. 
Not good at all. And now, as a writer myself, I wonder about that author too. I know I get super emotionally involved in my characters. Writing that ending must have hurt her or him a lot, probably a lot more than it could ever hurt the reader, just like the death of your own pet hurts more than the death of your friend’s pet, even if you really like the friend. So why would they do it? It’s weird to me.
Well, I would think that being able to evoke that kind of reaction in your reader is a sign of being a really good writer, so there’s that. Plus, even if it was so upsetting to lose the character, the other parts (getting so attached to the character, and so on) must have felt really good. Kind of like highs and lows go together.
Oh, I understand that. And, actually, the longest story I ever wrote (novel-sized) had an extremely unhappy ending where a lot of people died – and it basically convinced me that in order to write that sort of thing and keep my head on straight, I have to allow for some…future happiness, or improvement of mood, for the characters who are left. I honestly don’t remember if that existed in Bridge to Terabithia because I haven’t touched it since 5th grade, and that was 18 years ago.
I’m mad that I can’t see “Postal” yet. WTF?
Meenie7, have you seen the film “La Vita è Bella”?
The great thing about movies is nothing is incidental. Movies are written, cast, shot and cut and there are decisions made every step of the way. With rare exceptions, everything you see on screen is meticulously planned, approved on several levels, shot many times in many ways, kept in or cut out, tested and released. There are no accidents.
I’m not saying the filmmakers are raving racists who want us to hate people. But black men and young white women has been a film trope since at least Birth of a Nation, and it has some pretty heavy cultural baggage along with it. It’s an age old “every father’s nightmare”, and you gotta admit the scenes wouldn’t be as disturbing if they were having sex with some pimply white mid-western speed dealer.
But I think this particular bit of cinematic shorthand is repugnant and it’s cheap and immoral of film makers to rely on it. There are other ways to portray this “fall from grace” that don’t dredge up 100 year old racist stereotypes.
I took a family member my heroine loved deeply, wove her intricately throughout the book, made sure she was someone the reader could love, too, and then killed her off in the end. It was sad, sure, but more like losing a beloved D&D character than a pet. The story was much stronger for it, and my agent really liked that I did it.
You do it if it would improve the story, simple as that.
Gladiator. Someone must take out the only obstacle to peace and equality for all and restore democracy to Rome. But who can do it? Why, Russell Crowe of course and he will do it using only his bronzed arms and his huge popularity. It’s based on a true story, really! Wait, I forgot the subplot - Russell Crowe also has a sensitive side as we can see when he moons over his lost wife and child.