In the past year, I’ve seen a few movies that I’d heard a lot about, sometimes in a gushing, “You’ve gotta see this!” way. Some I appreciated, but more often, they did not live up to the hype.
Amelie: It was very clever. Problem is, clever is all it was, to not much point. Okay, she affected other people’s lives, but to what purpose? What was the use of getting those two people together, if they just kept sniping at each other the same way they’d been doing? The fake letter from the dead husband could easily have backfired and made the wife/widow feel even worse. And the guy Amelie chose for herself? I’ll never understand why she pretended not to be who he was looking for when he came to the cafe. The intro grabbed me, as I’m sure it did most people, but there were no satisfying payoffs. IMO, anyway.
Grand Budapest Hotel. Didn’t think it was funny. Didn’t laugh once; didn’t even think, “Oh, that’s brilliant.” I gather it was a satire, but I guess I’m not familiar with what was being satirized.
Withnail and I. Argh. I do not think incompetence is funny. “Okay, I get it,” I said early on. “Everything these guys try to do, they’re gonna f it up.” But that’s not interesting or amusing to me. I just wanted to knock them both into a wall and spackle them in. I kept scanning through to get to the scenes with Richard Griffiths, and then I didn’t think those were funny either. It’s ironic, because if I’d seen this when it was new and I was a teenager, I might have enjoyed it. Or, maybe not.
Anyone have that experience – for years, people told you this movie is essential, it will rock your world, see it or be square? And then you did see it, and reacted thusly?
Mostly comedies. I feel that I have a pretty good sense of humor, but I guess I’m a hard sell when it comes to typical Hollywood comedies.
There is a long list of movies that most people find high-larious but I find a chore to sit through. For example: Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Anchorman, Step Brothers, Old School, Wedding Crashers, the Hangover, This is 40, and pretty much anything featuring Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, or any SNL alum.
mmm
“Love, Actually” and everything I’ve ever seen by Woody Allen. I really don’t get what is so entertaining about watching a bunch of people act so neurotic that you actually cringe through the whole thing and then walk out feeling neurotic yourself. There is no plot other than a series of neurotic vignettes, and no outcome other than the neurotics choosing to be neurotic together (or occasionally apart.) There’s not one plot point that couldn’t be resolved instantly by a single character capable of the mildest open confrontation.
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Mr. Salinqmind watches this every year, absolutely howling with laughter through the whole thing. I don’t get it. I kind of like the hillbilly cousin and the gorgeous house, but I can’t find a single laugh in the whole idiot thing.
I found Inception to be interesting, but not enthralling.
In The Usual Suspects, I thought the twist was more annoying than exciting.
I once rented the “unrated” version of Electra. Why was it unrated, you ask? Because if you put “PG” on a Shannon Tweed movie, no one would ever rent the @#$% thing. With a little work, it might have been a good action film. With a little work, it might have been a good sci-fi film. With a little work, it might have been a good porn film. It just never quite succeeded at anything.
I saw it in the theatre when it came out and absolutely loved it, as did all the other moviegoers that night, everyone was all smiles.
Then, I saw it twice more in the following months, liked it significantly less each time and haven’t seen it since. I still think it’s all right in a cutesy-quirky way but not much more than that.
There have been many I’ve been disappointed with, but top honors for having the lowest ratio of enjoyment compared to hyper-emphatic recommendations goes for these two:
‘Borat’. Sold to me as groundbreaking-ly funny…exponentially so, was horrifically un-funny. Almost anti-clever. I could tolerate it only in half-hour hunks. I actually thought worse of my friend’s thought processes and mental capacities for it.
‘Pearl Harbor’. I was hoping for a modern ‘Tora Tora Tora’ and instead got a brutally inane gag-fest conflation of “rom-com” schlock and flag-waving jingoistic glurge. UGH! What made it worse, after comparing notes with the rave-reviews of a couple of friends, was the parts they swooned the most over, were the parts that repulsed me the most.
The Horse Whisperer. I like Redford, and I wasn’t expecting an action movie, by any means, but daaaaaamn, that movie was in serious need of an editor who was empowered to trim down the scenes. Glaciers move more rapidly than that film did.
The Triplets of Belleville: By the time I had any idea what was going on with the characters, the window of opportunity for getting me to care whether they all died in a fire had slammed shut.
To me, the incredibly hyped, critical darling and box-office smash “Lost In Translation” was less entertaining than spending 5 minutes online reading the deranged rantings of hysterical idiots claiming that Donald Trump’s latest innane, rambling tweets regarding the out-of-control price of Diet Coke are worse Crimes Against Humanity than the Rwandian Genocide, Portuguese gonorrhea and English cuisine combined.
Okay, it was a revolution in film-making technique. Sets that actually looked like real rooms, instead of looking like sets. But I found nothing of interest in the actual story.
