Inception. Stupid and a waste if time and SFX.
Not a fan of cyberpunk?
And A Thousand Acres won a Pulitzer. It’s still a jaw-droppingly bad book.
A friend who saw Thelma & Louise before I did called it “2 bimbos with guns”. I said “but it’s so critically acclaimed” . She said “go see it”. Yep. 2 bimbos with guns.
Right, and The Godfather was just a bunch of Italians with guns. 
Look, if you didn’t like the movie, pointing you to a whole bunch of critical acclaim isn’t going to make you like it. And you’re certainly entitled to your opinion, which is always a subjective thing. I myself often disagree with critics, although I’ve long had great respect for the late and great Roger Ebert, and I will say that Ebert stopped just half a star short of giving Thelma & Louise a perfect score, only because he had a minor quibble with the way the ending was edited.
Incidentally, I am generally not a fan of testosterone-laden “action” movies mostly made for guys who like car chases and explosions, and even less a fan of “social commentary” movies as a genre. But filmmaking is an art, and sometimes all the right ingredients come together in capable hands to craft a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining film.
You might be interested in this retrospective on the film more than 25 years later:
OK, I actually have a movie that I think everyone but me liked - Moulin Rouge! Just could not get into the movie, and the use of modern songs performed in an 1890s style was offputting. I’m sorry, but “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did not work in any way, shape, or form.
To the contrary, just not a fan of pointless and stupid, plotless movies.
I really, really hated that movie. Really.
Pointing out that it was highly rated doesn’t really detract from the point, which is “movies that were overrated.” By definition, a movie must be highly rated to be significantly overrated. Unless your position is that all well-rated movies are beyond criticism, this isn’t much of a counterargument.
As it happens, I agree “Thelma and Louise” is a really good movie, but I’d make that argument on its own merits. “It’s a great movie because other people think it was great” is not much of an argument when the entire discussion is “movies many people say are great that really were not.”
That wasn’t actually in it, but I take your point. I liked it, it established pretty early on it would be a very anachronistic kind of film, and I think it had great style layered in to transport you away from any expectation of logic. It’s like a pop-up book by way of vintage French postcards.
Anyway, as for me, I think Jaws is overrated. Not a bad film (though I really do not enjoy it), just not worthy of the praise it gets.
Well, a sample of it was.
You’re right, I stand corrected. It’s part of Zidler’s Can Can song.
“Watching the characters fight back” was not immensely satisfying.
Another vastly overrated movie? Gone with the Wind.
Gravity (2013)
7 Academy Awards… anybody ever bother watching it twice?
The CGI is excellent, the characters and story not so much.
Both main characters are like cardboard cutouts. The female astronaut played by Sandra Bullock spends most of the movie either panicking or flapping around uselessly.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield tears it to shreds:
Much of “Gravity” is so far from reality that I want to turn my head.
I think it set back a little girl’s vision of what a woman astronaut can be an entire generation.
I find that’s true of a lot of movies. Some movies are worth seeing even if only once (and I think this one was worth seeing in a movie theater) and other movies are worth seeing multiple times, sometimes just because they’re fun. For example, in 1982, three of the biggest pictures of the year were Tootsie, E.T. and Gandhi. The last won the Best Picture Oscar but I’ve never been tempted to rewatch it. But I have revisited E.T. and Tootsie multiple times.
Excellent post.
But even the infamous campfire scene has subtext. On the surface, it’s pure scatological humor; Brooks does love a good fart joke. But he said he wrote that in response to all the Westerns he grew up watching, that always showed cowboys around a fire, eating coffee and beans, but never showed the inevitable outcome of such a diet. Blazing Saddles, which I think is one of the greatest comedies I’ve ever seen, is all about subverting and mocking conventions; the campfire scene is subverting what TvTropes calls the “Nobody Poops” trope.
Interesting bit of trivia - Mel Brooks created all the fart noises himself, with soapy water and a balloon.
I’d just like to say that I was personally told that Thelma and Louise was a feminist movie, and through that lens I found it greatly disappointing. It wasn’t what I expected, and I might have let it influence the way I saw it.
I agree with RealityChuck here. It’s clearly about xenophobia and fascism.
…Well, yes, Starship troopers is about xenophobia and fascism. But it’s also about American politics, both obviously and from what the director says. It’s about the rise of xenophobia and fascism in a population that doesn’t realize it’s happening. To exaggerate the xenophobia from actual American politics, it substitutes actual aliens for human foreigners. To exaggerate the fascism from actual American politics, it dresses the government leaders in Nazi clothes and makes their flags look like Nazi flags.
Nobody disputes that it’s about xenophobia and fascism. The argument is whether it’s a satire. RealityChuck and I disagree on his criticism of virtually every other science fiction movie, so I’m not surprised we disagree here, too :).
I felt it worked. A cabaret would have been using well-known pop songs in its acts. But if the movie had used pop songs from the 1890’s they wouldn’t have had the right effect; nobody in a 2001 audience would recognize the songs. So Luhrmann used modern pop songs that were current in 2001.
As for the use of songs in general, it’s a musical. If you can’t accept the idea of cast members spontaneously beginning to sing and dance, you’re not going to like the genre.
So rather than just snark on other folks, I should put in my own. Wes Anderson is overrated garbage.
No, of course I know that he’s got an artistic vision, and he’s very precise, and o so twee and adorable. And a lot of people love watching rich self-centered white dudes have a middle-aged crisis about how useless they are, even when those rich self-centered white dudes are foxes or whatever. Cool cool cool, and I’m thrilled that other people like watching these adorable sad sacks be adorable in dollhouse sets.
But if I never watch another of his movies, it’ll be too soon.
I think that unfairly trivializes my two posts and the real points I was trying to make. The first post was a response to the idea that everything these two women did was stupid. Yes it was, but the fact that they were driven to it by societal norms beyond their control was kind of the point. My mention of the Oscar nominations was mainly to point out that it won for best original script, meaning that if someone thought the story line was trivially stupid, they should perhaps look more closely.
My second post offered a further observation on my view of the film’s merits, when I said simply that “I myself often disagree with [film] critics … But filmmaking is an art, and sometimes all the right ingredients come together in capable hands to craft a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining film.” Again, to the view that this was just a movie about “2 bimbos with guns”, I say: look closer.
Thanks for the comment. I wasn’t criticizing you for your opinion, to which you’re perfectly entitled, just offering my own, because I really enjoyed the movie. I think the making of the movie itself did more in the service of feminism than the story line, which unrealistically portrayed almost all men as reprehensible assholes. But in a Hollywood context, it was the first time that both leads in a major movie were nominated for Best Actress Oscars, and the Oscar-winning script was a first-time script by another woman.