Movies where you agree with the minority of critics (open spoilers)

Cafe Society
#1

There are some movies that just seem inexplicably popular or unpopular.

Let’s not mistake this for a simple failure to appreciate genre (e.g. if you don’t like RomComs at all, you’re probably not going to like the best of them). Some movies just seem stand-out awful or awesome, and you’re the only one that sees it.

Metrics for this thread then:
You must be in a minority smaller than 10% on RottenTomatoes (critic or audience, you can choose), OR a smaller than 20% minority on IMDB (i.e. >=8 stars or <=2 stars, where you would rate opposite).

My starter:

Happy-Go-Lucky 93% critic rating, all talking about it being uplifting, life-affirming, cheery and optimistic.

The movie features a dizzy, disorganised, carefree single woman who, quite frankly, I wanted to shake by the shoulders and yell at “Snap the fuck out of it!”. She dithers and blunders through life, causing chaos for those closest to her, and for some reason, this is supposed to be charming. I guess I hated it because I know people like that in real life - whose utter failure to plan or organise themselves becomes everyone else’s problem but their own.

It’s a conspicuously ‘British’ movie - and I don’t dislike this genre, in fact I’m certain I could think of examples where I wasn’t so annoyed by Brit-movies that featured disorganised main characters - Withnail and I & Brassed Off spring to mind.

I don’t dislike any of the actors in the movie and I don’t think I’ve failed to appreciate the portrayal of the beauty of living a carefree life either. *Amelie *is an example of that concept done very well. Happy-Go-Lucky is just… urgh.

#2

Good topic.

I’ll go with Brick, which the RT critics gave 80% and the audience gave 86%.

I saw it 8 years ago and remember getting an aren’t-we-so-clever smugness vibe.

I dunno, maybe I’d feel different watching it today.

Nah, I doubt it.
mmm
ETA: I just realized that I had seen Happy-Go-Lucky too and couldn’t stand it.

#3

I didn’t much care for Mad Max Fury Road. I’d give it a C, so an average movie. It was nothing but an extended chase scene, then they turned the hell around just to do it again. I liked the other Mad Max movies, but this one was just boring by the end.

#4

Alien. Without going into my usual rant, basically, the characters in the film were too stupid to care about.

#5

Saving Private Ryan - I feel the opening battle scene is amazing. But after that, when the main story starts, I thought it became a mediocre and stereotypical war movie. It didn’t do anything that a hundred other movies hadn’t done before.

#6

I’d agree with that.

#7

That was my reaction to Brick, too. I didn’t get too far into it, admittedly, but the smug! The smug! I couldn’t go on.

#8

Marvel’s The Avengers was not at all a good movie (in my opinion). Paper thin plot. Riddled with cliches. That quippy, zingy, overly jokey dialogue. People praising its fun factor and not its actual quality.

(I feel the same way about The Flash, but this thread is about movies.)

#9

Interstellar. Or, really, any movie where the plot boils down to, “We’re on a mission to save humanity. Let’s improvise the shit out of this!”

#10

When I started reading the OP I wasn’t sure I’d have anything to contribute, but towards the end it actually mentioned a well-regarded movie that I did not care for:

I didn’t hate Withnail & I (94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences), but I didn’t particularly enjoy it either. I’ve seen it once and am not interested in watching it again. I felt it was too long and too visually gloomy even for a black comedy.

There were some parts I enjoyed and I thought the drug dealer character was very funny, but these were overshadowed by the large chunk of the movie devoted to the main character’s attempts to avoid being raped by his friend’s old queen of an uncle.* This is presented as comedy, but to me it was just unpleasant.

*Played by Richard Griffiths, which was especially weird because I know him better as Harry Potter’s uncle.

#11

Almost anything by Wes Anderson. SO FUCKING TWEE! I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR RICH DUDE ENNUI!

The worst offender IMO is his version of Fantastic Mr. Fox, wherein he takes a lovely little trickster tale and turns it into a story about a bourgeois man-child having a midlife crisis and his funkiller middle-class wife. I hated that shit so much.

Darjeeling Limited was where I first formed my hatred of him. You know how From Dusk Till Dawn starts as a crime caper and then switches halfway through to a vampire movie? I so wanted that to happen with Darjeeling Limited. The opportunity was there to turn it, halfway through, into a movie about a man-eating tiger stalking and devouring these insufferable brothers. There, and wasted.

#12

There are a number of films which are considered towering masterpieces by film critics which I found a bit above average at best. The top three would probably be:
Vertigo
2001
The Searchers

#13

Ms Hook, the Little Hook (age 47) and myself saw Star Wars a couple of nights ago. It bored me. About half way through I walked out and checked out some of the other movies for a half hour or so.

The only part that I thought good was when Hans Solo was trying to save his son and it didn’t go so well.

#14

I have to admit I’m confused by this. Doesn’t fun factor count as actual quality?

#15

I’m probably the only person in the world who thought Terminator 2 sucked but that Terminator 3 was decent. Basically, it felt to me like T3 was what T2 should have been.

#16

Heathers. I saw it once, which was plenty.I don’t need characters I like, but I do need characters who interest me. This movie had none. It was just an exercise in the banality of evil. Plus, Christian Slater was in it and emitting punchmehardinthefacetrons like a motherfucker.

#17

Local Hero. 100% critic score and 88% audience score on RT, and a 7.5 on IMDb. It was the favorite movie of a former boyfriend and his family, and they sat me down one day to share in their delight. I HATED HATED HATED it. Maybe it was a test or something; either way I didn’t pass.

Thirteen Ghosts, on the other hand, gets a 14/49 score on RT and a 5.5 on IMDb, but I’ll watch it any time it comes on TV.

#18

Possibly an age thing. I saw this in high school, and Bill & Ted’s excellent adventure as an adult, and thought the first was great and the second was awful. If I’d seen them in the other order, I probably would’ve loved Bill & Ted and hated Heathers.

#19

I found Her, 8.0 at IMDB and 94% at RT, full of transparent emotional manipulation. Maybe that’s kinda the point (replacing real emotions with artificial facsimiles), but most people seem to think differently, so if it is, it’s badly made.

Also, Looper, 93% at RT (albeit only 7.6 at IMDB), just didn’t work at all for me. I mean, you have goddamn time travel and the only thing you can think of for using it is disposing of bodies? (Although that seems to be a Bruce Willis thing: Surrogates has technology enabling direct mind-to-machine interfacing, and all they use it for is as a glorified remote control.)

I also didn’t care much for Fury Road (8.2 IMDB, 97% RT), but it was OK at least.

#20

I expect you are right. Both of those movies came out when I was 30-ish and I don’t care for either.