Scawy!
Best wishes,
hh
The remake of Psycho, with Vince Vaughn being completely unbelievable and totally not menacing in the role of Norman Bates, and Ann Heche completly inept in the role of a heterosexual woman. It was word for word and gesture for gesture and scene for scene from the original, yet it was totally unspooky, unpsychotic, and unlikeable.
Awesome movie. You mean you didn’t cry at the end?
Awesome movie. Todd Phillips’ best. Zach Galifianakis should have been a star a long time ago. Definitely one of the top 5 living stand-up comics.
Awesome movie. Whatever you do, don’t watch “Lost in Translation!” You’ll regret it. Not even one superhero in that movie.
Awesome movie. Every John Carpenter action film (including “They Live” and “Big Trouble in Little China”) is more or less the same so the only reason you’d like one and dislike the other is if you happened to be in a bad mood the day you watched one of them and a good mood the day you watched the other.
Awesome movie.
Granted, Repo could have been better, but I think Darren Lynn Bousmans’ potential as a horror filmmaker in and of itself makes for interesting viewing, at least. Kind of like how “Sucker Punch” sucked because the script was lousy and nonsensical but it was interesting to watch anyway because Zach Snyder is so talented and ambitious. Fingers crossed for “Mother’s Day” and “11-11-11.”
“The Runaways” is awesome. Kristen Stewart’s performance blew my mind. I cried at the end.
Watch “The New World” and you’ll understand exactly what Terrence Malick was trying to do with “The Thin Red Line,” even if he didn’t necessarily succeed.
Wait hwat? You’re telling me “Terminator 2” and “Aliens” aren’t good movies?
I could go on forever. Did any of you ever consider that it’s actually amazing that movies even exist? That entertainment even exists? That most of you couldn’t write screenplays better those of most of the movies you’re dissing even if you tried your hardest and worked on them for years?
Mister Cheech, I agree with your assessments. Most of those films are actually great films.
Except Signs. Signs really, truly did suck.
Put the audience to sleep?
True, “The Thin Red Line” is often boring, and “The New World” is intermittently boring, but as far as I know, no one other than Terrence Malick has ever been given a shitload of money with which to make a movie that is not only totally different to all other movies, but is also coherent and entertaining not in spite but because of its defiant uniqueness.
See Mick LaSalle’s review:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-01-20/entertainment/17279026_1_terrence-malick-dull-emotional-power
He explains it better than I did, because he writes about movies for a living and I don’t.
How many screenplays has Mick LaSalle sold? I ask, because you just dismissed everyone else’s opinion on the grounds that we can’t write screen plays, so I figure Mick LaSalle must have sold a whole lot, for his opinion to carry any weight with you.
Mick LaSalle is a hack who bases reviews on personal opinion and political biases.
I liked Stranger Than Paradise and Lost in Translation. They’re not deep and significant films, they’re not exciting films and they’re not tragic films; they’re just films about people being people.
But Signs was terrible.
Miller: Mick LaSalle hasn’t written a screenplay. Instead, he has written about 2000 movie reviews that have all been published in the San Francisco Chronicle which sells about a quarter of a million copies a day, which can’t really be said for all the people here who are dismissing great movies willy-nilly.
thelurkinghorror: Reviews absolutely should be based on personal opinion and LaSalle constantly explains why in his Ask Mick column. To paraphrase:
To watch a movie is react emotionally. The way someone responds to a movie is out of their control. They either like it or they don’t like it or they kinda like it but not really or whatever. It just happens. The job of the critic is to critically analyze their own emotional reaction (i.e. to figure out why they did or didn’t like a movie) so that we, as people who are not film critics and who therefore don’t spend our lives thinking and writing about movies, should better understand our own responses.
LaSalle does like and dislike movies for political reasons. Everyone does. LaSalle likes movies with a feminist agendas and dislikes movies with sexist agendas. This is because he likes to see women treated with respect and dignity, while, on the other hand, he doesn’t like to watch sexism because it upsets him.
I’m aware. I grew up reading the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mick LaSalle’s movie reviews. That doesn’t answer my question: you said that one had to make a movie, in order to criticize a movie. Mick LaSalle has never made a movie. Why should we listen to his movie reviews?
This may be the very first thing Mick LaSalle has ever written that I agree with. So my second question to you is, why don’t you agree with him? Because the position you’re taking in this thread is 180 degrees around from what he’s talking about here.
Directors, screenplay writers, actors etc makes movies for people to watch. Those audiences then have the complete right to say if they didn’t like a movie - they don’t have to just pick a film at random, watch it all the way through and then only comment on the good points.
Audiences don’t have to be pathetically grateful that said directors, writers and actors were able to do a job that garners lots of prestige, fame, status and (for movies on cimeatic release) money.
It’s not a matter of making a movie, it’s a matter of making some kind of artistic contribution to the world.
Writing film criticism is a skill that takes years to develop (like any other artistic pursuit) and in discovering how hard it is to consistently write coherent, sound and entertaining arguments about movies (however great, bad or mediocre) is a lesson in itself about how hard it is to make a movie.
If making movies is the dream job, why not make them? I’ll tell you why. You’re not beautiful enough to be a celebrity, not interesting-looking and -sounding enough to be a character actor, not talented enough to be a writer, not mentally agile and emotionally tough enough to be a director, not shrewd and tough-willed enough to be a producer, and so on, and so on.
I’m not dissing you. The same goes for me. The same goes for nearly all people. Only a very small amount of people are actually able to do what movies demand of them. Only very few people have that right combination of talent and drive.
If you watch a movie and you really don’t like it, fine. But if you really don’t like a lot of the movies you see, the problem might be your own inane reasons for disliking the film - critics’/audiences’ praise you deem unworthy, others’ negative opinions you feel you must agree with, perceived derivativeness (a particularly awful one because every movie is derivative and if a movie wasn’t derivative at all you’d hate it for being so alien), discrepancies in plot logic, unclear character motivations and plot holes (as if you’re life isn’t riddled with discrepancies in plot logic, unclear character motivations and plot holes - and you don’t mock reality for this), etc. That’s when you become the kind of person who complains to the McDonalds manager if they take too long preparing your food or put the cheese on the wrong part of the Big Mac.
Though no film is objectively better than another, there’s a difference between disliking Ingmar Bergman (who most people don’t like because he made films for a very particular and esoteric audience) and disliking “The Hangover” which was tailor-made for casual film-goers, and where the reason people dislike it is usually because they saw it post-hype and were naively disappointed that it wasn’t as monstrously funny and timelessly brilliant as “Some Like it Hot.”
Titanic.
I finally got around to seeing it a couple of years after it came out by borrowing a copy from the library.
DiCaprio and Winslet can be worth watching, and people who normally seem to have similar taste in films said I ought to give it a try despite the hype.
Truly awful.
I was rooting for the icy Atlantic to kill everyone with a speaking part, way before the ship hit the iceberg.
Repeatedly hitting the fast-forward button during the 3+ hours of dreadful, unimaginative triteness compressed it into about 1.5 hours of dreadful, unimaginative triteness.
That’s the only positive I got from the experience: reduced saccharine exposure.
Turns out the hype had already exposed me to all the pop culture references I’d ever need or want to know.
Are you that guy who writes positive review of every movie he sees in hopes one of his lines will be quoted in the movie’s promotional materials?
I really hate bullshit artsy ones like Tarkovsky, Bergman, Godard, etc.
Terrence Malick is one of those directors who would have made a great cinematographer. His films are always visually stunning…and deadly dull.
I don’t think one has to be a film critic to understand that making a movie is a difficult process. I’m not clear on what that has to do with the validity of criticism from people who are not film professionals, or why, “Movies are hard to make!” is a useful rebuttal to criticism of a movie. I’ll grant that even the most mediocre director is a vastly superior film maker to me. That doesn’t mean I can’t look at his films, compare them to other films I’ve seen, and come to the conclusion that he’s a subpar director by professional standards. I’m sure he worked really, really hard to make his crappy film, but this isn’t kindergarten anymore. You don’t get As for effort in the professional world.
You also didn’t answer my second question.
You say this like it’s remotely meaningful or pertinent. There are a lot of things in the world that I’m not good at. I don’t know how to farm. I can’t design a car. I can’t play professional sports. That doesn’t mean I can’t spot a rotten tomato, tell the difference between a Yugo and a Volvo, or criticize Tampa Bay for fielding a crap baseball team.
You do realize that this thread consists of multiple posts by a lot of different people, right? It’s not just one person giving a big, long list of films they dislike.
Man, there’s just so much poor logic and bad argument here, it’s hard to know where to start. For one thing, I’m pretty sure I could go through Mick LaSalle’s movie reviews and find plenty of examples where he’s slammed a movie for being derivative, poor plotting, or sloppy characterization. I would go so far as to wager that the vast majority of his negative reviews are negative for one or more of those reasons. I’d further ask, if those are not valid reasons to dislike a movie, what on Earth are good reasons to dislike a movie? What’s your standard for dismissing a film? Do they have to have left the lens cap on by mistake before it warrants criticism, or is that covered under the “But it’s so haaaaard!” excuse?
On the “wrong part” of the Big Mac? You know, if I got a Big Mac where the cheese was, say, on top of the bun, instead of inside it (which is about the only way I can parse “wrong part of the Big Mac” to make any sense) I think I’d be justified in complaining.
Tampa Bay has a baseball team? Oh MAN am I out of touch!
Miller: All you’re saying is, “This gives me license to criticize a movie,” and “Why is this supposed to inhibit me from criticizing a movie?”
What you’re missing is the axiom of the argument, which is that if you don’t like a movie that was made with a broad audience in mind by skilled writers and skilled directors and skilled actors and skilled cinematographers, then it’s your fault that you didn’t like the movie and not the fault of the people made it.
You ever notice how people sound like a jerk when they say “I hated that movie” whereas they don’t when they say “I liked that movie”? Or are you one of those people who get all tight in the chest when someone says they liked a movie that you didn’t like?