How can anyone dislike a movie where old ladies fish for a frog dinner - with grenades? 
TheCat in the Hat … how Ron Howard could completely suck the charm out of a Dr. Suess book is beyond me!
Eutyschus:
Really? The very idea that this book - or any book that’s meat to amuse pre-schoolers for ten minutes - could be stretched into a feature-length film and still be decent entertainment is absurd. How could a live-action film capture the quality of enjoyment that comes from the cadence of reading Seuss’s poetry?
Years ago I had read that The Avengers was awful. The review specifically said that the (lack of) chemistry between Uma and Ralph was the worst ever recorded on film. Personally, I think Fiennes retired a long time ago and sends an android to earn his paycheck even at the best of times (except when he’s all lizard-like in Harry Potter - as a lizard man, the guy actually has some charisma). But Uma Thurman can usually manage to has some kind of appeal and can play off her co-stars to generate some kind of snappy-zingitude.
So expecting the movie to be crap, I watched it on TV while babysitting my goddaughter. “Lack of chemistry” was an understatement. “Crap” was an understatement. Every second the two of them were onscreen, “chemistry” was sucked out of the atmosphere. I ushered my goddaughter into another room to shield her from the chemistry suckage lest the two talking mannequins generated a chemistry-suckwave so strong that she’d grow up to have the charm of a piece of soggy cardboard.
How can two people who are supposed to be A-list hotties, combine to have the sex appeal of cold, mildewed pasta?
It makes me feel like a curmudgeonly asshole but I don’t like any of the computer animated kids’ movies.
Toy Story, Shrek, UP, WALL-E, and the like.
Someone recently started a thread about the CGI being soulless and maybe there’s something to that theory. I really don’t believe it’s the medium though, I’m just not impressed by the stories.
I hated the “Mad Max” movies. ALL of them. The Road Warrior included. It was crap heaped on top of crap with crap gravy and a bowl of crap for dessert. I hate them the way that Jewish people hate Hitler. Only more often.
I have to defend this. My reasons for saying it is closer to the book are the fact that it showed the kids at the end, the fact that Wonka is not some super happy guy, there’s no gobstopper test nor fake Slugsworth, they actually show the squirrel room, the Oompa-Loompas are the right size and skin color, that guy from India is there, they sang the songs from the book, and the entire thing was made more fantastic looking. Oh, and everything they added was clearly segregated from the book parts.
The part I underlined is the one I find the most incredible and the first thing I noticed, even if, by itself, it would mean nothing.
As for the OP: All I’ve got is Meet the Parents. Everyone told me it was hilarious, but it is not my type of humor. I don’t like it when the main character is being made to feel uncomfortable, nor do I find uncomfortableness inherently funny.
Ron Howard had nothing to do with The Cat In The Hat, that was directed by Bo Welch, his first film.
Ron Howard made the Grinch film, which was decent but, because it was based on such a beloved cartoon, was inevitably going to be unfavourably compared.
Uh, okay, but IIRC in the old movie Wonka did say something to the effect of “they’ll all go back to their horrible, normal selves…but perhaps a little wiser”, which is really all the four other kids get in the book, too (just a reassurance to Charlie that they would be okay)
Well, he isn’t really in the old movie, either. He’s definitely off-kilter and gets visibly irritated several times when he thinks one of his inventions might be compromised (like when Augustus falls into the chocolate river). My problem with Burton’s Wonka is that he’s basically a Michael Jackson parody: creepy and childlike (but not in good ways, just that he’s emotionally immature), broods a lot, etc.
That was the biggest thematic change from the book and they probably wanted to add an angle to make Charlie have some sort of internal conflict and not just “win” the factory. I don’t mind it personally but I can see how others would take issue with it.
That’s fine, I think probably this has more to do with the technical limitations of the time the first movie was made (they had no way to make CGI squirrels and so the goose room was easier to do). Both scenes serve Veruca’s storyline well, IMO.
That’s all fine. I’m not sure why they didn’t just use the book’s song lyrics in the old movie. And the choclate palace scene might have been another victim of the technical limitations of 1970.
Well…maybe not everything.
My biggest single issue from the Burton movie is the sub-plot involving Wonka’s father and his traumatic childhood. You can like or dislike that they added this angle, but it’s not the sort of thing Roald Dahl would have written. He didn’t tend to write characters that are so traumatized from their upbringing that they’re dysfunctional; look at Matilda which has two very badly-treated protagonists who are still basically normal people. There’s basically no consideration of internal conflict in his characters: for better or worse they’re either well-behaved, clever, and virtuous, or mean-spirited, prim, and deserving of punishment. Also, in the book Wonka isn’t the focus of the story: the kids are. He (and the factory) serve as means to separate the good kid (Charlie) from the bad ones. While it might be interesting to explore his motivations, the book hardly touched on anything other than “this guy really likes to make chocolate.”
I’m not one to say that Burton didn’t have the right to make his movie however he wanted. And I acknowledge that the old movie strayed from the book in some key ways as well. But Burton’s movie introduced some serious thematic changes as well as cosmetic ones, and to claim that it’s an exceedingly faithful adaptation of the book is a little far-fetched. It’s very clearly Burton’s interpretation, his mark is all over it. While he was able to include some scenes from the book that the old movie didn’t (or couldn’t), he also made changes of his own.
I’m with you. Every one I’ve seen was manipulative and formulaic. Which I suppose is fine for kids, but I’m an adult.
These films weren’t exactly screaming “quality” to begin with, but I was still shocked by them.
I was incredibly surprised at how bad Still Waiting… was. *Waiting…*was a bit amateurish, but often funny, a Clerks-like slice-of-life comedy that rang true for my own experience working in a restaurant. The sequel, though, holy crap it was bad. A friend bought it and brought it into work, popped it into the DVD player on lunch, and we decided half an hour in to shut it off and watch the local weather service instead.
Employee of the Month was awful, though not as cringe-worthy as the above. I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but since I work big-box retail, I was expecting a movie that would have funny moments that would ring true (again, like Clerks). Instead, not only was the story itself pretty bad, but the writers seemed to know nothing about how big-box retail actually worked.
Are you talking about the one with Dane Cook and Jessica Simpson or the one with Matt Dillon and Christina Applegate?
Cook/Simpson. Never heard of the latter one… is it any better?
I saw Twilight with some friends without knowing much about it at the time – thank Og on home video – and being told how “awesome” Twilight was. I gave up on it after an hour. The acting was so bad I could not stand it. I mean, I have a pretty high threshold for crap movies (for example, I loved the GI Joe movie - I knew exactly what I was going to get and it did not disappoint, but it was a bad movie, really), but I wanted drive a stake through “Bella” and her creepy vampire friend by the time that first hour had finished. Ugh.
Hell no. I reference it in the “Worst Endings” thread.
Resident Evil: Afterlife.
Not that I was necessarily expecting a great movie, and not that the others in the series were amazing or anything, but I enjoyed the previous 3 films in the series and was very disappointed by the utter crappiness of this latest offering. There’s simply no conceivable reason for the Umbrella Corporation to be that comically evil, even with a mutated, evil CEO.
I’ve been told that the Rifftrax (MST3K-style) treatment of Twilight is quite good. That’s probably the best circumstance to watch it under.
Did you see it in the theaters? We were trying to figure out how much worse it would have been in 3D.
double post
Could you give some examples of the films you do find entertaining, and that are not manipulative and formulaic? I can’t think of a single movie in the history of cinema that wasn’t both on some level. And also, y’know, so we can return the favor of spitting on something you enjoy (even as lighthearted fare) and implying you’re stupid.