Pretty Woman. Prostitution is fun; you get to wear beautiful clothes and go to the opera, and the rich handsome john will fall in love with you and take you away from all this even though it’s superfun!
Dirty Dancing. All I can say about this one is that it makes me hiss “Get some self-esteem!” at Baby through clenched teeth.
Many, many, many of my female friends LOVE these, and I have sat through them uncountable times. Mostly they just make me sad.
The only one I can think of that hasn’t been mentioned already is Donnie Darko
What. Was. That?
Oh, I’ve got another - Saturday Night Fever. Mind-numbingly boring, couldn’t make it through more than 20 minutes. Truly fantastic soundtrack, though.
Bleck! I forgot this one, because I only know one person who liked it. I loved the opening scene though.
A
Stripes. Supposedly most other people liked this movie; at least, it normally isn’t viewed nearly as bad as I do. Other than the fact that you can’t go because all the plants will die, I didn’t find anything funny about it. I found the plot utterly unbelievable, and all the jokes obvious and/or stupid. One of only two movies that I remember being unable to continue watching because it was just…bad.
I didn’t hate Animal House but I didn’t find it especially funny or particularly memorable, either.
My nomination for this thread is In Bruges. Not funny, not quirky, just depressing- yet inexplicably popular, especially here on the SDMB.
Amazing how many movies I came into mention have already been mentioned. My first thought was
**Superbad **- An amazing piece of shit. I did not get the appeal or popularity, but was told it was incredibly funny and a must-see.
E.T. - I couldn’t stand Drew Barrymore then, and I still can’t stand her. And the movie sucked (to me) too! I remember being the only person that didn’t like it when it came out.
Sexy Beast - Wow. A complete puzzlement to me. The only thing I remember about the movie is the “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” line by Ben Kingsley.
Forrest Gump - I thought I was going to lose my mind watching this thing. And it won Oscars! Best Picture? Tom Hanks as Best Actor? I ***still ***don’t get it. To me, this is like the Bizzaro World picture.
**Titanic **- Jack! Rose! Jack! Rose! - I laughed out loud when the poor bastard fell from the back of the ship and hit the propeller, drawing angry looks from all around (including my date). That was the best part of the movie.
I will defend a couple of movies that have been mentioned, to show that I don’t think I have perfect taste.
Napoleon Dynamite - Really liked this movie, and I wasn’t expecting to. But it made me laugh. The best scene was when the farmer shot the cow with the school bus full of children driving by (and you hear them screaming). Not the greatest movie ever made, but I did enjoy it.
Saving Private Ryan - The movie for me is really the battle scenes, particularly the Normandy landing. Watching that really gave me an appreciation for WWII veterans who had to go through that particular horror, seeing the landing craft door drop and watch those guys get shot from the pillboxes on the beach. How they were able to drive themselves forward is a fascinating study in human perseverance.
Finally, a comment on some older movies that have been mentioned. The Hitchcock movies have always been highly touted as great, suspenseful cinema. And they probably were when they were released. However, they just don’t hold up today. For example
Psycho - I agree with the comment upthread about this movie. Watching it now, with present-day violence standards, is not scary at all. Maybe when it was released it was ground-breaking, but now? Marcia getting hit in the nose with a football is as violent as the shower scene in Psycho.
Strangers on a Train - A snooze-fest with a great premise. I didn’t find it scary or suspenseful at all. But perhaps when it was released, seeing a close up of a strangulation was a cutting edge, but it’s very tame by today’s standards.
I think that (generic) your reaction to Superbad depends on the sort of friends you had at school. I found the film hilarious because the main characters were exactly like some of my friends from school- McLovin’, in particular.
The sort of things that happened in the film were the sort of things I could very easily have seen us getting involved in under similar circumstances, and teenagers really did talk like that to some extent at the school I went to. Personally, I loved the fact someone made a movie about teenagers where they really did call each other “Bitch” and “Motherfucker” and “Shithead” in jest, they swore when bad or unexpected things happened, and basically tried to pretend they were seven kinds of awesome when they were really, well, clueless teenagers.
I can completely understand how people might not like the film or not get it, but if you’re one of the people for whom the movie “clicks” or resonates, it really is very funny- at least IMHO.
Eye of the beholder. I can see how a generation raised on Hostel levels of violence might find these films’ depictions underwhelming, but that says more about the audience than about Hitchcock’s films.
Boondock Saints. My friends loved it and I found that it has a huge cult following online, so I thought I’d see what the fuss is about. Well, I have no clue, because it was utter shit from beginning to end. Even Willem Dafoe, whom I usually admire, was embarrassingly awful in it. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
While I didn’t hate Children of Men (it’s much better than the Boondock Saints, for one thing), I don’t understand the hype at all. There wasn’t nearly as much there there as I’d expected.
Oh, and don’t forget, you don’t have to think about college any longer if you have a sugar daddy! Hooray!
A lot of older films (Citizen Kane, Hitchcock’s works, etc.) no longer have an impact and seem cliched because they were the trendsetters. They did things before others did them.
Psycho was especially shocking because of a “twist” right up front. Janet Leigh was a big star, and the plot looked like it was going to play out in the expected fashion. She stole money to start a new life with her boyfriend, stopped in a motel on the way… cue shower scene. That just wasn’t done, and frankly it’s still not common that the biggest star in the film dies a short time into it.
My mother, to this day, cannot wash her face in the shower - she has to stand facing the curtain or door and lean her head waaaaayyyy back to wash her hair, so she can keep her eyes open - because of this movie, so I think for some people, yes, it was that scary.
I don’t mean to hold it up as one of the classics of modern film, because it’s certainly not, but I do want to defend Moulin Rouge a bit. I think it’s intended for a very specific audience and if you are not among that audience you probably won’t like it at all and no one will be able to convince you to. The whole point of it is that it’s supposed to be overdone and campy and a little ludicrous, and it wants its audience to revel in those facts, which not everyone wants to do. But I enjoy that from time to time (also why I madly adore the new Sherlock Holmes movie) and so I really like it. I also liked the comparisons it drew between modern counterculture and turn-of-the-century bohemia.
(I will freely admit it is about 30 minutes too long, also.)
gallows fodder - totally feeling you on The Boondock Saints. Many friends with very similar tastes to mine consider it a favorite, whereas I was almost immediately turned off.
I really hate stuuuuppppiiiiddd movies, which mean I hate most movies, especially ‘summer blockbusters’. Ones that I extra-specially hated:
Top Gun
Independence Day
Twister
Planet of the Apes - the remake
Pearl Harbor
Every Star Wars sequel
Every Indiana Jones sequel and in particular The Last Crusade
I dunno how many other people loved these. I only know how much I hated them.
I’m with you, BJ!
True enough. But I would find it surprising if folks that grew up in the generations after Hitchcock’s movies were cutting edge wouldn’t look at a Hitchcock film and feel the same sense of fear that a movie like **Psycho **created when it came out.
I think we’ve just been saturated with horror and gore to the point where the shower scene now is tame. It’s 50 years old. Violence and horror have changed in movies radically.
It’s like watching** Citizen Kane**. It is always mentioned as the greatest movie of all time, but it’s nothing special watching it now. But it was so far ahead of its time when it came out, it completely moved the bar for great film making and that’s why it’s so highly regarded. I’ve watched it, and it’s a good movie, but I have no context for what it was like to viewers who saw it new for the first time and how different it looked.
I’ll add a movie, since I’m posting.
Easy Rider - I know it’s been mentioned, but I had heard nothing but great things about this movie. Watching it was painful. I think you had to watch the movie stoned. If it was a movie that defined a generation, then I’m guessing you needed to be a part of that generation to understand it or appreciate it.
Agreed
Mystic River.
Yeah, context is hugely important in discussions like this, and it can be hard to distinguish between films that have dated badly (i.e. Easy Rider) and ones that don’t quite hold up to modern sensibilities. In some ways - the psychological mishmash that explains Norman’s crimes - the film doesn’t hold up, but such issues strike me as a MacGuffin, and if one can approach the film with any appreciation of how it deviates from standard horror of that day, it really packs a punch.
I think Hitchcock knew that these things change quickly, too - watching something like Frenzy, which is unsettlingly violent and bleak even by the standards of contemporary cinema, it’s easy to sense his appreciation of and concern for the changing mores of film.
The Big Lebowski is a detective film that tries to break all of the tropes. Most of the time non-action is occurring for a specific reason. Personally, I love it, but it’s perfectly reasonable to dislike the movie, since it tries so damn hard to be a terrible film noir piece.