You’re kidding, right?
Amazon.com lists about 20 books, not written by Dan Brown, about the dVC, ranging from guides to unlocking the code to detractors.
Google turns up about 2.1m hits. “Romeo and Juliet” about 400k less.
There are more than a “handful” of people who take this more or less seriously. At least seriously enough to travel to the spots mentioned in the book. Fodors.com has a link on its frontpage to a full section, including an intinerary to visit all the places in the book.
“Taking a book seriously” as in, being intrigued with its ideas and forming discussion groups and even visiting places mentioned in it, does not mean that the book itself is being held up as a paragon of literary genius. I think you’d be hard pressed to find even fans of The DaVinci Code who think it’s actually superb writing. It’s fun, and it got a lot of people to think (whether it got them to think rightly is another debate), but it’s no Shakespear.
Ah! There you go. A sacred cow is someone who we use in the sentence, “Well, XYZ is fun and entertaining, but they’re no [InsertYourSacredCowHere].”
I’ve never heard anyone say, “Well, Romeo and Juliet was good, but that Shakespear’s no Dan Brown!” Or even “Philip Pullman is a good author, but he’s no Dan Brown!”
ok, that makes more sense. Warner Bros cartoons (Bugs Bunny) are the pinnacle of western civilization. Hanna-Barbera cartoons are crap.
Done and done. The four movements might as well have been four separate symphonies: Lord knows they have the length for it. Not that they aren’t each memorable and fame-worthy in their own right, but they don’t add up to anything.
A few that popped into my head that I don’t think have been mentioned yet:
All in the Family Hate it, hate it, hate it!! It may be responsible for many TV “firsts”, but that doesn’t make the characters any less obnoxious.
Maude ditto
Out of Africa --the movie, never read the book. Booooooring.
Tom Clancy–or has he been mentioned?
Frasier
Meryl Streep
Dr. Who
That’s all I can come up with at the moment.
Do you mean stylistically or philosophically?
— Star Wars. Terrible plotting, cardboard characters, wooden dialogue. Terrible movies, all. My boyfriend says I don’t like SW only because I didn’t grow up with the movies. (Didn’t see them until I was 20.) I say I know a bad movie when I see it.
— English humor. This includes Monty Python, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Absolutely Fabulous. Maybe it’s just because I’m a dumb Merkin but I don’t find British humor to be funny at all. It just isn’t paced the way I’m used to. I just don’t like “dry” wit, I guess. I want comedy to hit me over the head like a sack of doorknobs. The accents don’t help.
— Reality television. Every show, all of it. Okay, I do watch the first few episodes of American Idol because I think they’re funny, but other than that, nothing.
— Joss Whedon shows. Seriously, what’s with the worship? The dialogue in Buffy is only a notch above Days of Our Lives and Firefly wasn’t worth the film they wasted on it. Repeat viewings of these shows forced on me by faithful fans have not convinced me Whedon is not a hack, but they do convince me that some people have very bad taste.
I agree. Makes you wonder what kind of folks watch TV.
Stylistically. When I finish listening to it it feels more like I finished an album than a complete opus. I also understand that that was one style of symphony, but I don’t have to like it.
Philosophically, the sum of the whole is only equal to the sum of the parts of the four movements. If they had more stylistic coherence, you could add worth to it, or “synergy points” :).
I think that’s the big deal. And that he was deaf, and they used the fourth movement in Die Hard.
I believe it was also innovative in using Schiller and voices.
I name not a person, or specific work, or genre, but a style: SHAKY CAMERA !
All too often in film, these days, it’s used project the gritty immediacy of a real situation, or just as a random artistic effect.
I just get motion sick … so all you directors out there, cut it out, I don’t think nausea is the reaction you’re looking for …
(And yet I don’t get car-, sea-, or air-sick.)
Well, all of that, plus the fact that it’s frickin’ fantastically good!!!
I’ll add a 2nd (or 23rd, or whatever) for:
Jazz. Noodling about with instruments is not music. Perhaps you should consider having a melody.
Terry Pratchett. I enjoy his books, but in many ways they really are crap. He acts like he’s pointing out obscure, fundamental truths, when he’s really just making crap up. Still, they make good airplane reading.
The LotR movies. The first one was pretty good, and I agree with the decision to skip over the bits with Tom Bombadil. But in the second and third movies, Peter Jackson decided to crap all over the story for no good reason. I almost walked out of Two Towers in disgust, but I would have had to stand around waiting for my friends afterwards.
Basketball. A sport in which someone scores every 30 seconds or so. How can this be exciting? Snoooooze.
And I’ll add in:
Fantasia. Incredibly, excruciatingly boring. I like classical music, but I like to listen to it, not watch it.
Cecil Adams, and by extension, Ed Zotti and the STRAIGHT DOPE coulmn.
I own the Straight Dope books, I read the message boards. Somebody has to say it: I’m not nearly in awe of Cecil as I once was. The heyday of the STRAIGHT DOPE as a syndicated column is done.
The Dope has become – not ordinary – just pedestrian, like syndicated cartoonists who stick around long after they’ve done they’re best work. The home page speaks volumes, with the more interesting questions merely regurgitating the best bits of Classic Straight Dope surrounding whichever recent and usually vapid query Adams had deigned to let his byline be put next to. The more recent questions seem to be straining the “meh” meter: a straightforward and boring “Is iceberg lettuce a drug?” can’t possibly compare to classics like “How many calories are in the average male ejaculate?”
By surrounding himself with the subordinate SDMB team who does the grunt work of intercepting and answering the more interesting/controversial/harder-to-verify queries, it not only makes the coulmn less special by way of committee, it instantly insulates Cecil Adams from the other unspoken aspect of his column – the possibility of his being wrong. Our Mr. Adams takes the road less culpable, picking an choosing whatever particular query alows him the opportunity to parade his psuedo-omniscience with some basic research and an appropiate *bon mot * and less forgiveably, the excoriated pun. (His joke, “However you look at it, that’s a lot of lettuce,” from his latest opus actually induced a groan.)
Here’s to hoping Mr. Adam’s New Year’s resolution for 2005 includes trying a bit harder or retiring the column. The message board can soldier on.
Askia!
:eek:
Now THAT’S a sacred cow!
I’m all like, TOP THIS, ya bitches…
I hate this whole Red Heifer thing. ;j
I find Motzart music completely frivilous compared to Beethoven and rarely worth listening to with much attention. Tchaicovski (sp?) and Wagner bores my pants off. Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is overly long, taking up too much time with comedic avenues that fall short and don’t much add to the films quality. Terry Pratchet wrote three of four good books, then wrote them again and again and again. Douglas Adams wrote one and a half good books, and a lot of poor books with ocasional good jokes/scenes. Monty Python’s Parot Sketch is one of the worse sketches being very one dimensional and not much different from several other non-cooperative shopkeeper sketches that they have done. Much of Queen’s A Night at the Opera is silly and dated even for the time it was released, with too much relience on meaningless but pretentious sounding lyrics.
The Truman Show…so prescient in it’s foreknowledge of the reality show culture…blah blah blah…totally predictable. The story was poor and completley missed the most intriguing aspect of Truman’s character: How would he adjust outside his bubble?
People seem to just be listing popular things they dislike, which is very different from stating what’s overrated. I think you need to explain why something is overrated, and I think you need to consider the time period it appeared in to appreciate its impact. I read the first 2 pages of posts & that was all I could take.
The Beatles and Dylan completely changed the way popular music was recorded, written, regarded and marketed. It seems nearly impossible to overrate their impact on their genres. You are of course free to dislike their music, but you really have to come up with a new and radically different timeline and explanation of how we got from 1962 to the present without them having far-reaching impact to explain them being “overrated.”
I don’t like most jazz, but how (an) entire varied genre(s) of music which has impacted almost all others worldwide since the 1920s could possibly be “overrated” is beyond me. I think some of you don’t like free jazz composition; I don’t at all either, but that’s different than stating iall jazz is “overrated.”
My mother blasts Sinatra all the time and I’ve grown to hate his voice from my youthful forcefeeding. I also think he was an awful human being… HOWEVER I recognize how he brought a personal reading to popular music lyrics, which has been with us ever since. Hard to call the guy “overrated” (except perhaps as an actor).
I imagine Citizen Kane was mindblowing when it came out compared to everything else around it; it was exteremely influential and, again, you can say “I don’t like it” (I do) but you’d better be prepared to rewrite cinema history in claiming “overrrated.”
I haven’t read LotR since I was a pre-teen, and I probably wouldn’t like it now, but JRRT obviously is the template from which everything from D&D to just about every fantasy book you’ve ever read (and liked) drew its inspiration, directly or indirtectly. Make an argument for how shelves of “Dragonriders of XGFJFHJJHGF #34” would exist now without it and we can claim “overrated.”
Seinfeld was never laugh-out-loud funny to me, but I appreciate how it pushed the bounds of the sit-com to make them on the whole a bit smarter and edgier. Very influential, rated just about right.
I have to defend Family Guy; I refused to watch it at first as a Simpsons rip-off (really now, people saying The Simpsons is overrated?! That was the smartest show on TV for years, although it isn’t what it used to be). It’s not quite. I think the writers know the premise was a ripoff, but the referential humor is often VERY funny, boundary-pushing, and sometimes quite obscure, in a good way. Favorite example: scene where Lois grabs Peter’s crotch after beating up New Yorkers in a bar fight and says “This is mine, this is where my babies come from!” … turns out to be an apparent OJ Simpson quote when he did the same thing in public with a horrified Nicole Brown. The odd reference, the pure shock of seeing that in a cartoon and the gender reversal are a good example of why I bother watching this (and very few others) show.
My candidate for overrated? “Dr. Zhivago,” the movie and the book. Strelnikov the villain is the only charcter with a consistent morality, which is precisely what Pasternak didn’t want to portray. Few of the characters behave believably. Zhivago himself is a womanizing pig. Pasternak seems to have contempt for the average peasant Russian. At least it was beautifully filmed, and the leading lady was a knockout. But as a story…? If it weren’t trashing the Soviet revolution, it would never have sold… bad piece of storytelling, told poorly.