Slaughtering Sacred Cows of Entertainment

Cafe Society
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Grease: Why is this musical/film so popular?! I just don’t get it. And the “moral” of the story is horrible: in order to get John Travolta to like her, Olivia Newton-John must dress up and act like a slut. Yeah, great.

West Side Story: Lordy this movie was boring and horrible.

Gone With the Wind: I hate Scarlet O’Hara. HATE her. Rhett Butler was stupid to even get involved with her at all. Shame on you Rhett. Shame on you.

The Princess Bride: Amusing at best, but not the genius work people go on about. I watched this for the first time a year or two ago, expecting (from the hype people threw at me) that it was the second coming of Monty Python or something.

Lord of the Rings: The movies were boring and the books were even more boring. I couldn’t even get through the first book and I tried at least three times.

The Matrix: This movie is basically the book Sophie’s World set to heavy-metal music, dark clothing, computers, and flashy green lights. The book was better.

Family Guy: I liked this show a few years ago, but now it’s not that amusing anymore. Like others have said, it tries to be The Simpsons and fails.

Dustin Hoffman, Robert DiNero, Jack Nicholson, etc.: You used to be good! What happened? :frowning: Plus, Jack’s “horny” personality creeps me out.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Also amusing, but it felt like he was forcing himself to be funny. I’ll probably still see the movie, though.

Judging Amy: Not a sacred cow, but I must say how I hate this show. I think Amy and her brothers are selfish brats and Tyne Daly should kick them all out. :smiley:

ER: This show should have ended five years ago. But it keeps going on with it’s horrible drama where somebody in the cast seems to die every week. Or gets amputated or decapitated or whatever. Enough already.

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Forgot about him! My mom is forever trying to get me to read more of his novels, but I can’t stand him. OK, I did sort of like The World According to Garp but HATED The Hotel New Hampshire (both the book and movie).

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Lord of the Rings: I’ve tried reading it, but been unable to get into it. It seems to appeal to many people, but I don’t understand why. Perhaps it’s just not my cup of tea.

Star Trek: Good entertainment, but that’s all it is. It’s not deep, it’s not meaningful, and any message it may have has been done to death in other media, and usually better, too.

Stevie Ray Vaughan: He was a good guitarist, and he died. Again, I don’t see that as any reason for the posthumous adulation he continues to receive.

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Lord of the Rings: I’ve tried reading it, but been unable to get into it. It seems to appeal to many people, but I don’t understand why. Perhaps it’s just not my cup of tea.

Star Trek: Good entertainment, but that’s all it is. It’s not deep, it’s not meaningful, and any message it may have has been done to death in other media, and usually better, too.

Stevie Ray Vaughan: He was a good guitarist, and he died. I don’t see that as any reason for the posthumous adulation he continues to receive.

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Of course, one thing that really gets me is the poster who double-posts. :smack: Sorry about that, folks.

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The Piano. It had many strengths, but the idea that a mute woman is erotically compelling *because of her muteness * disturbed me. Same goes for Children of a Lesser God.

Sting. Smug, sanctimonious prick.

As for the others, you got there before me. Friends, Michael Jackson, Grease - I’ve said this for ages but it’s taken me a long time to find a place where so many agree.

SDMB - :cool: !

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HOW could I have forgotten this one?

AYN RAND
who is John Gault? Who cares? And take your non-feminist, pure capitalistic nonsense elsewhere (sorry, am tipping into Pit-ish post).
I like LOTR and the Hobbit, but JRRT tests my tolerance for narrative, believe me…

and ITA with ER–I spent the first 3 seasons yelling at the TV for all the inaccuracies on the show: #1–and where would the NURSES be?

And then I laughed at it.

Now I ignore it.

Mebbe it’ll go away…

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I knew I was forgetting something:

The Great Gatsby. This is one of those books that high school literature teachers make their students read. I can’t imagine why anyone would read it voluntarily. To call it boring does a huge disservice to boring books everywhere. (And I even liked The Old Man and the Sea, which a lot of people think is boring as hell.) Try as I might, I could not detect any sort of plot in TGG. It was just a bunch of people going to parties and gossiping, and eventually the titular character gets killed because he was running booze or something. It was like a soap opera that someone had novellized, but without the sexual innuendo that serves as the main reason that anyone watches that sort of crap.

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A lot of my favourite cows have been slaughtered, and I can only come back with (at the moment):

Adam Sandler. What really infuriates me is that he turned in a halfway decent performance in Punch-Drunk Love–and then turns about and spews out more drivel! Arrgh!

Ashton Kutchner. He just REALLY gets on my nerves.

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I like to call her Alanis Morissette, Jr.

I’ll add one icon lots of people here seem to adore, but I can’t stand: Michael Moore. He’s the Eminem of the film world - turning out crap that panders to angry people just to make a buck.

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Because the chicks dug it?

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I’ll second ianzin on Elvis Costello. I think roughly the same thing happened
to him as happened to Stanley Kubrick, who I earlier denounced.

Elvis Costello started out making smart catchy pub rock, just like Graham Parker or Nick Lowe. Then he was told he was a genius. Then he believed it. the he started doing tributes to Burt Bachrach (!) and making CD’s with string quartets and doing other things way beyond the reach of his limited talents.

Other seconds:

The Doors. When I was a kid I loved this band. Now Morrison just seems like an obnoxious self-absorbed drunk who couldn’t even write well. Also someone showed me how to play Ray Manzerack’s parts on a piano. The Alarming thing: I can’t play the piano!

Ayn Rand. As a writer she is no worse than the other pot-boiler of her day, like Arthur Hailey or Judith Krantz. As a philosopher she is god-awful. She sets up strawmen and demolishes them and thinks she is doing something profound. To bolster her arguments she quotes her own characters, which would get her banned from here for sock-puppetry. And her ludicrous over the top rants are exactly the opposite of what philosophy should be. (OK, Nietzche did it to. But at least Nietzche had some good ideas. And he was nuts.) Be a libertarian if you must, but there are better sources for libertarian arguments out there.

Has anyone denounced the Rolling Stones yet? Crappy overrated cock-rock that can’t hold a candle to the Kinks.

Defenses:

Ulysses is difficult but worth it if you put the time into it. There are helpful annotations. Same with Gravity’s Rainbow. However I can easily understand people getting bored and frustrated.

The Sopranos was great for the first three seasons.

Family Guy is pretty derivative, but it can make me laugh sometimes. It’s funnier than newer Simpsons at any rate.

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Actually, if it ends in tears, it could turn out half decent! But just this morning I saw an IPO for it over at www.hsx.com. I’m sorry.

As for mine, **Lost in Translation ** did a fantastic job at portraying the feelings and emotions of boredom and jet lag. However, I fail to see the attraction in wanting to re-experience boredom and jet lag in movie form! “Oh, it was so boring! I loved it!” If you ever uttered that phrase, at some point you were lying. Either you were bored, or you loved it. You can’t have both.

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First of all, I love the thread title.

That being said, I’ll second;

Hendrix
Eminem
Sopranos
Jazz
Brittany Spears
Robert Jordan.

And add:

Anne Geddes. Apallingly cute babies in appalingly cute clothes. Mega-yuck.
Great Expectations. This is supposed to be a classic. I have tried three different times, and have never been able to finish it.
Puff Daddy. Bleh.

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Not to pick on you but this post made me laugh. Even as a fan of Adam Sandler, there is no way I would consider him a sacred cow. If it weren’t for Rob Schneider, he’d probably be our generation’s Pauly Shore.

And Kutcher? He’s just a male Pamela Anderson.

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Superman is a lousy character.

In @ 70 years, there’s been only a handful of good Superman stories.

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Music -
the Velvet Underground and pretty much all of Lou Reed’s solo records for that matter. I always thought it was funny that the alt-rock crowd I went to college with (early 90s) disdained the Grateful Dead as “plodding, noodling old farts” while at the same time cumming over themselves praising this noisy, droning, rhymth-less contemporary band to the Grateful Dead. Nico had a voice you could grate cheese with. Lou Reed is as wise & insightful as Jim Morrison at his most liquored up.

Literature -
Anything by Brett Easton Ellis sucks. But most especially American Psycho. Viscous, hateful drivel that gets compared to (by idiots IMO!) Camus’ “the Stranger.”

Television -
Star Trek - the Next Generation - self-important, overblown and overpraised. Retained none of the original 60s series’ charm, but expanded voluminously on the pretentious bile. It also contains three of the all-time most annoying characters ever to appear regularly - Riker, Troi…and Wesley!!

Film -
Rebel Without a Cause - James Dean is driven to extremes (by 1950s standards) rebellious behavior - because his father wears a frilly apron??? Natalie Wood falls in with the wrong crowd just because her father doesn’t like her wearing makeup? How dated can a flick get?

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I can’t stand a single frame of GWTW.

And I don’t care for Clerks either.

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I agree with this sentiment. There are a LOT of posts in this thread mentioning things that don’t even remotely come close to being sacred cows of entertainment.

How about Celine Dion? The mention of Anne Geddes made me think of her. I’d consider her critically-acclaimed (for what reason, I have no idea).

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Hell, James Dean is overrated.

He did what? 4-5 films? Method acting at it 's cheesy worst. He always looked like he was having a severe bout of constipation.