This is me but with Shawshank Redemption. I get what it was trying to go for but I just didn’t vibe with it. I can appreciate the fact that so many people saw something in it that I didn’t. To me it was decent but by no means one of the best films ever
I reckon I could think of something worse.
if i lived life thinking there was something wrong with me just because i don’t like something it seems like everyone else likes, then that would be one miserable existence–no thanks. anyway, for me it was the big lebowski–probably the most boring pointless movie i ever sat through
Well that just like, your opinion man…
Shut the fuck up Donny
The one saving grace of lebowski is that when you bring up not liking it the people who do like it are too busy quoting it to argue with you.
Everything’s a fucking travesty with you, man! And what was all that shit about Vietnam? What the fuck has anything got to do with Vietnam? What the fuck are you talking about!?
Agreed on both philosophical ground and impression of Lebowski!
Thank you. Plus his “best friend” (John Goodman) was a complete dick that did nothing of benefit for him the entire movie.
Haven’t watched it in years though, so I was planning to re-watch and see if my opinion changes.
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Any of those boring-ass superhero movies. What is so appealing about hour-long GCI fight scenes and no plot?
I think they just forgot the lessons from the earlier movies. They had action but there was a lot of build up so it meant something.
Now you’re just straight into a boring fight scene with no stakes. And somehow the bigger the stakes the less there are because you know they can’t fail.
And now even the rare consequences can be undone through time travel and multiverse bullshit.
That’s the whole thing with Infinity War, they failed hard and that made it a wild story.
I think they fucked up having Endgame the year after infinity War. Should have left it five years or so, and had things happening in between. I feel we missed out on a gritty R-rated, Punisher style, Hawkeye there. It should have had consequences that were left to feel for a bit, rather than instantly going “magic bullshit go” and reversing it all.
But they fucked that by having Spidey get dusted, so they had to bring it back quick otherwise how would they explain how Tom Holland had gone from looking about 14 to being a man.
I do agree we missed a bit of ronin Hawkeye action, and such. They don’t really have an interest in comitting to going that dark.
The colors! it’s so many. Plus there is a plot it’s just not very deep like in a comic book. The whole source material like 20 pages. It’s not novels.
This is very true, but id like to point out its a us comic thing. I’d invite you to read european comics, belgian ones in specific.
The thorgal series, aria, joko tsuno, or hell even the suske & wiske reboot called amoras. They are teen/adult comics that are a lot darker and more flushed out story wise than us hero comicsI will check those out thank you. We have some more advanced ones here as well they just don’t seem to make movies about it unfortunately.
Thats sad because some real adult/darker themed comics that dont follow the superhero theme are real gems. Got some us recommendations?
Never forget the golden rule: DC;RtRR, or
Disregard capeshit; rewatch The Raid Redemption
Avatar. Technically the 3D was fun, but I can’t understand any of the rabid fandom.
i don’t think I’ve ever seen a rabbid Fandom around it.
it was just an easy approachable pretty movie for the masses. with a massive budget and a very well known director it brought people in to see the best visuals hollywood sfx had at the time. that’s basically how it was marketed, as a tech demo.
I’ve never once seen anyone fanboy about it. it sold well, but didn’t excite many.
on three other hand, avatar the last air bender has a massive and rabid fandom.
don’t think I’ve ever seen a rabbid Fandom around it.
were you around when the movie was just released?
There was an insane weird fandom around it. From people just loving it to full on navi otherkin-ing. People getting depressed and suicidal to not live in that world. And I’m not talking about a handfull of people but quite a large group.
i was around then, I’ve just never met anyone who cared about that movie.
if there were clips going around of people dressing up like that I’d chalk that up to being a marketing campaign.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rabbid Fandom around it.
Avatar is the second-highest-grossing movie of all time, folk can’t seem to get enough of the science fiction epic and are going back for repeat viewings.
it sold well, but didn’t excite many.
Which is why I list it here.
It was a pretty awesome experience to see in theaters at the time. The story was ass even then but the affects were amazing enough to carry it. My GF at the time and I went back twice to see it. Watching it on a regular screen these days it’s completely forgettable.
It’s the second highest grossing movie of all time, yet no one who has watched it can quote a single line from it, or recall the name of any character.
Avatar: The Way of Water is 3rd highest grossing (Ignoring inflation) so it’s not just the 3D part.
And people cosplay it frequently.
I really don’t get it.
Huh, I certainly can’t. The only name that I can recall is “unobtanium” because it’s so stupid. “Big dumb movie that has good visuals” has always been my estimation of it.
It’s very true that “it was just Dances With Wolves in space,” but Dances With Wolves is a good story. A good story + decent directing + pretty visuals = a movie that’s at least decent, if not mind-blowing or whatever.
Avatar 2, on the other hand, definitely suffered story-wise.
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None of yall know how to spell Pocahontas right.
“Dances With Smurfs,” as South Park put it.
Hard agree. Just generic sci-fi with obvious themes and plot.
Nobody actually liked that (Either the Kevin Costner one or the blue remake).
What movie is it for you? For me, The Princess Bride.
inconceivable!!!\
I can see not liking that movie. It’s very specific. Endearing for a shitload of people, myself included, but it’s a very particular brand of comedy.
Movie? Oh god there are so fucking many. One that comes to mind at the moment is Whiplash. Ive seen it 3 times because a dude I cared about deeply loved it. Everytime I saw it I got it less and less. I don’t see why people like it at all.
Oh man. I think Whiplash is amazing and the story absolutely sickens me at the same time. I can absolutely understand people not liking it.
I wasn’t sickened or anything. I was just bored. Just felt overly pretentious to me which, considering the Juliard or whatever school stuff, I figured was the point.
The book is fantastic
Almost done with the Cary Elwes behind the scenes book too
I second The princess bride but to add something new: (although not a movie but a serie)
The Game of Thrones
I love fantasy, I love medieval history, I love huge worlds, I love slow pace. But this one … just didn’t click, I don’t even know why. I gave up after the 4th episode
I know why - Martin can’t write complex characters and confuses shock value for motivations. They’re all caricatures, not characters. Its just a medieval soap opera.
I thought the appeal was the fact that it was a medieval soap opera
medieval soap opera
This sounds accurate when I think about it, maybe I found out why I wasn’t interested. The thing is - I don’t mind medieval soap operas (to some degree), I really liked The White Queen, The White Princess and The Spanish Princess. But those are based on real characters in actual history, I can forgive them for being boring at times since history is sometimes a bit boring. But for me the selling point and the excitement comes from the fact that this actually happened (well … sort of). With GoT it felt like I’m watching one of those medieval soap operas but without the excitement of being based on the real thing
I tried the show twice and never made it to the second episode. Everyone who knows me is blown away by the fact that “I’ve never watched GoT” because I’m such a big fantasy nerd. I’ve even tried the audiobooks but made it maybe 2 chapters in.
See if you can find “Black Sails” It’s got all the sex and violence and intrigue GOT promised in a much more fast paced form.
I just got annoyed that every character I liked died. Real life is depressing enough without watching fiction that also just bums you out.
i was invited to a viewing party for a GoT season premier. i had never seen any of the show before and had no idea what i was in for beyond “gritty fantasy show”. they all talked it way up, told me it was “sex and violence the TV show” and how much i would love it.
it was so so so boring i thought it would never end. i’m baffled why it’s popular.
I once knew someone who told me she couldn’t enjoy the movie because the ships traveled somewhere that was anachronistic to the time period.
Like, what??
Kingsman: The Secret Service. just… no.
Is there a specific reason you didn’t like it or more a general meh?
Like the overall premise of the post asks, it just didn’t click. For people who love it, I don’t think they’re wrong. I generally like the humor, and the cast is great– like legitimately great. But it might be the medieval setting that I seldom find interesting, or the magical/mystical things that I never do.
I mean the setting isn’t really the point. It’s about the characters and their journey. So it sounds like you liked the parts that most people like
Pulp fiction
What?? That movie has everything, it’s like the perfect movie. This is the only answer that has left me genuinely confused.
This whole thread is kinda wild to me, but I think this Princess Bride answer helps me distill it down to: I’m ok with you not liking movies that I love, but how can you say that you don’t understand other people liking it?
I don’t care for Star Wars or Lord of the Rings but never has it crossed my mind that this is more than just a matter of taste, that there are people whose preferences are outright wrong.
The Princess Bride is an action movie that many people don’t realise is an action movie, I love it.
Grave of the fireflies. Didn’t even shed a tear and I cry at everything. Someone psychoanalyze me.
Oh, there is my bus. Thanks to the Net I know all the characters and quotes. But I guess
Mel Brooksthat movie’s humor never really did it for me, sorry.(edit : apologies. I always thought it one one of his)
I think you may be thinking of Robin Hood Men in Tights.
Unless I’m misinformed, I don’t believe Mel Brooks was involved in The Princess Bride.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
[off topic?]
I had heard about Gone with The Wind all my life and I knew it was incredibly racist. It finally came on basic cable and I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
I found myself watching and liking a movie I knew was complete and utter bullshit.
Well, as a movie, it’s a good movie. Great directing, incredible acting (for the era), with a dynamic and well paced story. It holds up in technical terms despite the shifts in style and performance that have happened over the years.
If you hum really hard during the racist parts, you could still call it one of the greats. And it isn’t like it’s “birth of a nation” bad in that regard. There’s way worse movies out there from the era, and the era before that was horrible on average.
[nsfw]
Watch an Peter O’Toole movie, ‘The Stunt Man.’ Great movie; funny, scary, exciting, romantic, plus a bunch of great plot twists.
There’s a scene where a kinda schubby screen writer talks about how he paid $1,000.00 to fly to Guatemala to have sex with a 14 year old virgin.
That line was considered only mildly off-color when the movie came out.
Holy crap. That would not go over well any more
Even wilder. Look at the Sean Connery James Bond movies. The smoking and drinking are the least offensive things. Back in the day, Bond was considered suitable to be sold as a kids’ toy.
https://www.liveauctioneers.com/price-result/lot-of-james-bond-collectibles/
Also, Sean Connery was open about about beating women. He saw nothing wrong with it if he felt it was “corrective” of behavior, like a dog.
So part of the reason for the toys is actually a bit of interesting cultural shifting. Basically back then there wasn’t really a separation between adult and kids media unless it was explicitly pornography, so a lot of things we see now as for kids or for adults still had broad appeal in mind.
This shifted through the 60s, 70s, and then solidified some time in the 80s. It’s why Star wars a New Hope has dismemberment while being rated PG, same thing with Indiana Jones.
You can also see this when watching films from the 50s and 60s as they were really designed to cover a variety of genres at once. Has a little romance sub-plot for mom, action sequences for little Tommy and some cool cars/gadgets for dad. Y’know because everything had to be stereotyped to hell and back. But it is jarring seeing how much of variety films old movies really were
While the reasoning for why that is the case is kinda meh, I wish that was done more often nowadays. Sadly it seems like the media that inherited that tendency was video games, which while I love my vidya it does make it harder to backwards push it into film.
As a side note. The MPAA ratings system came out in 1968. Any movie made before that was automatically “G” rated if it had been shown in theaters. So if you showed “Goldfinger” in a theater it would be “G.” But movies get rated differently if it’s VHS/DVD; so when the movie went on sale it was PG, then PG-13.
That’s art for ya.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-iron-dream-norman-spinrad/7751155?ean=9781490439457&next=t
[nsfw, Nazi flag]
The book was written by a Jewish guy named Norman Spinrad. In the foreword we learn that in 1922 Adolph Hitler went to America and became a science fiction illustrator and, after his English improved, a writer. This is his final and most popular novel, a tale of a young man who was exiled from his homeland and finally returns to find it under the control of a mysterious cabal of mind readers…
I thought Black Panther was mid at best but it made me sound like a racist whenever I mentioned that.
Ironically, this movie is pretty racist. The opening scene is a cliche basketball scene, and Wakanda, despite being a futuristic society, still uses tribal law and decides its leaders by fighting half naked to the death.
I mean I’m confident they were to fight have naked due to eye candy. That 100% worked on me despite the bland writing.
Aquaman too.
Dudes are out there celebrating some aggressively average movies.
Aquaman
I agree with you in general, but I don’t think you can pin this one on the dudes… or at least not the ones below 3 on the Kinsey scale 😆
It insists upon itself.
Any of the mission impossible/fast and furious films. That shit is boring.
It’s Top Gun for me. It’s just Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise in a flight jacket.
Strangely enough there aren’t that many movies that feature jets dogfighting though. That kind of makes it worth watching because I love Ace Combat and that’s the closest thing I’ll probably ever have to a feature film.
In Ace combat 6 the player also flies down a narrow corridor and destroys the enemy doomsday weapon.
Top Gun 2 sucked ass.
To be honest, so did Top Gun 1…
It was just high budget military propaganda.
Yvan eth nioj!
You shush your filthy mouth! Never disrespect the memory of Goose!
I’ma not disrespect the memory of Val Kilmer but that movie was the gayest thing I’ve ever seen and I fuck men
You ain’t wrong lol.
I know for a fact that volleyball scene was misunderstood by so many teenage men discovering that they’re gay lmao
Top Gun was what I came here to say
It really depends on the movie, but I think most movies that people see as “universally loved” are children’s movies, and the people who love them the most are those who watched them when they were kids. Sometimes, they’re not very good if you see them outside of their intended demographic.
On top of that, everybody has their own tastes. I know a person who doesn’t like Shawshank Redemption because she feels uncomfortable with enclosed spaces. And I’m personally not fond of movies with people who act like gangsters, so I’ve never felt particularly affectionate towards Godfather movies.
I think most movies that people see as “universally loved” are children’s movies, and the people who love them the most are those who watched them when they were kids. Sometimes, they’re not very good if you see them outside of their intended demographic.
Avatar the Last Airbender for me. I just can’t get into it. I’ve tried watching numerous episodes and given up or have seen countless clips that just don’t catch my attention. Seems most people who did started when they were fairly young and the love grew overtime, and all the power to them.
I know a person who doesn’t like Shawshank Redemption because she feels uncomfortable with enclosed spaces. And I’m personally not fond of movies with people who act like gangsters, so I’ve never felt particularly affectionate towards Godfather movies.
Funnily enough, I don’t like those movies either and are also perfect examples of the title post for me. I don’t think they’re good, I don’t think they’re bad. They’re movies that just sail right over my head and I’m like “I guess this one just aint for me.”
Atla is pretty long and if you didnt start watching it as a kid it could be pretty hard to get over the start of it. It starts off very slice-of-life-ish with some of the more mature themes sprinkled in between, and becomes much more dense later on. It’s also a story about a bunch of kids (who grow and learn to cope or deal with their issues later on) which isnt the easiest to identify with unless you started watching it at a young age.
Oppenheimer
And even to an extent interstellar
I just find recent Nolan massively overrated
Which is ironic because The Prestige, Memento and even Dunkirk are great
I both loved and hated Interstellar. Really loved the storytelling and visuals, really hated how sci-fi/magical it got towards the end
I remember thinking at the end “wait, what was the entire point of this?”
Agree. A non-library cut is what is needed.
It feels like it should’ve been 2 films. The last quarter or so of the film just felt a bit rushed and overly-convenient. I absolutely loved the world building and general lore to the movie though
I think he plays with the timelines of some of his movies a bit too much to the point it’s just a chore to sort it all out. At the end of Oppenheimer I’m just like…great, now I need to watch this again. It still made sense but going back with the context of oh that scene is like years prior to the one we just watched…and that one goes after this other one.
I still need to watch Dunkirk again because I honestly think the theater spliced a reel in the wrong spot. I was back at my parents for some reason that summer and saw it with them and some of my siblings…everybody was a little lost. So I’m withholding judgement on that till I see it again.
Interstellar was at least more or less linear just with time acceleration.
I haven’t even seen Tenet yet but from what I’ve heard…
Prestige and Memento(oddly enough) I don’t have an issue with…
Interstellar was at least more or less linear just with time acceleration.
Except the library bit. If I stop Interstellar before the ending then I can enjoy it.
Tenet is just laughably bad from an audio but also writing POV.
Cool concept tho. He just managed to ruin it.
I’d still recommend you watch it just for those two things.
Unless you’re seeing films at some kind of cinema revival, nobody does reels anymore. You saw the reel Dunkirk, so to speak.
Dunkirk was a weird exception
Warner Bros. is looking to make the most of it. The studio has announced that theaters in the U.S. and Canada will be showing Dunkirk in all its glory in 125 locations around the country, the widest 70-mm release in 25 years. To make that happen, the movie will be shown in 30 IMAX theaters that are equipped with 70-mm projectors. In addition, 95 old 70-mm projectors, once thought to be a technology destined for obsolescence, have been resuscitated and installed in select theaters.
Interesting. I wonder if Seattle Cinerama was part of that at the time? The film did have a great visual appeal, but the script definitely fell short.
The more I thought about Oppenheimer the less I understood why people liked it so I 100% relate
The thing that gets me is that it was simultaneously way too long while also finding a way to be too short. Obviously years of history have to be compressed to fit into three hours of cinema, but they distilled what was originally months worth of conversation down to one or two lines of dialog in some cases. It’s more off-putting to me than a two-hour film would have been if they had just skipped some of the details.
I wish they had just taken some creative license and done what the writers of the miniseries Chernobyl did with the fictional Ulana character:
I liked Oppenheimer because I found the man compelling, plus the cinematography and pace really complimented the drama of his life in a way that kept me engaged. I think one’s enjoyment of the movie really comes down to if they find the decisions he made interesting or dramatic enough to be worth watching for 3 hours. If you find that boring then there’s nothing really there to enjoy.
I think it was the most useless movie to watch/record in IMAX. The trinity test was visually extremely disappointing (Nolan’s fault for not wanting to use CGI and rely on practical effects to mimick a nuclear explosion was just stupid…) and also Oppie as a character in the movie is extremely bland and shallow
And finally once again the only relevant female character is laughably bad.
IMO from barbenheimmer, Barbie was the best movie or at least the one I’d more easily rewatch
Oppenheimer
YES. For me it was especially disappointing because I’m exactly the target market for this kind of film on every level.
Beyond the Barbenheimer memes, everyone pretty much forgot that movie existed after a few weeks.
Everything Everywhere All At Once. I found it utterly boring, yet everyone seemd to love it, especially my fellow ADHD crowd. I never even bothered finishing the film which is bloody rare for me.
Yet I like mind-bending films like Primer, and chaotic films like Crank, and heck, I even like Battleship as a guilty pleasure that I can turn my brain off to… But this film? Bleh.
I felt mostly the same way watching it, but I also think the ending of the movie is important to understand the soul of it. I wasn’t crazy about the humor or the whole look-how-random-LOL vibe it had, but I do think there was something more beneath that. The performances were also very good.
This is the exact film I came to comment. It tried way too hard to be quirky and rAnDoM.
I liked it, but a lot of it seemed like reddit fan fiction. What if butt plug fight. Imagine they have carrots… Not saussages as fingers. Someone give this man gold.
I didn’t get the hype when I watched it the first time shortly after it was released. But when I rewatched it recently it hit differently. There was less need to try to keep up with all the random things that are happening so fast and instead I focused on the deeper message about the meaning of and the appreciation for our lives with all the good and bad going on.
