Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
Spirited Away
No consistent world, cringy behaviour of the main character, love story out of nowhere, you can’t have a plot twist if you didn’t have any previously established lore. It felt a bit like a dream that was trying to take itself seriously as an actual story.
how dare you
Upvote
Spirited Away, and to some degree all Ghibli stuff leans very heavily on a shared cultural Mythos. It doesn’t do exposition in the same way that zombies or angels aren’t explained; everyone knows that stuff because we all grew up with a million references.
Interstellar. That ending was so unbelievably dumb that I can’t even stomach the rest of the movie thinking about it.
I know it’s got rave reviews, a stacked cast, Nolan directing. Plenty was pretty, cool concepts, high stakes scenes. But that ending… shudders
honestly, i disagree. i really don’t see the big problems with the ending. i actually even like it.
the library (called a tesseract in the movie) is constructed by the future humans, who have control of 5d space, and who include Murphy, who actually lived in the room connected to the tesseract. it’s built to look like that, so Cooper, a 3d being, can actually understand it. it’s basically stretching out time and gravity into a 3d space. the library is not something the black hole made up because Cooper loves Murphy (which i thought what happened on my first watch), it’s what the future humans made with the help of the black hole. love ties thematically into it, 'cause Cooper loves and knows Murphy so well, he knows how to tell her the quantum data from the black hole, or something. and Cooper, or the future humans for that matter, can’t say or do anything directly, 'cause in the past, they’re only able to affect gravity (and because of the construction of the tesseract, Cooper can only control the gravity of that one room.) the reason for why the future humans don’t go just directly do it themselves is explained as them not being able to pinpoint a specific space, or time for it, which is why Cooper, who can traverse the tesseract for a specific point in time and space in that room to tell Murphy the quantum data, which allows the future humans to do all of the crazy 5d stuff.
anyway, sorry for the rambling. Interstellar is my favourite movie, and i really love even the ending of it. multiple scenes, including the ending, make me bawl like a baby, like no other movie has done to me, and i love all the hard sci-fi it has. sci-fi so hard, that physicists learned something new about black holes, because of the equations used to make the black hole cgi in it.
Forest Gump. The 1994 Best Picture nominees were some of the most highly competitive the Academy has ever had, and they went with the one that was just a straight-up terrible fucking movie. It has no value except as nostalgia bait for Americans and propaganda for those who want to believe in the myth of American individual exceptionalism.
Its musical score is also probably the worst thing I’ve ever had the misfortune of performing in an orchestra. Dull and repetitive.
And its most famous line is straight-up bullshit. I’ve heard the book does it differently, but the movie puts “something that kinda sounds deep to a 14 year old” over a level of rationality that stands up to 20 seconds of thought from an average person. A box of chocolates tells you precisely what you’re going to be getting.
Lord of the Rings.
I understand and respect the seminal role LotR (Book) has as a fantasy work. I have to, as a fantasy nerd myself.
I also believe that those three movies that everyone loves could be edited down into one and not much would be lost.
God DAMN do those films drag ON and ON and ON.
The books, too, drag on like Tolkien was being paid by the individual word. Thankfully with books I can set the pace at which things go.
I also believe that those three movies that everyone loves could be edited down into one and not much would be lost.
Just factually wrong on this one, sorry. I can prove it, too:
The films we have right now are already severely cut versions of the story and many people agree that we lost some good shit in that cutting
As someone who did gonna school: how exactly could you cut Fellowship any further without completely removing something essential? That movie is on fast forward it has so little time to get through the story
Pretty much all of the Avengers films.
They aren’t engaging in any way. The characters are unintelligent and full of self importance. The whole franchise is Just loud noises and shark jumping.
If you think Ernest Cline’s movie is cringy, wait until you read his poetry. Absolutely one of the worst piece of writing I’ve ever read.
And it only gets worse from there.
James Cameron’s Avatar series.
Then again… Does anyone actually like it? It seems to have all this online hype when it’s such a boring visual spectacle.
It’s like the opposite of the other Avatar franchise, which wasn’t a commercial hit, and seems less popular on paper, but seems to have a massive cultural impact.
Ready Player One was so bad, but this is a rare instance where the book is worse than the film. At least the film has visuals the book is just cringe and rememberberries.
Agreed. That book was recommended to me by a few fellow sci-fi book fans, so I gave it a shot. Couldn’t get through it. It read like a 6th-grade kid’s fanfic about the 1980’s. Bad writing, bad dialogue, ham-fisted plot.
To be honest, isn’t it a ‘Young Adult’ book, i.e., intended for preteens/teens, not adults?
deleted by creator
Ted.
Juvenile fratboy humour done badly, very badly with lots of fan services to get the brainless cheering.
Made me laugh once in the first few minutes (I can’t even remember the joke) and walked out of the cinema after about an hour.
You tried to watch this movie sober, didn’t you?
That’s the problem, lol. You have to turn off a bit of your brain to enjoy yourself properly.
You have to turn off a bit of your brain to enjoy yourself properly.
People with this attitude are my enemies. Specially if they propose alcohol as method.
That just means the film is stupid.
ET, Ghost Busters, Back to The Future, Anything Marvel, DC apart from Joker. And many more.
Inglourious Basterds.
However much I liked all the Tarantino flicks before this one, I just cannot get into Inglourious. Also, everything Tarantino made after that movie is also tainted by the same uneasy feeling I get. If pressed to guess why, I’d say he took the stories out of the ‘now’ and transported them to other times and places, which just does not seem to agree with me.
Joker
I thought it was pretentious, had no real story and pretty much just milked the gritty batman of the already not great nolan movies
I feel like Joker is one of those movies that needed to be on its own. It doesn’t feel like a Batman universe movie. It feels like a movie about some kind of mental illness that they slapped Batman related stuff on.
But then as a stand alone movie on mental illness it is so mediocre. I feel that it’s only palatable if you’re into popcorn movies and have no reference of good psychological drama.
I related to this movie/character on a personal level. I haven’t been able to fully explain why, maybe that’s the gist of it : it expresses struggles that I haven’t been able to put into words, yet I saw on film so eerily resembling mine
This is also one of the reasons I liked it. I knew exactly why it spoke to me, though. I was always very submissive in my life, unable to stand for myself. I was trying to change my approach when the movie came out. The scenes where he defends himself resonated with me deeply.
Tolkein.
I tried watching the new tolkein Rohirrim movie. There were clues I would hate it already, but they started with one of those ‘tolkein songs’ like by elves or whatever ~one of the ones where he’s like modeling the dialect on some euro language and being a nerd with glasses in the library holding up a schematic of what he just made and being like, “it’s music”. So it started with that and I was done. did not get past opening song.
No Tolkien’s languages were created wholecloth by Tolkien. He just used similar phonemic inventories as existing languages, for example Sindarin having a similar inventory to Welsh. But the vocabulary and grammar are entirely their own.
Everything he made is corrupted with the inappropriate patriarchy of an unwoke time.
Ok? Not sure how that relates to what we were discussing about his languages.
Donnie Darko.
It was so overhyped back when it came out because the OG hipster crowd of the early 90s thought it was cool, as did younger people who valued things that were “indie” as if that inherently adds value.
Fuck your lack of commitment to sparkle motion.
Oh I have another one. Thor Ragnarok. People loved it because they liked the Thor character and found his earlier films too dull or something, but I loved that they were unapologetically serious about themselves, using comedy in ways that felt very authentic to the characters.
But Ragnarok? It came out later the same year as this excellent essay about bathos, and it was dripping in it. I was hyper tuned to the problem with bathos, and it leaned even harder into that took than nearly any other MCU film did.
What sucks so much is that it had the bones of a really good dramatic story. The Bruce Banner/Hulk storyline had built up over multiple previous films, and come the climax of this film it’s established that he’s in Bruce form now and has enough control to stay that way, but if he transforms into Hulk it’ll be a big deal and he may never be able to be himself again. So they arrive in Asgard at the climax of the film and it’s pretty urgent. In a dramatic moment you can see him steel himself to make the sacrifice; he jumps out of their aircraft onto the rainbow bridge, clearly intending to transform into Hulk to fight Fenris.
…and he splats. Faceplants on the bridge. Still in human form. It’s played for laughs. The ultimate conclusion of Hulk’s story in this movie and probably the most important moment of his arc over the entire MCU to this point, and it’s undercut by a joke. Not even a very funny one. A slapstick joke that would make Charlie Chaplin cringe.
And it means nothing, because the very next shit, he’s transformed anyway and throwing Fenris around like a doll.
Not to mention it undermines the verisimilitude of the movie. I can suspend my disbelief in these movies pretty hard, but Bruce Banner, in human form, is meant to be painfully average, physically speaking. He should have died from that fall, given he didn’t transform. That’s certainly not the worst thing about the moment, but it is was the sprinkling of salt on top of the wound that just made it that little bit worse.
That moment was the worst bit, but the film as a whole was full of lazy humour and bathos, and it was really just the worst example of what was wrong with a lot of MCU movies at the time. I was shocked to hear so few people came away disliking it in the same way I did.
I’m sorry but all the previous Thor movies (and the one after this) are ASS. Ragnarok is the only good Thor movie.
