I’ll go first. Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree. It’s like being continually reminded that I am in a movie. I swear the success of that movie has directly lead to every blockbuster having to have a joke every 30 seconds
Tarantino is overrated. You have to watch a lot of movies to come to this realisation, because otherwise you don’t realise his movies are often in large part a collage of other movies. Movies which did what he does better. That means that it doesn’t actually matter that Tarantino is overrated for most movie goers. More generally, this is why critics’ opinions don’t actually matter that much. They’ve watched too many movies and likely know too much about movies, to tell the average audience goer if they’ll enjoy a movie.
Once you’ve watched a few thousand movies, and especially if you’ve ever studied film or read a few books about it, you’ll often find you enjoy interesting but shit movies more, than very well made but unoriginal movies. People who truly love film, invariably aren’t snobs. They enjoy absolute trash, they enjoy arty farty stuff. If someone has a related degree or even a doctorate or works in the industry, the likelihood is high that they’re also a fan of B-movies. They don’t need to pretend to be knowledgeable, because they are. A film snob will bore you with the details of a Tarkovski movie. A cinephile is more likely to bang on about 80s horror movies, lesbian vampire sexploitation movies, Albert Pyun’s Cyborg, or Troma’s The Toxic Avenger.
I enjoy Tarantino movies. It all boils down to: are they solid fun entertainment or not, and to me the answer is yes.
Someone else did it better elsewhere? Sure, and he is very forthcoming about his influences. So if you’re a fan, you’ll likely find his sources and enjoy those too. Win win.
This is how I’ve come to view anime. You can tell the age of an anime fan by whether they’re enamored by the latest hit series or they sigh and go “this is just a remake of [old series from the 90s/00s].” I don’t give a shit how well made a series is; if the premise is “been there done that” without an original take or twist, or a tired and worn trope gets trotted out (looking at you, every fucking series that includes a scene where a female character comments enviously on another female character’s large breasts, yes Frieren that means you), then I’m insta-jaded on the series. At a certain point you realize anime relies heavily on its perpetual fandom refresh, with new fans replacing the ones who “aged out.” For me, I knew it had gotten bad when I was struggling to enjoy Cyberpunk because I felt like I had heard all the voices before in previous series.
Do you have a recommendation for a book that’ll turn me into a cinephile?
Oh, wow. Old comment.
The easiest route to learning about movies, is to watch a lot of movies, and reading about the movie you’ve just watched. Wikipedia, a more in depth review, interviews with people who made the movie (not just the actors).
Google a top 100 list. Work your way through a few of them. Eg.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time
They also have cool features. For example, Michael Mann’s made a load of really cool action movies. Here’s a feature on his movies they made:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-michael-mann
Or here’s famous critic Mark Kermode’s top 10 of horror movies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdj_22hHRyM
Yes, he has a PhD and is a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the UK equivalent of the Academy of Motion Pictures. No, he’s not a snob. Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s in the top 10. So are some older classics, which are still good.
But if you want to read something, you could try:
Bordwell and Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction.
David A. Cook. A History of Narrative Cinema
Wow, thank you so much for all the recommendations! I sometimes feel like I don’t know how to watch certain kinds of movies (e.g., older movies, or more artsy movies). I hope reading up a bit will help me appreciate them more
I watched The Princess Bride and couldn’t understand why it gets so much love. I found it really gruesome and unfunny, and Robin Wright’s princess was bland and unlikable.
Inconceivable 💀
Christopher Nolan hasn’t made a truly good movie since The Prestige. Everything since then has been too long, too convoluted, and/or too loud (or in the case of Oppenheimer, not loud enough).
Very hot take considering
The Prestige - 2006
The Dark Knight - 2008
I didn’t like The Dark Knight at all. It was just kind of boring and the acting didn’t do anything for me.
I also think Nolan is highly overrated.
The critic rating is better than the audience rating. I’ve never seen a film with a high critic rating that didn’t have something worthwhile about it. But I’ve seen a lot of audience hits that were garbage.
The Dark Knight has fucking terrible editing and a lot of bad, hammy acting. The opening bank heist is just bad, with really on-the-nose dialogue delivered pretty badly…even William Fichtner seems like he’s trying a little too hard, and he’s an otherwise good actor.
I know the editing has been covered in some YouTube essay that made the rounds a number of years ago so maybe that’s not such an unpopular opinion, but it really sticks out to me like a sore thumb.
Before anyone gets totally mad at me, I still enjoy the overall story, a lot of the action, and I think both Ledger and Bale (dumb batman voice aside) are great. Also, Morgan Freeman, Michal Caine and whatshisname who plays Harvey Dent are also very good too.
Films where I don’t recognize a single actor among the whole crew are almost always better than ones where I’ve seen such and such actor in other movies. Just more immersive. And even if they’re not the best actors I’d much prefer that over whatever the hell Chris Prat or Tom Cruise or Leo D are up to.
I knew being faceblind must have some benefit. I often only realise I know an actor when I see their name in the credits. Then again it can take me half a movie to realise there are two men with dark hair, a beard and glasses, so I wouldn’t entirety recommend it.
My experience watching The Departed while almost entirely sober felt like a face blindness simulator. I was baffled when one of the characters that had been killed came back and none of the other characters acknowledged it. Cool movie but so confusing.
So many well known actors play themselves playing the character.
Tom Cruise has employees rewrite movies he’ll be in to make his part more, and more in his style.
He has more acting range and ability than so many other actors
Most movies are incredibly dumb and boring.
Give us an example of one you do like!
Hmm, so I like movies that kinda play with your expectations and turn out to go into a completely different direction than you’d expect.
Dragon (2011) with Donnie Yen is a good example. You think you’re getting another Kung Fu flick, but it turns out to be more of a detective story of almost Sherlock Holmes-style complexity.
Yes there’s kung fu but it’s mostly esoteric and there’s only a few fights, but it’s still a fascinating movie.
Terminator is better than Terminator 2, and as cool as it is Terminator 2 should never have been made (or should have a different script).
I know the mob is raising the pitchfork, but hear me out, there are two main ways time travel can solve the grandparent paradox, these are Singular Timeline (i.e. something will prevent you from killing your grandfather) or Multiple Timeline (you kill him but in doing so you created an alternate timeline). Terminator 2 is clearly a MT model, because they delay the rise of Skynet, but Terminator is a ST movie. The way you can understand it’s an ST is because the cause-consequences form a perfect cycle (which couldn’t happen on an MT story), i.e. Reese goes back to save Sarah -> Reese impregnates Sarah and teaches her how to defend herself from Terminators and avoid Skynet -> Sarah gives birth to and teaches John -> John uses the knowledge to start a resistance -> The resistance is so strong that Skynet sends a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah -> Reese goes back to save Sarah…
The awesome thing about Terminator is how you only realise this at the end of the Movie, that nothing they did mattered, because that’s what happened before, the timeline is fixed, humanity will suffer but they’ll win eventually.
If Terminator was a MT then the cycle breaks, i.e. there needs to be a beginning, a first time around when the original timeline didn’t had any time travelers. How did that timeline looked like? John couldn’t exist, which means that sending a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah was not possible, Reese couldn’t have gone back without the Terminator technology, which they wouldn’t have unless the resistance was winning, and if they are winning without John, the Terminator must have gone back to kill someone else and when Reese went back he accidentally found Sarah, impregnated her and coincidentally made a better commander for the resistance which accidentally and created a perfect loop so that next time he would be sent back and meet Sarah because she was the target (what are the odds of that). Then why is the movie not about this? Why is the movie about the Nth loop after the timeline was changed? The reason is that Terminator was thought as a ST movie, but when they wanted to write a sequel they for some reason decided to allow changes in the timeline which broke the first movie.
Not to mention that it’s fucking stupid to have all your infiltration units have the exact same face and body. The first movie even showed other terminators with different faces, so why is every T-800 Arnold?
That said, T2 is one of my favorite movies.
Ah! A fellow holder of the belief that time travel stories are better when they are internally consistent! I hate e.g. Looper for having time travel that makes no goddamn sense. It takes me out of the story when the characters are literally watching the timeline change before them as it magically radiates out from one point. And then our protagonists somehow remember the original timeline… Bah.
…So I must ask - have you seen Primer? If not, maybe you’d like it!
My head hurts.
Never watch Primer.
You’ve way over analysed it. It’d be like pissing on Star Wars because the Force has no basis in science.
As someone who enjoys the magic systems of Brandon Sanderson, I do piss on Star Wars for not having a logical basis for The Force.
Actually it’s not that bad. Harry Potter is much worse.
No, the problem is internal consistency, in Star Wars the force works the same way in all films. But imagine if on one movie someone was shown using the force to move objects, and on the next movie the same character was shown trying to reach for something important and failing and not using the force and when asked he replies “it’s not possible to move objects with the force”. That’s the problem here, internal consistency, on one movie it’s said it works one way, on the other it’s said it works differently. I love both movies, I just think T2 shitted on one of the main things from T1.
Except the prequels establish force powers that we never see again and so do the sequels. Like force super speed in the phantom menace.
Also Eddie furlong is fucking insufferable
Gonna try to phrase this an inflammatory way:
People who like bad movies have been conditioned by consumerism to not appreciate art. They believe spectacle, humour, and a tight plot are ‘good enough’, and they don’t value thoughtfulness, novelty, beauty, or abrasiveness nearly enough. Film is more than a way to fill time and have fun. Film is more than an explosion, a laugh, and a happy ending.
On an unrelated note: Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favourite movies.
I see you’ve met my wife. Transformers is the pinnacle of cinema, but 12 Angry Men is boring as fuck because all they do is talk.
It’s strange that you said that and then said you liked fury road. I thought fury road was the epitome of spectacle and production value with actual value.
I explain it like this: people assume beer is one product but most economists actually study it as two distinct products: mass production beer and craft beer. They actually behave like two separate markets. People like each for very different reasons. And consumer behavior is very different around both.
That’s how I feel about Film and Movies. We may watch them both on a screen, but other than that they are very different things. And you can like both! I love the MCU films. But I don’t go expecting intellectual expositions.
I also love Dead Poets Society, Hidden Figures, and Argo. Let people like things. Let people like different things differently. It’s OK.
Horror films are where art flourishes and it has a huge culture of being outside of Hollywood which is just a plus. Also the acting is usually way better
Amazing, every word is wrong
Most horror movies have worse acting than a porno.
There is no accounting for taste. Who’s to say what’s a better actor?!
The Mario movie was incredibly mediocre, despite its high production value. I’m talking MCU-levels of truckloads of money spent with shockingly little to show for it.
Interstellar is a terrible movie that doesn’t say or do anything special and I still don’t understand why anyone thinks it’s so amazing.
I did really like the robot guy though.
Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman was good. I geniunely don’t understand it’s hated so much, like for real
I’m a huge Star Wars fan. I really liked the Sequel Trilogy. Someone can be a Star Wars nerd, and still enjoy The Last Jedi. I understand why fans hate it, but for me it’s fun to watch. I don’t like to take it too seriously. Also, I enjoyed Solo. My mantra Trust no one and you will never be betrayed is from that movie.
That all said, I love the lore! Jar Jar the Sith, Darth Plagueis, the fan films, the theory—It’s so cool.
Mine is- the Marvel/DC superhero movies all but entirely ruined cinema.
