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
One of the most recent ones I watched was Whisper of the Heart. It can be summed up as “girl meets a cute guy, girl wants to be an author, writes about a cat in a parallel universe, finds an antique shop, random proposal at the end”, it was like watching a clipshow. I remember reading reviews for Totoro and them trying really hard to beat around the bush with “ah it doesn’t have a cohesive plot, buuuut…” and then the rest of the review, almost like they didn’t care because it was Studio Ghibli. I’ve seen movies panned for that (e.g. Alita Battle Angel or Spiderman 2).
Studio Ghibli today is a pale shadow of what it was in the 80s and 90s.
Most of the new stuff they did has been repeated over and over again to the point that they are no longer ‘new’ to a modern audience. Half of modern Japanese pop-culture, and a significant share of modern Chinese and Western pop culture borrow from their three early films (Cagliostro, Nausicaa and Laputa). Nausicaa is probably the single most influential animated movie in history.
To fully appreciate Totoro, you have to watch Grave of the Fireflies first.
I mean some of them show their age a bit and ok some of them rehash ideas from preceding ones, but it’s hard to think of any Miyazaki movie that did nothing for me at all.
If you ever want to ruin Princess Mononoke, just think "what exactly does the main character guy do to advance the plot?" The answer: almost nothing haha
I don’t think that ruins it for me, rather the opposite. Ashitaka is a member of a tribe far away from the places in the movie. When he gets there he is just an observer to the war between industry and nature and wants to form his own opinion. He gets sucked into it and even if he did nothing the story would have continued almost the same, bar the ending where he then has made up his mind. I’d have to watch it again and spare more than a few minutes before sleepy time to write a better response, but those are my two cents
I mean in general, not really all of them (for example, Spirited Away gets honorable mention on every list). I remember reviewers for Totoro trying their hardest to not spotlight the fact it has such a jumbled plot when movies have been panned for that before. A masterpiece is supposed to impart something onto someone, but except for Spirited Away and arguably Marnie, my main reaction was little more than “well now I can say I saw it”.
Grave of the fireflies left a deep impression with me. I recently saw a bunch of them with my girlfriend and I’ve come to the conclusion that most are nice looking long TV show episodes. Which is fine for what the are.
Being all their ages didn’t change a lot for me (not sure how normal that is amongst those age groups). Except for Totoro which I watched when I was four if I remember correctly, I was roughly a preteen to teen when I watched all of them (or all the ones I watched, which is all but three) up to The Boy and the Heron (which just came out, I’m an adult now) which would only put me out of range with Ponyo and Porco Rosso when I watched those. Most people have a good sense of feeling for a story that adds up. I was little when I watched Totoro and little me had to stop myself from getting distracted from the movie itself.
I don't know...I watched princess mononoke and was pretty impressed by the movie. Only other anime I've watched is ghost in the shell which I thought was alright. I'm not really an anime fan but I'm super glad I watched princess mononoke!
I think Mononoke was easily the weakest of Miyazaki’s movies but it’s the one everyone raves about because it was the first one to see a widespread and non-butchered release in the West on DVD.
The earlier Totoro, Kiki, and to a lesser extent Laputa are all better movies, in my opinion. The former two shine exceptionally by being charming slice-of-life vignettes from a time before that sort of thing was the mega genre it is today, managing to be captivating stories that somehow don’t need or contain any kind of villain, quest, or cliché call to adventure whatsoever.
Laputa does – in spades – but it’s still great. It’s got so many villains that it’s got two sets of bad guys, but one set of bad guys turn out not to be bad guys and basically the entire damn movie is a flying scene of some type or another and it’s fantastic. Castle of Cagliostro is also awesome, and it was arguably one of those pivotal Citzen Kane style moments for the medium that turned out to be surprisingly influential to subsequent works, both animated and not. (And also introduced an entire generation to the only version of Lupin who is not an huge asshole, much to the surprise of everyone who watched this movie first and went on to check out… any… other Lupin III works.) Cagliostro was so influential that Japan’s (former) Princess Sayako based her real life wedding dress off of Clarise’s dress from the movie, and said so.
I found a few movies that I genuinely enjoy that make the (or made at the time this was written and I tried it) bottom quartile. Malibu’s most wanted and “the crew” are movies I don’t skip by (but also never see any more :( ) basically ‘organized crime by the inept’ movies tickle me the right way
I actively like Star Trek Generations (48 on RT). I think it’s accessible if you’re not a Trek fan, and delightful if you are. A bit campy at times, sure. But it’s a human plot dealing with age, death, and change.
I like Generations way more than say, First Contact.
Generations, for all its flaws, was a science fiction story passing the torch from TOS to TNG, and saying something about the characters and world of Star Trek.
First Contact was a generic action-adventure movie wearing a Star Trek uniform.
Honestly, I consider Generations to be the only interesting TNG movie.
The Way of the Gun (2000), 46% fresh. I really, actually do like this movie. I know, Ryan Phillipe makes things complicated. Like, starting in the first scene with Sarah Silverman.
“There’s always cheese at a mousetrap.”
The problem that this movie faced was that there was no reward for having a long attention span. Critically panned, the Way of the Gun rewards those who get carried along in the story; those who understand the roles the characters play in each others’ lives, the Shakespearean knit in the fabric.
Longbaugh and Parker are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern witnessing the collapse of the house of and unborn Hamlet, whose supposed parents are a mob underboss and his trophy wife. His actual parents are at the shootout where he was born.
I’d say 2001 Space Odyssey. The film has its interesting parts but the pace is absolutely awful. It makes it unwatchable. I watched it a while ago and couldn’t finish it. Multiple long dragged sequences showing off the ships where nothing happens. Everything is an excuse to drag the scene, even a goddamn elevator. By the time I got the HAL part I was fed up with it and couldn’t go on. It has multiple parts (starting with the music at the start) where it seemed they had a script but had to have a movie yay long. Like a class film. So they took every opportunity to stretch it.
Some people say I don’t get it because it’s not Michael Bay. That I have to appreciate the art in those long drawn out scenes. Well, excuse me, but I wanted to watch a movie, not a painting. Also, I shouldn’t be expected to be on acid while watching. A disclaimer would help.
The slowness is meant to represent the distance they are traveling, in both time and space. This was also made in 1968, the moon landing was in 1969. Compare Planet of the Apes to 2001 for a good comparison of what special effects were like in the same year.
Most of them are long winded, it was the style of the time.
If you think of the movie as 3 parts. One, pre-man discovers tools (because the monolith changes one tribe). Two, Man must overcome the tools it has created. Three, man is absorbed by the aliens tool to become next-man.
Anyways, I understand why someone might not like it but it is one of my all time favorite movies and its worth watching later in your life as you might get different impressions on it if you are young now
I too recently watched this film for the first time. I didn’t like it at all. The shock factor with HAL maybe kept people interested back then but it’s a almost common theme today. I think Kubrick is overrated.
Holy shit, thank you. My husband thinks I’m crazy for not enjoying this film. We saw it for the first time at a special event thing at a theater because he’d always wanted to see it, and I was so fucking bored.
I remember falling asleep to some dude jogging in a gigantic circle, and I woke up and was like “Omg it’s still playing.”
HAL was neat. Have no idea what was going on with the giant space fetus.
I came out saying that it was the most boring yet gorgeous film I’d ever seen. Because I mean, it WAS fucking pretty.
This, like other movies, I think comes down to novelty. Some of the shit done in that movie was truly incredible… At the time. Some bits are still really interesting.
The jogging scene, for example, was done at a time when CG wasn’t really an option. So then you ask the question… How did they do some of these shots? How is this guy seemingly running in a zero g circle but it’s actually a real camera?
Cinematic transitions are another. The bone spinning into the space station was really cool. It’s a shot that has permeated like every form of media. Now it kinda looks cheap and jarring.
HAL as an AI, an evil robot, was an extremely interesting. Now it’s something that has been done so, so many times since.
As a sci Fi I still like it, the slow pace isn’t something that bothers me. I enjoy movies that are capable of taking their time. So many movies move at breakneck speeds. The plot is really cool to me as well.
Otherwise, yes, it’s not surprising that a modern audience finds this incredibly boring for all the points above.
As a huge fan of the movie (and books) I kind of agree. I have managed to watch it in full only handful of times. I usually fall asleep mid-movie.
Having said that, I still love it. It also helps me fall asleep sometimes, so win-win. But I get what you’re saying.
One thing that’s probably worth keeping in mind is that the movie was made before the manned moon landing in 1969. So many of the scenes are super interesting just from the realism POV. Today we’re one click away from a HD video someone made at the international space station. Back then you had few grainy transmissions from space. Star Wars was almost decade later.
So yeah, seeing ship slowly floating across the screen in complete silence is boring, but it’s also realistic. Same for many other scenes. Now you can play games that will render the same scene in real time on a potato-level PC, so the novelty of seeing “how space might look like out there” is just not there.
So in many ways it’s like seeing the bullet time scene in Matrix for the first time vs seeing the bullet time scene in any random movie decade later.
Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, etc are corney as fuck, but in a fun way. You can throw shit at the wall as long as you do it in an entertaining way.
I could get on board with this. Both were amazing at their best and pretty mediocre at their worst. I’d love to see what Carpenter could have done with some bigger budgets. Although maybe the results wouldn’t have been as good. He seems like the sort of director where necessity breeds invention.
Yeah exactly, it seems like a such a shame that The Thing (1982) didn’t find its audience until years later. Because I feel like that’s as close as we got to seeing a John Carpenter film with a big budget and it was great.
Inception is one of the worst executions of an interesting idea. My imagination can imagine anything. Hollywood’s? Well I guess you imagined too hard so now there’s people with guns. Oh and this applies to everyone.
If you haven’t give the anime Paprika a watch. I don’t think its a smarter movie necessarily but it is great and I’m pretty sure a couple scenes from inception were basically pulled directly from paprika.
In theory I agree, but in practice? The amount of people having a hard time following the timelines of inception show that you really can’t make a more complex execution, the average viewer simply won’t get it. You have to simplify it to make it more digestible.
For comparison Dark is an exceptionally well done series that doesn’t hold back with the complexity. How many people can say they “got” Dark when watching it the first time around? I’m an attentive viewer and even I had wrap my head around it to really understand what had happened. My wife, who is not an attentive viewer, pretty much gave up after S2 because she simply lost the plot. Too many bits of information was thrown in her way and she couldn’t keep track of what was happening.
Personally, I give Nolan props for even trying to execute interesting ideas because the average high profile movie is pretty barren of interesting ideas. Would I like to see more interesting ideas with complex executions? Absolutely. Do I think it can be done? Considering who the target audience is, not really.
Cillian Murphy was good, the historical figures were well represented if you know a bit about the history of quantum mechanics, and the overall movie was a disappointment compared to the hype at the time, but it will be forgotten. That doesn’t mean it SUCKED though.
Sucking is subjective. The same film can not suck for you and suck for BoastfulDaedra. That’s what an unpopular opinion is about - if you disagree with them, you should upvote them!
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.
I actually fell asleep watching The Dark Knight in a movie theatre. They fucked up the pacing.
Another instance of this is the second Spider Man (the one with Doc Ock). It was so sluggish that I forgot there was a villain halfway through the movie. Then it cut to Ock doing something and I was like “Oh yeah, that guy still exists”.
Another unpopular opinion I have is that spider-man 2 is pretty good, but not on the level people seem to put it on. The train fight is good, the overall plot is decent, Alfred Molina is a good choice as Doc Ok, but the whole split personality thing came across to me as kind of cheesy. At least Willem Dafoe’s scenery chewing in the first movie was highly entertaining.
I think a lot of people sees Heaths performances and go this is awesome that makes this an awesome movie, didn’t help that he died around the same time.
This then lead to it being this best movie ever meme, where anyone that didn’t think so was hevely down voted and sometimes insulted and it managed to remain like that for many many years.
Personally I hold the opinion that while Heath did a incredible performance, had he had a better script and maybe even a none Batman script. It would have been an absolutely marvellous performance. Also that as he did such a good job but the rest of the movie didn’t, he’s work stod out more as being really good.
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