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.
deleted by creator
Agree completely
sadfasfsadfd
For me, there was something about the number of A list actors in the cast. It just took me out of it. I was just thinking this is a movie, those are famous people acting.
I felt the same way about Dune 2 this past year. The film was incredible, but when every actor is a huge name known for something else. It just makes me hyper aware that casting exists, and then the suspension of disbeleif is shattered.
sadfasfsadfd
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.
Oppenheimer.
It’s probably an interesting movie, but holy shit each shot is less than 3 seconds long and it just cuts around to different camera angles every 3 seconds for 2 hours…
Not only was this making me feel physically sick and disoriented, but this erodes tension in the film and is completely unnecessary. You don’t need 14 shots of someone walking down a damn hallway or having a think, you need one (1).
Take all that shit out and you’re probably left with a story worth actually telling.
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.
A Christmas Story
I have never been able to watch the whole thing. Ralphie’s whining and dull life was just unpleasant. I didn’t really like any of the characters. Nothing in it was entertaining except for the kid and the pole. It was just a slog. I think the furthest I ever got was at a scene about a parade?
It seems like this is a really popular movie but I just never saw the appeal.
“Sit down I’ve got a movie I want you to watch. It’s called What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”
- some dumb wrong people I know
Mortal Engines. I have not read the source materials.
Amazing concept, fantastic visuals, weak story, weak characters. Apparently just accidentally spliced in the end of Return of the Jedi instead of finishing the movie.
Harry Potter.
Before JK went mask off, I had dropped the books about half way though for being increasing annoyed with how they ended. Never any change to the status quo except Harry actually regressing in character development. I watched the first movie, but that was around when I dropped the books and never looked back.
I was able to just quietly keep my opinions to myself, but with with JK becoming increasing unhinged with both her tweets and books, I haven’t felt the need to be polite with the “separate the art from the artists” types. Especially when they just assume that you’re a fan if you don’t correct them.
I’m just gonna hop on to say that there is zero world building in Harry Potter. I know that’s because it was written for a youngish audience, but like the only things that are ever built on are used directly for the story in that book, then mostly left alone.
No one comes back years later with a Time Turner and wrecks havoc, for instance.
The few comparisons to Tolkien I’ve heard of her works are so unbelievably unfounded and off base.
Not to mention she’s a TERF
Sanderson’s third law of magic: Expand what you already have before you add something new.
Not sure why this was downvoted. It’s a very good point. Sanderson doesn’t like being openly critical of other authors but it’s pretty obvious that applying his laws to Rowling explains a fair amount of why her writing is bad.
I’m just gonna leave Shaun’s review here.
Harry Potter unintentionally made a whole subgenre of fiction that could be called “Harry Potter, but fixed”. Little Witch Academia’s workers union episode was great and Reign of the Seven Spellblades is a mid, but still fun anime that seemingly takes aim at opposing Harry Potter and JK(specifically, her anti-trans shit) at every turn. I haven’t read it, but Shaun seems to think that The Hog Father is a direct reaction to the house elf shit in HP.
Hogfather as in the Discworld novel? I could have sworn that was older than Harry Potter.
Edit: it is, but surprisingly only one year older than the first Harry Potter book.
No one comes back years later with a Time Turner and wrecks havoc
Fuck I hate her bullshit inconsistency with this. Prior to that shitty play coming out I could have given you a simple explanation for this. First: the time turners were all made inoperable during book 5 when the team went to the Ministry. This was shown explicitly in the text (and is an example of Rowling’s delayed reaction to criticism that I think the Shaun video brings up). It could be bypassed pretty easily if you wanted, but it also works well enough to explain why nobody else uses one anymore, for a kid’s book.
But more crucially, the way time turners work in the original is pretty clear: it’s a one-way trip back in time. In book 3 they travel back a matter of hours, and then work back to the “present” in real time. You can’t use it to go back and kill Hitler or something like that, unless you want to be permanently stuck in the past. It’s never said, but it’s feasible that it could have been expanded on by placing a hard limit on how far back you can go at all. Then she went and wrote the play and (supposedly—I never read or watched it myself) completely broke all of that. I suppose you could be generous and say she was following Sanderson’s 3rd law, but IMO it wasn’t so much “expanding” on what she already had as it was “completely retconning the way it works in a way that also undermines previously-established plots”.
And they were made inoperable in the laziest way possible. Like someone bumped a cabinet and ALL of them broke. Easy, no more time travel.
Fine enough for a kid’s book, but it tried to take itself WAY more seriously than that, just to continue to pick up and drop plot points and ideas constantly. I wouldn’t mind it if a fair few people didn’t hail it as if it’s a great work
JK Rowling holds a very common position amongst older feminists and really doesn’t deserve the constant rape threats for funding women’s refuges. I’m pushing back on the party line here, and no, I don’t believe trans people deserve to be killed, or any bullshit like that. I promise to hide them in my non-existent attic if it comes to that.
Edit: the books did get progressively worse after the third or possibly fourth one, though, and the films aren’t very good.
Her or her friends are running those charities. It’s a way to hide money from tax collectors.
Looking back with adult eyes, her books push a very pro-Class based society. That’s why nothing ever changes.
Edit: The books got progressively worse because JK wrangled more and more control away from her editor.
I’m not sure about the ownership of foundations, charitable funds and the like; some degree of corruption wouldn’t surprise me unfortunately.
I will say that she won’t have been deliberately pushing class-stratification given her socioeconomic background, however the whole setting is heavily influenced by Victorian-era children’s novels about boarding school adventures which were absolutely saturated with classism.
They surely needed a team of editors towards the end.
JK was never poor. Her “homelessness” was couch surfing between friend’s houses in Edinburgh.
If she didn’t approve of the class system, then why was the sorting hat never wrong? Having kids switch houses between school years would have been an easy to to signal character development for a younger audience. Her class system is depicted as shitty, but something you just have to accept as true and deal with to become stronger. Look at how they treat the one character to oppose slavery. Even our MC, who’s an outsider to the wizard world thinks it’s weird to be opposed to slavery.
It being common does not make it ok. If she were just quietly anti-trans in her personal life that might be something we could overlook. But she is proudly and actively hateful towards trans people. She ignores the fact that trans women are even more likely than cis women to be victims of gender-based violence and pretends that trans women are actually predators. And she engages in bullshit “transvestigating”, drumming up witch hunts against butch cis women. She is actively causing harm against women, including the cis women she claims to want to protect. She’s a terrorist using stochastic methods.
Disney’s Hercules.
Because it completely butchers greek mythology. Of course, that’s to be expected from a kid’s movie (especially Disney) but I’ve been a greek mythology fan from an early age and this movie really disappointed me as a child.
This was a really popular opinion at the time if I recall.
Counterpoint: it’s one of the better Disney movies IMO. The gospel soundtrack slaps, and Danny DeVito, James Woods, and Susan Egan are all perfect in their roles.
Also, I blame Meg at least in part for my lifelong weakness for skinny dark-haired sarcastic women. But that’s on me.
I’m not sure if you’re saying my opinion was popular at the time- I’ve never met anyone in person who agreed with me, not then and not now either. Occasionally some people say, “ok, I get what you mean” but they don’t really share my opinion. Most of the times I get “what? Hercules? Such a great movie!”.
And fair enough, I’m not saying it’s a bad movie, simply that I was thoroughly disappointed which isn’t the same. Objectively the art direction is really good, the voice acting and animation is solid, and yes the soundtrack was also objectively good but unfortunately not my type, what can I say. It’s just not a movie for me.
The cycle:
Step 1: (as a child) “wow this movie was great, I love Greek stuff!”
Step 2: learns a ton about Greek mythology over the next many years due to interest sparked by the movie
Step 3: (likely as a teenager or older, re-watching it one day) “holy shit this movie is absolutely nothing like Greek mythology, why did I ever think it was good…”
Zeus being a caring father?
And a loyal husband ha
Much of this thread be like…
I mean… what did you expect? You came to a thread titled “What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?” It’s going to be full of unpopular opinions that people are going to disagree with. Coming in and hoping to agree with everything is being that guy on a Lemmy thread.
Kubrick’s version of The Shining. Most likely, I would feel differently had I not read the novel first, but the reduction of the story to a Nicholson-show pisses me off to the point where I cannot enjoy it for what it is. I’d rather endure the over four hours of less brilliant screenplay of the 1997 version.
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.
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.
I think Basterds was his first movie that casually re-wrote history, which threw off the movie’s tone for me. Like a historical “what if” movie. And every movie he’s done since then has the same feel to me now.
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.
The thing that baffled me about that movie was how many “startups” used it as reference for what they were trying to create. Like, did I watch the same movie? Real life was so shitty they had entire blocks of people living in trailers mounted to each other vertically. They used the matrix or whatever it was called to escape. And you want to create that for real?
Why don’t we turn the world into a real life Mad Max while we’re at it.
Why don’t we turn the world into a real life Mad Max while we’re at it.
Have you been around the car culture?
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?
True, but it’s still poorly written. And so much of the content is GenX nostalgia, it’s obviously meant to be a crossover to those preteens’/teens’ parents.
Young adult means the content is suited for a younger audience, it’s not an excuse for unintelligent writing void of anything of value.
Lets be real here, young adults (I.E toddlers and teenagers) aren’t exactly the most critical readers or familiar with judging literary quality. The writers of books targeted at young adults know this, and tend to not do more work than they have to on plot and world building. Go ahead and write me a five paragraph essay on the value that Warriors added to the medium. No child read warriors for the themes, they read it for the premise of anthropromorphic cat drama and as fuel for their first role-play world building sessions. YA novels are the literary version of comfort food, enjoyable for those that like the taste but you would be foolish for expect a fufilling rich plot with well thought out characters.
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.
