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Erkki

I don't see what everyone sees in that movie ...

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[edit]The original title was "overrated classics", but that was a somewhat problematic wording.

 

(I don't want to put this in the recommended movies thread, so I made a new one)

 

Damn, I just watched Taxi Driver, expecting to be hit by brilliance... What I found was one of the most boring movies I have watched recently, with a great lead actor. Wait, is this actually what the height of american cinema was in the 1970's? I'm now scared to rewatch other classics from those years lest I be as disappointed.

 

I have of course seen this movie a couple of times as a teen, but I was different then and I guess I had forgotten it mostly. Later I have always heard of Taxi Driver as being a classic and perhaps one of the best movies ever. But this was just lame, the only thing it had going for it was the portrayal of the loneliness of Travis, and De Niro played him well, but that just wasn't enough to make the movie captivating. And what the hell was the ending?

 

Become a murderer and get the girl who was disgusted by you before.

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Citizen Kane is also super dull. I get that it is important in the history of cinema, specifically for cinematography, but if you aren't into that, its just a long dull film.

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These kinds of threads always devolve into "I have bad taste" threads*. Usually it takes more than two posts.

 

 

*Of course I'm being glib, taste is subjective and you have every right to like or dislike whatever you want, but I think also there is something to be said about being objective enough to realize that some things just won't hit with you and that does not necessarily mean the emperor has no clothes.

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Citizen Kane is also super dull. I get that it is important in the history of cinema, specifically for cinematography, but if you aren't into that, its just a long dull film.

 

I super love Citizen Kane, but I'm also a sucker for things related to the history of journalism and Orson Welles. 

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Yeah, Citizen Kane never struck me as one of those "eat you vegetables!" movies. It's entertaining through and through.

Taxi Driver is a good movie too.

I thought this thread was going to be about video games and I was going to say that coming into Half Life late its got a lot of old games baggage. I managed to get stuck with low health at one part later in the game and just couldn't get to the next health pack so I quit. :v

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Scooby Doo is fucking awful. Bad drawings, slow animation, predictable plots, reused jokes, shitty audio, and ugly colors.


Why that stupid fucking dog is on so much merchandise is beyond me.

 

Also Scrappy can eat farts.

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These kinds of threads always devolve into "I have bad taste" threads*. Usually it takes more than two posts.

 

Do I have bad taste? I think Alien is overrated. Maybe I just watched it under bad conditions, but I had a big problem with the movie being way too dark. A lot of the time the characters might as well have been acting against a pitch-black background for all I could see. Most of the time, I found it dull, rather than tense.

 

Overall I got the same impression as mentioned for Citizen Kane above: I'm sure it made a lot of important and impressive advancements in its time, but watching it in 2015, all of that gets taken for granted, and I feel it doesn't have much left after that.

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I'm not going to say anybody has bad taste, but unless you're setting up some HOT TAKES I think just straight up dismissing long time hailed classics is a mistake and it's really incumbent on the person to engage with these classics. If the response is just "i'm bored" I would first engage that feeling. 

 

I think a negative can might be made about Taxi Driver being a kind of blueprint for modern white rage in a way that it was no way intended to be (or that could have been anticipated). Scorsese doesn't position Bickle to be a hero though, and I don't think the movie is at all sympathetic to his plight. Also, it remains pretty amazing if only as a portrait of a New York that stopped existing so long ago. 

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Also, Paul Schrader's a genius.

 

Taxi Driver is hypnotic to me. The second unit photography of a decaying city soundtracked by Bernard Herrmann just sucks me right in. There's like three or four career-making performances in this movie. It's dark, violent and uncomfortable, but I can't turn away.

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Scooby Doo is fucking awful.

No one actually thinks Scooby Doo is good though, nor ever did. Scooby Doo is the animated equivalent of those awful chalky heart candies at valentines: Universally disliked, inexplicably ubiquitous.

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No one actually thinks Scooby Doo is good though, nor ever did. Scooby Doo is the animated equivalent of those awful chalky heart candies at valentines: Universally disliked, inexplicably ubiquitous.

 

Those hearts are GOOD dammit!

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No one actually thinks Scooby Doo is good though, nor ever did. Scooby Doo is the animated equivalent of those awful chalky heart candies at valentines: Universally disliked, inexplicably ubiquitous.

 

Scooby Doo is my favorite cartoon, and better than every other cartoon I've ever watched. 

 

 

Mystery, Inc is really good, though.

 

Super good!

 

 

Do I have bad taste? I think Alien is overrated. Maybe I just watched it under bad conditions...

 

I'm going with bad conditions, too dark of a tv or monitor, because the last time I watched Alien (a few years ago), I was impressed by how incredibly well I thought the sets and design held up. 

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We all have things that just inexplicably leave us cold. I think calling Citizen Kane dull is crazy but I also think Vertigo is dull, and Vertigo is literally the new Citizen Kane, according to the latest Sight and Sound poll. I think it can be interesting to really dig in and explore why certain certified classics don't connect with us*, but I think taking the approach of "I didn't like this movie, it's overrated, prove to me it isn't" is backwards.

 

*Often in my case my lack of formal education, particularly in philosophy, psychology and poetry, makes more high-minded or metatextual or semiotically subversive art films fly over my head. If something is playing with Jungian or Freudian archetypes, I will probably miss it.

 

Also, there is a brand of art cinema that mostly existed from the mid 60's to the late 70's where the straight male id is on full display (sometimes critical of it but rarely critical enough for my taste) and it is just gross and off-putting and totally unrelatable to me. I feel like a lot of my hatred of Godard's films comes from that place.

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Yo Star Wars is merely okay.

 

The world of Star Wars is infinitely more interesting than the story of the movies. I think it's a shame the world is bogged down by such a mediocre plot and characters.

 

Except Han and Chewie, I'm all about those bros. 

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Also, I will say this about the "Citizen Kane is dull" crowd: I would guess you probably haven't seen too many films from the 40's. Which isn't to say Citizen Kane is only good compared to other films of the time, but to say that if you don't have a fluency in a certain era's (or region's or sometimes genre's*) films, it takes a lot of work to watch them.

 

It's the same with video games (and probably exacerbated): I got a couple hours into Empire: Total War and was totally overwhelmed and flustered. I don't have a fluency with strategy games and so trying to get anything done always felt like a monumental task, totally unintuitive and backwards, and even when I did figure out the UI I kept getting my ass handed to me. There may be a good game inside Empire: Total War, but it would take too much work for me to perceive it.

 

But once you've seen about a hundred or so films from the 40's something just clicks in your brain and it takes no effort to snap into 1940's viewing mode and see the film for what it is. The first time I saw King Kong I was 13 and I thought it was boring, the sound was terrible, the effects were terrible. I watched it again ten years later after having seen a lot of films from the early 30's and was blown away by how exciting it was, how great the effects were and...well the sound is still terrible. There's no getting around that early talkie recording technology.

 

It takes a lot of will and effort to become fluent in something like 40's film, so if it's not really important to you that's fine, you probably will never find Citizen Kane hilarious and sad and fast-paced and entertaining. But that doesn't mean it isn't.

 

*And often all three, as any fan of giallo will surely tell you.

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Dunno if it counts as a classic being from merely 10 years ago, but Howl's Moving Castle is a piece of shit. Fantastic animation, imaginatively crafted world, all wasted on an infuriatingly dumb and uneven story, and the blandest fucking characters. I'm not even kidding, I enjoyed Tales From Earthsea more because at least that didn't piss me off with its utterly misused potential.

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Dunno if it counts as a classic being from merely 10 years ago, but Howl's Moving Castle is a piece of shit. Fantastic animation, imaginatively crafted world, all wasted on an infuriatingly dumb and uneven story, and the blandest fucking characters. I'm not even kidding, I enjoyed Tales From Earthsea more because at least that didn't piss me off with its utterly misused potential.

 

I always found Miyazaki to be a genius world-builder and a rather graceless storyteller. Sometimes he creates characters and worlds so rich that it really doesn't matter (I certainly feel that way about Spirited Away) but your feelings about Howl's are what I feel about most of his work.

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Howl's Moving Castle is a piece of shit.

ugh you are literally the worst of the humans

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Hmm I see this blowing up so I'm just gonna take it to the anime thread where it's more appropriate. :x

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Also, I will say this about the "Citizen Kane is dull" crowd: I would guess you probably haven't seen too many films from the 40's. Which isn't to say Citizen Kane is only good compared to other films of the time, but to say that if you don't have a fluency in a certain era's (or region's or sometimes genre's*) films, it takes a lot of work to watch them.

 

Pretty much this. I was going to say that a lot of people who find older movies hard to watch probably comes down to editing style. Older movies tended to hold shots longer, and often this means people see them as boring since we've been trained by more recent TV and film editing styles to expect shorter shots. 

 

For example, Citizen Kane has an average shot length of 12 seconds or so, while Iron Man 3 has an average shot length of 2.4 seconds. Even outside of big budget blockbuster movies, we're used to shorter shots. Look at a movie like The Grand Budapest Hotel (which keeps a decent pace, but isn't a blockbuster action movie). It's ASL is 5.3 seconds. 

 

EDIT: If you find any of this interesting, check out Cinemetrics, a giant database of information about film shots run by a faculty member at the University of Chicago.

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Also, I will say this about the "Citizen Kane is dull" crowd: I would guess you probably haven't seen too many films from the 40's. Which isn't to say Citizen Kane is only good compared to other films of the time, but to say that if you don't have a fluency in a certain era's (or region's or sometimes genre's*) films, it takes a lot of work to watch them.

 

Part of it too is that over the years I have become less and less interested in Film as a storytelling medium. I am often left underwhelmed by attempts to introduce characters, build a world and finish a plot on 1.5-2 hours. Probably the same reason I don't like episodic shows. I am a fan of depth in story, worlds and character development so many films end up feeling very shallow. Even film series often repeat so much content in an attempt to allow people to watch film 2 or 3 without watching 1 that they waste viewers time (the Avengers for example). 

I also agree about film pacing being an issue, there are a lot of stylistic differences that have developed from the early film era. I think there are also issues of films reflecting the era they are made in, so it can be harder for people today to relate to films from the 30s, 40s and 50s. I remember watching a black and white movie about a father who's daughter was getting married. One of the main conflicts in the film was how expensive the wedding was, but due to it being an older film he ends up complaining about food being like $5 a plate. 

 

I remember seeing the old and new versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still  back to back. While the older one is good, having grown up in the post Cold War world I found the environmental damage theme in the new one more compelling than the nuclear annihilation theme of the old one. 

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