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Erkki

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

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Have you seen the Metropolis anime version that came out in 2001? I haven't seen the original but I wonder how they compare.

 

Yeah I have, they're equally slow and boring and very very pretty.

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I'm just going to talk about an "overrated thing" - the Watchmen opening titles. Consensus is "shitty movie but wow that title sequence is great."

 

The song choice is painfully literal and obvious (as well as it being quoted in the graphic novel so, along with most of the moments being lifted from there too, this isn't the brief flash of originality from Snyder that some claim) and the narrative it tries to present is utterly confusing for someone coming to the film with no prior knowledge: there were superheroes, then they retired or died in unrelated incidents, and the world's a bit shittier, then there were more superheroes, and they were popular, then they weren't popular." It's clumsy and unnecessary.

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I'm just going to talk about an "overrated thing" - the Watchmen opening titles. Consensus is "shitty movie but wow that title sequence is great."

 

The song choice is painfully literal and obvious (as well as it being quoted in the graphic novel so, along with most of the moments being lifted from there too, this isn't the brief flash of originality from Snyder that some claim) and the narrative it tries to present is utterly confusing for someone coming to the film with no prior knowledge: there were superheroes, then they retired or died in unrelated incidents, and the world's a bit shittier, then there were more superheroes, and they were popular, then they weren't popular." It's clumsy and unnecessary.

All the pop music in that movie felt really ham fisted.

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iirc, a lot of them were songs that the graphic novel quoted, put in there without worrying that they didn't actually fit. Also, the use of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah over the sex scene made it sound like Rorschach was crooning to Night Owl and Silk Spectre while they banged. The one bit of music use I liked iirc was when the guitar on All Along The Watchtower briefly went quite well with Archie crashing into the snow.

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This would arguably be a wrong forum for this post, but what the hell: IMHO, the Grand Theft Auto series is way overratedoverpopular(?). Sure, I enjoyed the shit out of the games, and there was nothing quite like it, but man, actually there's a lot about these games that is so crappy.

 

Mainly, I mean the way they are structured and the way that some "modes" in the game work well with one type of controller while other modes work better with other types of controllers. Even in San Andreas I remember some horrible missions where I had to shoot people from (the backseat of?) a motorcycle, and how I struggled with it. The new one has similar scenes, even ones where you have to keep rotating around 360 degrees to shoot everyone quickly, while the controls are absolutely not suited for that (at least with the steam controller, maybe slightly better with dual-sticks but I doubt it's a fundamental difference). I resorted to grabbing a mouse & keyboard while doing shooty bits. WTF? Why does a modern game make me do that? Of course the mouse & keyboard are then not very awesome for driving (a controller works just as well or better, and can be way more comfortable on the couch).

 

So what I'm saying is that GTA has stuck to some format of gameplay that is a bad compromise between all the things it makes/allows you do, and people probably love it just for the amount of stuff it provides, ignoring the gameplay problems. And Rockstar has seen that it kind of works well enough to sell and haven't really come up with a better way of doing things, and are just providing new content for the same broken format.

 

Honestly I enjoyed Sleeping Dogs more, although I remember having similar problems there, but maybe the shoot & drive stuff was more in the extra content than the main story.

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This might be branching out too far but I actually really liked Waterworld.

Dennis Hopper was going full Ham, the setting was pretty fun, parts of it just looked really pretty, the action felt good for what it was.

I was a kid when it was a movie I watched a lot of and I was way too young to understand the uncomfortable sexual subtext that underpins the first half of the film between Kevin Costner, the little girl, and her mum.

Obviously those things are super shitty and would probably tank a large chunk of the movie for me if I watched it back as an adult but I've still got a lot of holdover enjoyment out of it from watching it as a dumb kid.

It's not the best movie but I don't think it deserves the kind of 'worst movie of the 90's' rep it seems to have about itself.

Bad Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge, and Romeo + Juliet are two movies I think should be recommended more.

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I loved Waterworld AND Postman, even in my early twenties. I’m scared of rewatching them now, though.

 

Back to the topic. I’ve kind of mellowed a bit since making this thread and maybe calling these movies “overrated classics” is not exactly using the right term...

 

But I think I’ve found another movie that sits nicely especially next to Goodfellas as one of the classic movies whose content doesn’t hold up to real scrutiny and that’s Once Upon a Time in America. I read this movie as a long-winded rape apology.

 

ps this is all IMHO, not claiming objectivity 

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I absolutely hated Once upon a Time in America.

 

But speaking of things that everyone seemed to love that baffles me:

Point Break - there is this weird evolving nostalgia that has started to surround this film that gained ground after Hot Fuzz and broke into enormous adulation when the remake was announced. I like very little of this film except Lori Petty asking 'Have you no soul?'. I think the remake is better, but both are bad

Jumanji - I think I was too old for jumanji by the time it came out and it felt like yet another sugary Robin Williams vehicle alongside Mrs Doubtfire, Patch Adams and Hook.

Lost Boys - This seems to be wheeled out by older people to bash Twilight, I would say that Lost Boys was the Twilight of its time. Very pretty boys being vampires and very little else worth considering.

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Oh, vampire movies that I didn’t find as good as I expected based on other’s opinions: Near Dark. Although it definitely has nice shots.

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I've mellowed out on it, mostly because I haven't seen it since but I really, really disliked Daybreakers which was another weird vampire movie with mostly corporate overtones.

 

I watched it in a really fun way! My highschool mediastudies class co-ordinated with three other highschools and we all went and saw the movie at the office of the chief censor, we watched the movie in their HQ theatre, talked about the context of judging media for content ratings, then tried to rate the film as a group. For some reason I just really capital H hated it but everyone else thought it was awesome.

 

Might actually have to go back to that one some time.

 

Anyway for a proper one is basically every marvel movie, it's not just over-exposure they're all pretty forgettable for me now. Maybe the first Iron Man, the Captain America movies, and Thor Ragnarock really stick out. Everything else is warm toast. Something I eat sometimes and forget about.

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Is Daybreakers the one with Ethan Hawke aaaand... Sam Neill? I quite enjoyed it, iirc - it felt like a good world-builder that could have led to some great sequels.

 

I'm with you on the MCU though - Iron Man and Ragnarok are the only ones I unreservedly loved.

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Yeah Daybreakers is the one with interesting worldbuilding that they do basically nothing with. I liked it but I found it quite frustrating.

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What’s the appeal of the Marx Brothers? I’m watching Duck Soup and it seems like one of the least funny comedy movies ever to me. Maybe you have to know the brothers before seeing this? It starts out completely silly, with no motivation for why things happen and only gets stupider.

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I envy the technical skills on display, but I found The Double Life of Veronique to be incredibly dull. The only thing that might make it interesting would be trying to solve the puzzle of what it was, but then that's not the movie any more.

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On 26/08/2018 at 11:00 PM, Erkki said:

What’s the appeal of the Marx Brothers? I’m watching Duck Soup and it seems like one of the least funny comedy movies ever to me. Maybe you have to know the brothers before seeing this? It starts out completely silly, with no motivation for why things happen and only gets stupider.

 

I actually don't like Duck Soup at all. Animal Crackers is a better earlier version of the Marx Brothers stuff, and honestly when they sold out and became a musical type thing Night at the Opera and Day at the Races are pretty great (from what I remember I haven't watched them in 20 years).

 

As for the appeal, it is hard not to appreciate Groucho Marx's one-liners at that time - there was something barbed but also disorientating about them. I still paraphrase Cheeko's line from NatO 'I'd give you my seat but I'm sitting in it' and some of the comedy sketches they did have been infinitely immitated. Not sure how I would feel about them now, much like some of Peter Sellers's output but I feel they have a place in the pantheon of comedy because of what came after them.

 

For me, Duck Soup is not the best of the lot and I guess that is where I differ from most people. I don't think I've sat all the way through it.

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11 hours ago, syntheticgerbil said:

Haha I love that my bad joke about Die Hard and Family Matters was lumped into this thread, because I actually like the movie Die Hard.

Maybe you posted it here? This is not a new thread, I renamed it recently, though.

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On 12/10/2018 at 10:52 AM, syntheticgerbil said:

I'm so old.

I'm older!

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Not a movie, but a TV show. I finally decided to watch The Sopranos, and while the acting and production is great I struggled with it, mainly because I didn't like hardly any of the characters. Tony, in particular, is a real piece of shit. I don't mean to imply that you can't have characters with questionable morals (of course you can) but I get the sense we as the audience are supposed to care for him. This is also what I found in various essays discussing the show, with many explaining how they relate to Tony. I mean, the family he supposedly cares about would walk out the door if they knew the extent of, or weren't in denial about, his actions. They spend more time on his infidelity than his interactions with his kids. He's constantly bitching about how the therapy isn't helping, and it's true because the only bit of character growth he has comes after a near death experience.

 

I don't know how I'm supposed to care about anyone, except Adriana, in that show.

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On 8/16/2018 at 9:09 AM, twmac said:

Jumanji - I think I was too old for jumanji by the time it came out and it felt like yet another sugary Robin Williams vehicle alongside Mrs Doubtfire, Patch Adams and Hook.

 

The sequel can go in this thread too. Outside of about ten minutes of legit good body swap comedy, this whole movie is overworked and empty. (And I actually don't think the original is that sugary; it has a feeling of real danger and mischief, and Williams' character is dealing with PTSD, racial guilt and father issues - but y'know, for kids.)

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I don't think that's fair

 

They also have that one good joke about video games characters with inexplicable weaknesses

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