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.
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
The original Star wars trilogy was overrated, the sequels were underrated, and I’d rate them all to be equally mediocre.
The best thing about Star wars is the world building. The expanded universe with the books, comics, and cartoons contain much better stories than any of the movies.
The sequels were rated quite well by critics, except for the final one. The Last Jedi even got a better rating than Return of the Jedi from the originals.
I agree that overall the original Star Wars films are overrated.
The Empire Strikes Back is the only one that I would say is a great movie.
A New Hope is solid. You can find blemishes, and they’ve torn new ones with the “special editions” that just cram more CGI shit on the screen for no reason, but as a classic Hero’s Journey movie A New Hope works rather well. It was amazing for its time; I mean, a fun Sci-Fi movie? With special effects this good? It was a cultural phenomenon for a reason.
The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie that has been made, which is why when most people quote Star Wars they’re actually quoting Empire. The characters are at their deepest, the setting feels the most magical, and the Luke/Vader saber fight is utterly gripping.
Return of the Jedi was the beginning of the “Lucas is a genius who can do no wrong, do everything he says” era. The “let’s put a funny thing in the background” starts happening. We get Jabba’s hedonism palace with the droid torture room, Bikini Leia, Ewoks, and lightning hands Palpatine. This would only get worse by the time the prequel trilogy is made, Lucas gets to make whatever he wants without question.
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
Most horror movies have worse acting than a porno.
There is no accounting for taste. Who’s to say what’s a better actor?!
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.
My head hurts.
Stanley Kubrick never made an original film, they are all adaptations of other creators original works.
And yet, they are fantastic films. Your statement is not really an opinion, it’s a fact. My statement is an opinion.
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.
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.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is a cyberpunk movie.
Mars is a dystopian, broken society in which cyberware is so ubiquitous that we only ever see one Martian without visible augmentation. Every character in the movie does what they do for purely selfish reasons, with the exception of the idiot Droppo, the old man Chochem who remembers society for what it was before it went to hell, and the mythological embodiment of generosity himself. When Chochem suggests that Mars needs a Santa Claus, the immediate response isn’t to research and emulate St. Nick, nope. Martian society is so degenerate that the first idea is to commit a crime: to kidnap the jolly old elf. And all of Earth’s governments are incapable of stopping them.
Cyberware, broken society, selfish characters, rampant crime, laughably inadequate government? What genre does that sound like?
When I pointed out that Santa Claus Conquers the Martians predates Blade Runner, the film that most people consider to be the first cyberpunk movie, by some 18 years, at a tabletop session of Cyberpunk 2020, I was less than popular with those assembled.
I decided to not press my luck by pointing out that it came out 4 years before the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Hooray for Santy Claus.
it’s actually spelled film
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.
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.
Out of all the bad opinions in this thread, this one legit made my BP rise. Well done at having a terrible opinion lol
Inconceivable 💀
Tarantino is trash and Ruins movies that should be good with weird edginess. Django unchained would be 10/10 with someone else as director. I never saw a good movie from him. I DK how death proof scores as high as it did. I gave that a 2/20. what a waste or kurt Russell and other good actors.
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.
Horror movies are unfairly judged because most people who do not like horror movies watch them for the wrong reasons.
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
I never met another person who like Eye of the Beholder, I really enjoy it. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0120662/
