Topic Question
Added 2023-05-30 04:30:32 +0000 UTCName a movie you hate that everyone else loves, and why.
Comments
Yes definitely does. And I agree with you on how you arrive at it.
Deepfocuslens
2023-06-02 22:39:35 +0000 UTCAnd yes, Janis is awful. Her monumental self-absorption and cluelessness…it makes me think that some characters are better off in supporting roles. I couldn’t imagine a film or show built around someone like her. It’s funny how we were never more on her side than when she blew away Richie Aprile, but then she goes and steals that woman’s leg…she definitely qualifies as an unlikeable character, but she doesn’t ruin The Sopranos for a couple of reasons. As I said, she’s a supporting character, so she doesn’t overwhelm the show with her cringey self. And though she’s one of the least sympathetic characters, we also know she didn’t have it easy in life. She’s been through some things which gave her her issues. But maybe more than that, Janis as a character never loses her integrity, and never ceases to be real. That’s due to both her characterization and the show’s clear-eyed, unwavering view of her. Her marrying Bobby Baccala is never viewed as a cheap, easy redemption for her past relationships and misdeeds. There’s hope and dread in equal measure regarding her getting involved with that family. And yeah, she is important, both in understanding Tony and what it is to grow up a Soprano. Those other characters in the shows you mentioned seemed to have failed because the creators lost sight of who they were and/or didn’t know what to do with them. I suppose that can happen when you’re working under the grueling schedule of TV, especially as seasons go on. You lose sight of the overall creative vision and focus and characters can suffer as a result.
Bennett Oliver
2023-06-01 03:31:12 +0000 UTCTo answer your question, Maggie, regarding how often I don’t like a film due to an unlikeable character compared to a narrative…I’d say that those two elements are often intertwined. Or at least, the character and the stance that the narrative takes towards them. A character isn’t ruinous to a film necessarily because of their moral character. I mean, there’s no shortage of people in movies and TV who are reprehensible—people we wouldn’t want anything to do with in our real lives—who are, as you say, utterly compelling to watch. As you also say, a lot of that has to do with how realistically they’re drawn, how rich and complex and utterly human they are, and how we as an audience come to understand that humanity. The more we wish to understand a character—and in most cases, the more we succeed in doing so—the more compelling they are to watch and the more we wish them to achieve their goals. A great recent example would be Mikey Saber from Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. There’s absolutely no reason to like the guy. He’s a liar, manipulator, predator, and all-around sociopath. But we come to root for him to succeed over the course of the film because we come to understand where he’s coming from, and while we don’t exactly start to sympathize with his desperation, we do begin to root for him to succeed in climbing out of rock bottom. Sean Baker achieves this by presenting the audience with a sober, clear-eyed objective stance on who Mikey is. He holds no illusions of Mikey’s monstrous flaws, but he doesn’t judge him for them either. We the audience are left to make up our minds about him. And so an unlikeable character becomes a great, compelling character, in part because we have to work out how to feel about him. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that he’s also very charming. On the other hand, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is an example of when a narrative stance towards a character is fatal to the film. It positions Ferris as the ultimate cool guy, the type of person that girls love and guys want to be, because he so effortlessly glides through life and gets what he wants. The film fails to see that those qualities stem from narcissism and entitlement. If the film took a more honest stance and repositioned Ferris as an antihero, highlighting his flaws and the destructive consequences of his actions, he might’ve been a better character; he would’ve gained in complexity and ambiguity. But no, the movie wants you to so very, very much like Ferris, giving itself blinders, and suffers as a result. He’s the wrong kind of unlikeable because I can’t stand to watch him, and I can’t stand to watch him because he’s being presented in a disingenuous bullshit manner. So yeah, a film’s narrative, or rather its narrative stance, is important in determining the effectiveness of a character. It’s not a matter of formulating judgment. It’s a matter of providing or allowing for…clarity, if that makes sense. Ferris may be a better person than, say, Tony Soprano, but I’d rather watch Tony because, among other things, I know I’m not being jerked around by David Chase into getting me to like him. I have room to form my own opinions about who he is. As for Being John Malkovich, I ultimately don’t like it not so much because Kaufman didn’t create badly written characters, but because he positions them in the narrative that asks us to feel something towards them that we don’t. There’s a power struggle that occurs in the third act, and I don’t care who comes out on top because I find all of the characters to be awful, selfish, cruel people. I consider it an act of subversion on his part that didn’t work out but unfortunately was very detrimental to the film. In thinking of other films that I feel are ruined by unlikeable characters…it’s not so much because they’re unlikeable that I think they ruin the film, it’s because they’re badly written and thinly conceived. When they are that way I don’t care for them, and when I don’t care for them they become unlikeable. Is there any example more egregious than Anakin Skywalker in the prequels? He was meant to be Lucas’ great tragic hero, but because of a thin conception of his downfall he came off as a petulant brat who turned to the Dark Side because they let him do whatever he wanted. His evil acts seemed more like tantrums than anything else. But even he’s topped by Rey Whateverhernameis in the sequels, who’s more feminist conception than actual character. Do you know why she was such a Mary Sue, someone who excelled at being a Jedi with very little difficulty? Because she had no character flaws to overcome in her journey. Why did she have no character flaws? Because the creators were afraid that if she were given any, no one would like her and hold her up as a role model. How ironic in their desperate attempt to make her appealing they doomed her to unlikeability because of how bland and boring she is. But that’s really all I can think of right now. To me, characters become hated more often than not because of how terribly they’re written. Movies like Being John Malkovich and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are more anomalous. Anyways, I hope this answers your questions.
Bennett Oliver
2023-06-01 02:42:15 +0000 UTCThere are soooo many unlikeable characters on The Sopranos, I should point out. Unlikeable yet the most compelling you can imagine. But I do think Janis takes the cringe to monumental levels even so. Even just her walk.....XD....it's just, everything about her my eyes, ears, and mind, want to reject. And yet...she's an important piece of things. Very important.
Deepfocuslens
2023-06-01 00:31:54 +0000 UTCI actually have a question for you, Bennett. One I've been thinking about for you a bit recently. How often do you feel that your distaste for a film is more having to do with the unlike-ability of a character, compared to more the narrative? Like...maybe you love Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood...and yet you may hate Ferris in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But what's the difference there in ones mind? Also...what are some movies where the character is just so unlikeable, that it keeps you from enjoying the film? The ones that come to mind for me are from tv actually. For me as an example...Rachel Berry from Glee made it near impossible to watch the show at a certain point . Perhaps I knew too many girls like her but...the stereotype was too on the nose. Though, I can get behind a despicable character with the right type of writing. And I would've loved if this character had been written well. I would've loved to hate her, in the right ways. But in Glee's case, it felt like Rachel sank to incredible lows to get her way, and yet the script, the writers, the creators, clearly wanted to glorify her talents and what she was, always finding an out for her, at the expense of other characters, in a way that felt really misguided. Ethics only applied to some, but never her, which I take offense to as a viewer. Marnie from the show Girls, is another one. Though...I tend to somehow think Allison Williams brings a humanity to that delusional bitch. XD Marnie has somewhat grown in my mind overtime, and yet, the shift in her character from realistically high-strung, to the cartoon she became, never sat well with me...even if we at times, delight in her humiliation. Something was just never clicking. Some characters were resolved better than others in that show...but hers was always perplexing. Felt a bit like a nose dive. An example of a character that is deeply unlikeable from every angle, and yet it works for the show...is Janis Soprano in The Sopranos. She is so realistic, so well written, and yet I think everyone hates her. But...that's okay. She is supposed to be disliked, and she is supposed to feel eerily realistic in how pathetic she is...which is why I fully love this example. But that's just The Sopranos. The best writing ever so far as character building on tv, imo.
Deepfocuslens
2023-06-01 00:28:28 +0000 UTCLala land. Can't bear anything about it. It's like a sweet with double dose of sugar and honey. So stylish yet no content at all. The songs are like hungry newborn cats moaning for milk.
Alexandros Alexandropoulos
2023-05-31 13:21:52 +0000 UTCThanks. I’ll be sure to check it out.
Bennett Oliver
2023-05-31 02:31:09 +0000 UTCI’ve been meaning to rewatch Eternal Sunshine for awhile and I might join in calling it a masterpiece once I do. Always have liked it but for some reason it never quite hit me the way it has most people. I can’t recommend Synecdoche enough though, it just became available on Criterion Channel if you have it. Anomalisa & Im Thinking of Ending Things are pretty good as well. Not in the same ballpark as Synecdoche but definitely worth a viewing. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is Maggie’s favorite.
Stephen
2023-05-31 02:21:15 +0000 UTCAdmittedly, I’ve never seen any of his directorial work. Been meaning to watch Synecdoche. But Eternal Sunshine is, I think, him at his best. He engages in all the things we love him for—the giddy, mind-bending surrealism, the crazy, out-there scenarios—but he uses them to create a very moving, complicated love story. And he winds up saying some very astute things about love, mainly how the qualities that draw us to a person can be tied to the flaws that drive us away. I think it’s a masterpiece. I’ll take Joel and Clementine over anyone in Being John Malkovich anytime.
Bennett Oliver
2023-05-31 01:28:42 +0000 UTCInteresting. What do you think of Synecdoche, New York? It was my introduction to him as a teenager and it was a revelation to me to say the least. It also produced one of my favorite Ebert reviews. Any thoughts on his directorial work in general?
Stephen
2023-05-31 01:11:29 +0000 UTCI discussed a lot of your criticisms when I posted about Forrest Gump a month ago, but you bring up one that I didn’t address: the innate conservatism found at the heart of the story. To which I say…you’ve got a point. It’s definitely there. All that can be said is that the buried politics most likely stem from the novel from which the film is based. I’ve never read it, but I know that it was written by a man named Winston Groom, a Southerner and Vietnam veteran who most certainly was not a hippie, and most likely was not a fan of them either. I feel confident that the conservatism was a hell of a lot more prominent in the source material. In adapting the novel, Robert Zemeckis and Eric Roth most likely tamped down on that conservatism in the hopes of making a more apolitical film that was more fable than screed. They succeeded in tamping it down, but they couldn’t eliminate it completely. It is there, as you said, in the trajectory of the lives of Forrest and Jenny. Forrest lives a simple, patriotic life and succeeds beyond his wildest dreams while Jenny takes the countercultural route and sinks into the abyss towards near-suicide. To compensate, I think that Zemeckis and Roth came up with the idea that, rather than have Jenny’s life be a symbolic condemnation of the counterculture, her life of promiscuity and substance abuse is an extended act of self-destruction, a means of escaping the trauma of her childhood. I’ll admit that such a notion, done crudely, can be construed as reductive and rather insulting, especially to anyone who suffered from sexual abuse in their childhood, but…I think that Robin Wright, in the best performance of the film, carries it off beautifully, or at least as best she could. Though we’re locked out of her interior life, she makes Jenny human and all of a piece, not just a collection of wounds and bad decisions. She’s been through a lot in her life, and we never blame her for the choices she’s made or the life she’s lived. We understand in each scene where she’s coming from. I will admit, however, that it’s an ugly, contrived notion to have her die of AIDS at the end (when did she get it?). It serves as too easy a resolution to her and Forrest’s story and, yes, leads to oversentimentality. I’m not posting to say you’re wrong to hate the film. It takes the 1960s—one of the most complex, turbulent, dynamic decades in American history—and renders it as mere tapestry to a rather simple-minded fable. That was never going to sit well with everyone; some find it a distasteful thing to do. I’m fine with it, and like the film for what it is. There are other films, books, and documentaries that provide a deeper, more insightful look into what the ‘60 were about. I hope in posting this that you get an idea of where people are coming from when they say they like the film. True, it may to some people be an affirmation of “old-fashioned values”, but they could also like it simply for the fact that he gets the girl in the end.
Bennett Oliver
2023-05-31 00:40:03 +0000 UTCBeing John Malkovich. “Hate” might be too strong a word, but I’ve never been much of a fan. It’s not that I don’t respond to the wondrousness that’s being presented. For many of us, this was the first film in which we were exposed to the wildly original mind of Charlie Kaufman. With his endlessly inventive screenplay as directed by the equally inventive Spike Jonze, Kaufman brings us into a heady, dazzling wonderland of casual surrealism, fantastical absurdism, and madcap wit. You could say that it’s an inspired mixture of Kafka and Monty Python, but it’s really pure Kaufman and his riff on the nature of identity and how we all long to be other people. But all this incredible originality is, to me, strongly negated by one major factor: with the exception of the put-upon Malkovich and the hilarious Charlie Sheen, I don’t like a single character in the film. They’re all selfish, cruel, and uncaring people, only thinking of what they desire and nothing else. To have such unlikeable people may be intended as part of the subversiveness of Kaufman’s script, but it’s hard to be carried along by a film, no matter how unique it is, when you want nothing more than to have each character get hit with a beer can. BJM was highly acclaimed, but I much prefer his later works Adaptation and especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Bennett Oliver
2023-05-30 23:45:43 +0000 UTCHave seen any films by the director Miranda July? If so what do you think of them?
anthony scully
2023-05-30 23:05:11 +0000 UTCthat’s me and half of Michael Bay’s filmography lol i love that guy
Jared Angcanan
2023-05-30 22:46:21 +0000 UTCMe and Breakfast at Tiffany's is like Maggie with An American in Paris. I know it has problems but it's still one of my favorites anyway.
Wolfman Brandon
2023-05-30 22:42:39 +0000 UTCAvatar (2009). This has to be one of the most underwhelming cinematic experiences I've ever sat through. I have really admired much of James Camerons work, especially the original Terminator, but Avatar left me absolutely cold. The effects being impressive really didn't do anything to me because all of the characterisation was incredibly weak and the story felt like it was a lazy rip off of everything from Dances with Wolves to Fern Gully. It is like Cameron got so involved with trying to break new ground with regard to the effects that he forgot to do anything else right, even calling the mineral the corporate villains are after "unobtanium" feels like he just forgot to take out a place holder name in the script. As to the performances they were incredibly weak other than Stephen Lang who was at least going for it in terms of trying to be memorable villain. Finally, the message of the film is the (now nauseatingly familiar) "humanity sucks" nonsense delivered in a ham fisted way by a film maker whose recent output entirely lacks any human feeling at all. To me it ranks along side the Star Wars prequels as an expensively ambitious failure.
William Mckay
2023-05-30 22:27:19 +0000 UTCThis is one I watched pretty recently, but Grave of the Fireflies really, really frustrated me. A lot of people seem to consider it an anti-war film, but I never fully got that impression. It feels like it's supposed to be about the brother neglecting (and inadvertently killing) his sister, but the movie kinda fails to accomplish that presentation—because it doesn't really focus on their dynamics too well, in my opinion, and everyone around the brother is presented as complete assholes (which I'm not sure if that is what the movie is trying to accomplish, but I felt everyone treated the brother poorly despite how selfish his actions were)—especially with how it's established (in the beginning of the movie) that both die at the end.
vince2k
2023-05-30 22:18:05 +0000 UTCJust checked RT - the critic score is 88% out of 56 reviews and the audience score is 91% out of 100K+ ratings. So I respect your opinion, and I’m honestly happy the movie has a positive effect on you Wolfman, but it does look like a good pick for this topic considering most folks would agree with you vs me And to your point, yeah, I blame Edwards more than Rooney, and both have apologized several times, but holy shit that accent is insane hahaha 😂😂😂 I would pay good money to watch footage of him practicing that voice in his trailer, smiling at himself in the mirror and thinking, “Nailed it!”
Jared Angcanan
2023-05-30 22:09:26 +0000 UTCHaven’t read the Capote story and still didn’t care for it. Don’t outright hate it but every time Rooneys character appears he brings the movie to a screeching halt. It’s competently made but as a story I don’t think it works.
Stephen
2023-05-30 21:52:58 +0000 UTCI'd put that more on the director Blake Edwards. Mickey Rooney did exactly what was required of that role and did it competently. It was just an awful character that Edwards added to the story for cheap comic effect and this is coming from someone who loves the film. It seems like the people who hate it have read the Capote story. I'm not one to judge a film adaptation if compromises had to be made due to the Production Code. In 1961, Paul Varjak being gay and Holly being a heart of gold prostitute wouldn't have passed by the censors. I thought they did a fantastic job with what they had to work with.
Wolfman Brandon
2023-05-30 21:19:49 +0000 UTCForrest Gump. I find it to be unbearably saccharine and smug about how “apolitical” it is despite the complex nature of the time period it covers. For how much it strays away from addressing politics, I find that it’s extremely reactionary at its core. Look at the characters of Forrest and Jenny, who they are as people and think about why the movie has them where they are by the time the credits roll. The propaganda is so nauseating that I genuinely have difficulty understanding why it still resonates with so many people.
Jackson Littlewood
2023-05-30 21:05:29 +0000 UTCHome Alone (1990). Most people I know seem to like this one. I’m not sure why and neither are they. When I ask them what they like about it, I usually get something about the kid and the bumbling crooks. They can’t really remember much else and nothing very specific. My experience when this came out was that I went to the theatre to see it with some friends. I fell asleep and had to watch it later to get the plot which was stupid, stupid, stupid.
Paul Robinson
2023-05-30 16:21:49 +0000 UTCAlways so extreme with the question: hate/love and what's worse people are answering. Oh well, IHate Liberals pretending to be left wing, I hate modern cinemas, and the food they sell. I hate kier starmer. I dislike, dislike the way most of my friends are still impressed with lastest twat dazzling cape wearing, lazer sword nonsense from Disney. Not hate though.
Simon
2023-05-30 06:38:46 +0000 UTCET. Because it is naive
anthony scully
2023-05-30 05:45:55 +0000 UTCYeah, I’ve seen that, but firsthand, stg people were arguing with me saying they thought he was funny. Since racial stuff is a lot hotter in recent years, I’m sure they would backpedal now lol
Jared Angcanan
2023-05-30 05:13:37 +0000 UTCIn regards to Mickey Rooney's performance, I have a hard time believing anyone today would give it praise. For those who do, I have questions... I think most of public sentiment today can summed up in a famous scene from a Bruce Lee biopic called "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story." https://youtu.be/lbiymQJsC8M
Stephen
2023-05-30 05:10:31 +0000 UTCTop Gun: Maverick I saw this one in IMAX with an enthusiastic crowd and was not impressed. It felt so calculated with nothing much to hang onto. I say this understanding that we are living in a time where sequels are exclusively branding themselves around nostalgia for the original movies but even then this felt like too much. There where too many moments I turned to my friend telling him what was going to happen next. Additionally, the action sequences are overrated in my opinion and I say this while acknowledging that they're one of the best parts of the movie.
Stephen
2023-05-30 05:02:14 +0000 UTCFerris Bueller's Day Off. One of my least favorite tropes is those characters that act like hotshots by breaking all the rules with no motivation other than to be cool. He ditches school because he can. That's his character. No depth, no nuance. Nothing but a pretentious, unlikable bore that's treated like a know-it-all. I wish the movie was about Cameron who was much more relatable.
Wolfman Brandon
2023-05-30 04:49:51 +0000 UTCI can’t stand Breakfast at Tiffany’s. To me, the direction butchers the tone of Capote’s original work, and it plays like a broad romcom that is way too “Hollywood” for his story. George Peppard has dead eyes the whole movie, which is disappointing to me as a fan of him in the A-Team. Also, I know I may be biased as an Asian-American, but those Mickey Rooney scenes just feel gross. If racial humor has decent writing behind it, I’m willing to at least give it a shot, but holy shit, I can’t believe people still praised that performance while I was in film school. I love the scene showing Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River, but I hate pretty much everything else about it.
Jared Angcanan
2023-05-30 04:44:32 +0000 UTC
