Films You Hate, But Everyone Else Loves

Oh okay, I also like 12 Monkeys a lot better than Brazil. I haven't seen other Gilliam movies though. But Brazil just goes over the top for me, and it makes Tim Burton look subtle in comparison.

I actually like Pulp Fiction a lot better than Reservoir Dogs, and for me, Reservoir Dogs felt like an okay, but mediocre Tarantino wannabe knock off movie, but maybe I need to watch it again.

Yeah it's a little Burtony isn't it There's hints of that in Zero Theorem as well, but I didn't find it annoying at any point. Recommend checking it out.

I can see why many hold Brazil high. It's pretty groundbreaking and novel. I think Zero Theorem is a better movie overall, but that's a bit apples and oranges. Also kinda unfair to compare futuristic stuff which release dates are like 30 years apart.

Airplane! (1980)


I know comedy is very subjective but I found maybe 5% of the jokes funny. It's just a dumb, ridiculous and pretty dull film. It baffles me that many people regard it as one of the greatest comedy films ever made. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

You're the man. I hated Airplane! Check out my review and find out why Airplane! review

Titanic. Love LEO but don't care two squats about the movie.

I don't care for this either or any American comedy like this. Too disgusting and too degrading for my taste.

Yeah I pretty much agree with everything you wrote. Perhaps if I'd seen some of the disaster movies it was spoofing I might have found it funnier but I doubt it. Most of the jokes were just really cheesy and cringy and the plot was boring, especially all the flashback scenes. It was a real effort to stick with it until the end: I was quite proud of myself for completing such a feat of endurance.


1/5 Stars.

You've got to have a heart as cold as the Atlantic to not like Titanic... It's a classic.

When I first saw Airplane!, I hadn't seen most of the movies it was referencing and I still loved it. Conversely, I'd seen most of the movies referenced in Disaster Movie and absolutely despised it. A good parody should still manage to be funny regardless of the audience's familiarity with the source material.

__________________
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I neither loved nor hated Airplane. After years of seeing listed as peoples' favorite comedy, I was like, "Um . . . okay." A lot of the jokes were just not my brand of humor.

An example for me of having the opposite reaction to most people is the films of the McDonagh brothers.

So I know a ton of people who just love In Bruges. I thought that it had some real strong points, but also was kind of a tonal mess. I rarely dislike a film that I see on the big screen (big screen magic!), but In Bruges was a rare exception. Martin McDonagh also made Seven Psychopaths. Both of these films have strengths, but also things I consider serious flaws.

John McDonagh, his brother, made The Guard and Calvary, the former is really good and the latter is superb. And yet I hear Martin's films discussed far more frequently and I don't understand why.

Yeah I remember being distinctly underwhelmed by In Bruges. I've always planned on rewatching it but never got around to it.

I saw In Bruges in theares and remember liking it quite a bit, but I've been extremely reluctant to revisit it after being severely unimpressed by both Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - I wonder if the latter qualifies as a movie that "everybody loves" (I think the resulting discourse makes it seem divisive enough to disqualify it, though it does still have enough acclaim from critics and audiences to make me think otherwise).

One movie that I could not get into at all was The Boondock Saints. I thought it had some laugh out loud funny moments, but it also had quite a few painfully bad moments to. Everyone I know loves this movie, and when I went to film school, one of the students said it was one of the best movies ever made. But after watching it, I don't understand the hype.

FRIDAY

When you're like, 19 years old, it seems like the perfect movie. If you're over the age of 23, it's a mostly well-paced bit of bro-fluff carried by charismatic performances from its lead actors. Its desire to be edgy becomes borderline painful on a rewatch (OMG they punch a woman--but she was a butch feminist so it was cool, bro! Hey, there's a gay character but HE is the one who calls someone a f*ggot, LOL!!!).

I do think that everyone should watch Overnight, the documentary about the director of The Boondock Saints and how once he got a little bit of success (ie a distribution deal for the film) he turned into a huge jerk and basically went around burning bridges like it was his job.

Yeah I saw Overnight and it was good. In Overnight, they talk about how The Boondock Saints was the hottest script in Hollywood that everyone wanted at the time, which surprises me, unless the finished product was not as good as the original script on paper?

Also Willem Dafoe was really good in it. If he played the same character in a better movie, that would have been awesome.

Something that is not the film's fault is that a lot of the marketing overplayed it as a quirky comedy. I mean, it is a comedy, but it's also very violent and depressing.

Part of the problem (and this is the film's fault, IMO) is that the opening act is SO GOOD. The playground conversation between Farrell and Gleeson is quietly heartbreaking and well acted and all around brilliant. And then, from my point of view, the film just slides into something messy and garish. The labored plot element of introducing a character who is a person with dwarfism. It totally loses its emotional center for me.

The years after Pulp Fiction spawned a lot of quippy and violent action/comedy/crime/thriller stuff. I think that you can see why Boondock Saints was so coveted--it has the cutesy/edgy dialogue, it has the gay detective (at a time when gay men in action roles were . . . . not a thing at all), and it has a very specific setting. It's a movie that aims right at the heart of your average male movie-going bro, but also at the heart of people who want to think of themselves as being a little smarter than your average male movie-going bro. There's the meta element of the detective character constantly commenting on how unlikely and outrageous the action scenes are. I would say it was one of the most watched movies in college in the early 2000s.

Trying to think of other films in this mold from the same era. You have Way of the Gun (a film I mostly do like), for example. (Notice that both films establish their male heroes by having them punch "mouthy" women in the face in ways that are shot to be funny and/or celebratory). You have "guys with guns" film Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrells. David O Russell's Three Kings. The violent, gritty, time-warped action/comedy was a thing and Boondock Saints was one of the most accessible films in that style.

Oh okay. I saw Three Kings but I would say that's in a much higher league, as well as Pulp Fiction. I never thought of The Boondock Saints made as a result of Pulp Fiction. One movie I find more comparable to The Boondock Saints is Shoot Em' Up, but I found Shoot Em' Up to be more focused with better humor, and didn't try to be as serious as The Boondock Saints. So maybe a lot of people feel the same way about Shoot Em' Up, that they would The Boondock Saints?

I feel like Shoot Em Up belonged to the next wave of violent action/comedies where the films got almost more cartoonish. I'm thinking of things from that era like Wanted where the style was deliberately more cheeky. Even something like Sin City. The focus kind of shifted from emphasis on dialogue and story structure to emphasis on the style of the film itself.

That might be a bit reductive or generalizing, but those are sort of the big swaths I see.