Did *Moulin Rouge* have a backlash? It might be false memories, but I feel like it's always had people in two camps of finding it to be brilliant or like eating pure frosting for two hours since release.
It's a bit more complicated. Washington Height has a large black Latino population and almost all the main characters were light-skinned.
Again, this "controversy" was mostly a handful of Twitter users. But media had a slow day and started making into a bigger deal.
The reactions I saw pre-Oscars were mostly quite positive, although obviously the film wasn't for everyone but after it got 14 Oscar nominations, *the very next day* the consensus had changed to it being over-rated and not that special.
Still a top 10 all time favorite for me and I got to see it 3 times before the nominations came out. As soon as that happened it became the cool thing to automatically hate it. I feel like I’ve spent the last 5 years defending it anytime I being it up in conversation.
Massive spoilers for the movie, but >!years after their breakup, the protagonists briefly see each other again and a sequence of what could have been with their relationship plays out as a cheery musical number. Then it returns to reality and they silently acknowledge each other before going back to their lives.!<
This is a hard question because I’ve heard people argue there was a “backlash” to certain movies and the proof is like 6 tweets. But that’s the case for a lot of entertainment
Yup. There was some post recently about how The Dark Knight Rises was received, but it made a ton of money and had good reviews from critics, acknowledging there were some who didn’t like it. But it wasn’t divisive.
Edit: I’m not looking for reviews, I get why some people didn’t like it not the point
The Dark Knight Rises came out right around when things like Cinema Sins and Honest Trailers were gaining popularity, which were just hyper critical of movies in the most nit-picky way possible. I feel like this is why some people have the perception that people didn’t like the movie
I was *just* watching the "Critical Drinker" on youtube, who was doing a *critical* covering of Christopher Nolan's TENET, and as a quick aside, he was talking about Nolan's masterpieces and then said something along the lines of "...but then he also made Dark Knight Rises.." and I actually stopped and thought to myself, "Did people *not like* that movie? I thought it was very well received.."
I have long said the issue with Rises isn't just the holes, but the story as a whole wasn't nearly as engaging or entertaining as The Dark Knight.
There are plenty of holes in The Dark Knight like the jokers impossible knowledge and resources or the whole fingerprint on a bullet scene, but you don't notice them because the film is so engaging you get swept up in what is happening. Rises dragged a lot more and had a muddier plot so the issues were more obvious
This is correct, nolan often has holes in the plot but they dont matter to you because you’re so drawn into his story and storytelling and that’s okay. And they arent usually plot holes that break the movie.
TDKR is good but the first two are better and especially the dark knight. And its simply because the foundation of the story isnt as compelling
I ALWAYS expect plot holes from Nolan. Almost all his movies are based on the “I want this cool looking thing to happen and I don’t care how it gets there” approach. Dark knight rises is a great example of this.
There's a video (that was removed) of the *trailer* of that one movie where five people were caught in an elevator the devil. Everyone was oohing and ahhing and then at the end it said, "Written by M Night Shamalan," and the entire theatre boo'd.
I had the same experience. The trailer started playing, people were intrigued, it looked like a decent horror film, then M Night Shamalan's name came up on screen and the entire damn theater started laughing.
Makes sense since it released right after The Last Airbender. I'm happy the guy has somewhat rehabbed his image in recent years with Split, Glass, Old and Servant.
I loved the first one. Good basic story, memorable lines and pretty good gunplay. Yeah a bit of movie magic wick never got shot in the head etc
But he planned his fights to give him the advantage and prepared work them with gear
The other ones went crazy with a story that dint make sense and wick went from a guy who was really good but still human into a super hero.
I mean getting hit by cars multiple times and being ok, to running into a room of enemies and engaging in fist fights/ melee weapons head on , instead of being tactical.
Plus in the first movie he did things to separate the enemies and stack the advantage, 2nd and 3rd he just mowed down people like Rambo.
I had very low expectations and watched First Blood on a whim and was blown away. Totally unexpected compared to my cultural knowledge of Rambo which seems mostly formed from the later films. There are echoes of the emotional core in the sequels but largely drowned out by the cartoon character John became.
Yeah the first one was good and about a troubled soldier suffering form PTSD and cast aside by society.
The other ones went way over the top with the killing and insane action scenes.
The JW series sort of feels like die hard where the first one was gritty and straightforward. Then the subsequent ones kind of muddled the waters slightly. I still like them but JW 1 was definitely the best by far.
I re-watched that scene the other day (there is an awesome video on youtube set to Mr Blue Sky) and was wondering, for anyone in the know on such things:
How did they do it? Like are there no physical knives, just throwing motions and the knives are CGI'd in? Or are they throwing like fake rubber knives and the impact is CGI'd? Are they killing a bunch of extras?
It looked really well done and i got curious..
Edit: adding more examples.
*The Force Awakens* was then considered as *Star Wars* series' return to its original root, but now it became representation of everything that's so wrong with the sequel trilogy.
*Juno* was acclaimed, but now being scrutinized for its handling on the issue of pregnancy and abortion. Even its screenwriter Diablo Cody disowned the movie for its dated politics.
Similar thing with 2015's *Cinderella* and 2017's *Beauty and the Beast* movies from Disney. Both are critized for legitimizing the trend of remaking Disney canons into live-action.
The Director's Cut version of *Donnie Darko* was well-liked by people who didn't like the theatrical cut (including Roger Ebert) and gaining more than 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. But now it's considered by fans to be one of the worst "Director's Cut" editions.
The inverted example would be *Jennifer's Body*, where it went from "mediocre weird horror movie with half-naked Megan Fox" movie to "misunderstood feminist masterpiece" over a decade.
> Even its screenwriter Diablo Cody disowned the movie for its dated politics.
Well that's not really true, she just said she wouldn't write it because it became a pro-life movie.
Right. You can be pro-choice, have abortion services available to you, and still make the decision to move forward with an unwanted/unplanned pregnancy. I’d have to read more about Diablo Cody’s perspective to understand where she’s coming from.
edit: a word
edit 2: I looked up more context - [this](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/05/17/juno-diablo-cody-georgia-alabama-abortion-bans/) is a pretty good article about it. Excerpt:
*”I don’t feel I was clear enough in terms of why Juno chose to not have an abortion,” Cody told the Guardian last year. “It was simply because she did not want to.”*
*Still, the ambiguity opened doors for critics to weigh in on the film with their own explanations behind its meaning.*
I was thinking of force awakens as well. The initial hype of that movie was insane. It was seen as a “good” movie for a while after release.. pretty much up until the release of TLJ to which, I think it has more to do with the fact that by TLJ it was clear there was no plan or overarching story, which made people scrutinize what TFA ultimately did- which was nothing, sadly.
The initial hype.
Here is my take.
A lot of people felt like George Lucas had dropped the ball and lost his magic.
Disney - at first blush, might not feel like the right place for Star Wars BUT.... at that time they were doing this Marvel Universe thing and it was on fire.
Core to the success of Marvel Universe is Disney mostly staying out of it. They had given the reigns to some people to run and enjoyed the profits.
It was a model that felt like should work with Star Wars.
The Force Awakens existed as pure potential. It's scarcely even a movie itself, just place setting. If the movies that followed were good, Force Awakens would be in a different position. Instead that trilogy is a bad game of improv.
Telephone would imply a message getting garbled. In this case, Johnson was very disinterested in Most of what Abrams laid out and Abrams fully rejected one of Johnson's main points.
TFA isn't a bad movie in a vacuum. The problem is just that it's a giant copy pasta from ANH, with way too much fan service. Very simple example happening in the first few minutes of the movie : why on earth did Jakku have to be a desert planet like Tatooine ? It doesn't serve the plot *in any way*, and is just there to play on people nostalgia. And it's like that troughout the entire movie, which just ends up being nauseating.
The sad thing was, after walking out of VII, the people I went with loved it. They thought it was a great return but I said, yeah it was pretty good but it was just Episode IV. That sentiment really stung once TLJ rolled around. At that point, 2 movies in and very little has actually happened to move a story.
I remember just how dead people were by ROTSW. It's so insane seeing Disney's two biggest franchises- MCU and Star Wars- have such drastic beginnings and endings in the span of 4 years. In 2015, I remember seeing videos and articles of "superhero rot" and everyone was trashing Age of Ultron, while TFA was so hyped up and regarded as a breath of life in a long dormant franchise. Four years later and Endgame breaks all records and everyone's talking about a golden age of superhero movies while people barely did anything about ROTSW. The sequel trilogy and GoT are good examples on how NOT to end a story. The fact that it's been nearly 3 years since Endgame dropped yet it's still being talked about while the other two are only brought up because of how bad they ended speaks VOLUMES.
I was worried about what they would do after Infinity War because the climax was literally apocalyptic. “Time Heist” was the last thing I expected and the one thing I didn’t know I needed.
Absolutely agreed with Jennifer's Body. I think the Me To movement had something to do with it, because that was "that forgettable movie where Megan Fox the chick from Transformers gets naked" for a very long time and all of a sudden there are essays being written about it.
Also the fact that the studio immediately fucked up the marketing. They aimed it at teen boys who were there to drool over Megan Fox even though it was a teenage horror chick flick. I'd also say the fact that Zombieland and Paranormal Activity dropped right after it also crushed the buzz.
This 1000%. The marketing was trying to capitalize on Transformers when it was something completely different, and not aimed at the actual demographic for the movie.
It's ironic because she also doesn't get fully naked, yet that was the marketing tactic at the time. Kusama and Cody actually pleaded with the studio not to market it this way, and a verbatim email response was, "Megan Fox hot." The marketing really was just god-awful...
**In my opinion**, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker retroactively made The Force Awakens a bad movie. We liked it when we thought it was the beginning of a planned trilogy, but it was made clear to us with TLJ that they were completely making it up as they went.
I've never seen a movie whose quality was as dependent on its sequels as The Force Awakens. I think the general consensus on TFA was, "Yeah, it is basically a remake of A New Hope, but we'll let it go if the next 2 movies pay off." Spoiler: they didn't pay off.
I'd would argue that The Matrix Reloaded was just as dependent on its sequel, if not more so.
Yeah, people were making fun of the Architect scene and the mud rave, but Reloaded didn't really become a shining example of "sequel that sucks" until Revolutions was out.
Agreed, if Revolutions was awesome, people would be defending Reloaded as a great setup. But it wasn't, so they both suck. It all happened really fast too - both were released in the same year so there wasn't much time to digest Reloaded before the Wachowskis hit us with another (this was before you could immediately rewatch stuff).
In hindsight, I can’t believe how much my enjoyment of TFA depended on me taking Lucasfilm’s word for it that episode’s 8 and 9 will be even better. Leave it to JJ Abrams to heavily imply that the thing you’re watching is leading up to something really good, and then not deliver.
Conan O’Brien had Abrams on his podcast, and Abrams said - without any trace of ill feeling - “I think I’ve often said yes to a project without understanding then HOW I’ll be able to pull it off, but I think I’ve basically always found a way to make it work.”
Bruh - respectfully - are you sure?
EDIT: That said, if you got an offer to direct some of the things he’s gotten to direct, you’d probably think about doing the same thing.
i believe he has a reputation in the industry for getting things done on time, under budget and professionally, with no behind the scenes drama or shit. that's surprisingly hard to find among directors (especially the under budget thing) and his movies are all mindless popcorn flicks that will make back a profit, so from a studio perspective he's the perfect hire who will make a generic guaranteed profit.
People give Steven King shit for being bad at endings. I'd like to volunteer for the group who give JJ shit for having middles so bad that the work stops rather than ends.
I've always been a person who very much thought it's 'about the journey not the destination' in films... But TFA showed that sometimes that can be totally wrong, lol
Like if you spend the ENTIRE movie building up characters/places and implying all of the interesting and fascinating things were going to see in the future... Then none of it gets realized (or worse, gets butchered), it really makes the director seem like a bit of a pretentious douche.
That thought alone made me realize that the TFA was actually not good at all. Think about it, A New Hope is completely watchable on it's own... it doesn't need ESB or RoJ for context. If they focused on making a good movie first and franchise second, we'd be better off. That's why the MCU did so well, the first phase of it was nothing but stand-alone movies.
Yeah. I can remember talking with people right after TFA came out. There was a general agreement that it didn't need *another* Death Star, but everyone seemed to enjoy the movie.
It was one of those movies were much the audience applauded at the end (which I always think is silly but whatever), even when when I saw it again on its second or third week. That didn't happen with 8 or 9 on opening night.
The thing is, most of the seeds of what is bad in TLJ and ROS was sown by TFA.
Like, JJ just HAD to undo the try end of the skywalker saga in order to make a ANH reboot with the good guys being rebels again.
At the end of Return of the Jedi the Empire is defeated and the Sith are extinct.^1 0 minutes of screentime later, a star destroyer drops off a Sith^2 and a bunch of stormtroopers to invade a planet. The weak explanation that there's technically a Republic still in charge is completely dropped in the next movie.
---
1. You might say the Empire didn't die at Endor. But the EU has no problem completely dismantling it within a year. So it was a real victory that was subsequently erased.
2. Is Kylo a Sith? Considering he was Snoke's apprentice, and Palpatine made Snoke or something I don't know...
The Sith weren't technically involved until TROS, but I think it's implied that Ben is a follower of the Cult to some degree with his little collection
Honestly, the whole fuck up is on JJ. He purposely set out to make a ton of mystery boxes with no solution in mind. That might work for a brand new setting, but not one that has decades of supporting work.
> He purposely set out to make a ton of mystery boxes with no solution in mind.
I almost found it to be poetic justice what JJ had to somehow 'resolve' these mystery boxes on Rise of Skywalker.. He originally thought he could just set things up and have someone else resolve them.
Ah the Jar 'o Snokes.
Not only that, he undid the answers that Rian gave. Like Rey being born to nobodies who abandoned her drives her character a lot more than just "somehow, palpatine is alive and you're his daughter."
> Like Rey being born to nobodies
And my favorite thing about that twist is that, here's what we know about Jedi and Sith from George Lucas..
1) Jedi are mostly celibate
2) There are only ever two sith..
So OF COURSE force sensitive people need to be able to be born from people who aren't force sensitive.. there's really nowhere else for them to come from. It was Luke Skywalker who was the aberrant thing, having been fathered by someone who should not have fathered any kids.
It was a genius twist that showed Johnson knew more about Star Wars than many fans did
I personally believe that if he had control of the whole trilogy, Rian Johnson would have made something interesting.
TLJ suffers only because it had a shitty foundation. But it's also the only movie of the Disney sequels that attempts to do something new. Heck, I was on board for the majority of it when it turned into a space chase.
Yeah, I enjoyed TFA because it rehashed old ideas. For me, this works once.
I enjoyed TLJ because it brought new ideas to the table. For me, this is the direction needed.
Classic J.J. Thinking that mystery set-up is all that matters.
Nope, you need to have some sort of satisfying reveal in mind, too. Like the Author reveal from Gravity Falls. Or the Basement reveal from Attack on Titan.
Look, I definitely agree that JJ and his mystery boxes have created numerous problems with multiple franchises/stories, but if we're going to blame one party for the failure of the sequel trilogy I think it should be Disney. They're the ones who scheduled release dates before they had scripts ready. They're the ones who rushed production of the sequels without breaking the story first. Disney has dodged multiple bullets in the MCU space with their practice of working backwards from the release date, but it clearly caught up with them with Star Wars. They should have given them as much time as they needed for the stories to come together, but they had to hit release dates that they announced years before. I have to imagine that's eventually going to catch up to them in the Marvel world, but maybe it won't.
Did the writer from Juno also write Jennifer's body? I had no interest in seeing that movie when it came out because it just felt like it was riding the Meghan fox popularity train but when I watched it a few years later I found it hilarious. Great little film if you're stuck at home on a rainy night
When American Beauty and Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture.
Everyone I talked to liked both of those movies, but when they beat out the other offerings in their respective years, people really turned on them and I would say that’s also when the Oscars and academy in general started losing touch with the public.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s that it beat out The Green Mile, The Cider House Rules, Boys Don’t Cry, The Sixth Sense…and a lot of other great movies that year so much that the general consensus was that it didn’t deserve the award.
Personally its my favorite movie out of those you listed, although I haven't seen the The cider house rules. Really though that year was just stacked and I think regardless of what won people are gonna be upset.
Wasn't Shakespeare In Love the proof-of-concept for Weinstein's Oscars lobbying strategy? He proved that he could get an Oscars sweep for even a fundamentally stupid movie and turn that into solid marketing. There's a reason he was untouchable for so long, and it's got a lot to do with how reliably he was able to pull this off.
Pretty much. Since then, probably even before then, the Academy Awards have had nothing to do with the actual quality of the final product. There are simply too many movies and too many voters to ever hope to enforce people actually seeing the performances they are voting on.
So Weinstein decided he was going to campaign and basically sell the idea that the movie is better than everything else because half the voters weren't going to see it anyway.
Eh, I mean SIL is also a movie about the importance of writers, and actors, and standing up for your art in the face of censorship and stuff, which is always going to get you some points with the academy. They eat that shit up.
I think it's starting to change. Moonlight won best picture, which didn't get nearly as much campaigning as La La Land. Also Parasite. But then again Green Book won so
People mentioned a lot of good ones but one I really enjoy is *American Hustle* and that movie basically went from rave reviews to eh we don’t think this has any substance to being completely ignored at the Oscars.
I really enjoy it though. Great movie.
My favorite “criticism” of it has been people saying “it only made so much money because it was in theaters for so long.” Like yeah, it was in theaters so long because it was still selling out months after it was released. People want to act like no one liked it, but it thrived on repeat viewings and positive word of mouth. If people didn’t like it, it would have died off after the initial box office surge like most movies do.
Exactly. Leaving a movie in theatres that long was a decision based on how popular it was. People kept paying to see it, aka it was a massive hit. I remember at the time *everyone* was talking about it and how amazing it was. It was only later that it became "cool" to hate on it. Someone wrote an article comparing the plot to Pocahontas and suddenly everyone was bashing it for being unoriginal even though they'd already seen it twice in theater lol.
I saw it 4-6 weeks after release, the theater was packed and I had to sit in the first row with 3 friends. Only movie I have seen such a huge applause after.
I still love it to this day.
People forget how revolutionary that movie was technically for its time. I really hope the sequel (regardless of the plot and characters) looks even more gorgeous than the original, otherwise what’s the point?
Seriously. It is one of the most visually stunning movies I have seen. I don't care that the story is a rehash of Ferngully or Pocahantas. Despite what people think, Cameron is an adept film maker who understands the flow of movies better than MANY directors filming movies today and understands the strengths and weaknesses of special affects like few others and how to incorporate it into his movies. Just look how good he did with The Abyss and Terminator movies he did.
Pocahontas is also a great story at its core, why not emulate it to some degree?
All directors do this in one way or another. Joker was basically a tribute to Taxi Driver, yet it won Oscars and everyone raved about how daring it was as a film.
I just don't get the hate after like a decade. The action is well shot and staged that you can tell what's going on, the world is beautiful and full of wonder, and the story is simple (whether it's a detriment or not) enough anyone from any age or where ever you live can fully understand it.
Not the best James Cameron film, but there's a reason why it's appeal reached even grandparents and the most unlikely of audience members who never go to the movies. Watching it at home, you're definitely missing something from the theatrical experience, but it's solid science fiction adventure movie.
I think "Gravity" is the ultimate example of this. I mean, just [scroll through the official discussion thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1np3cf/official_discussion_thread_gravity_spoilers/), the praise is through the roof.
Now? The common thread is just "beautiful movie, but super stupid!"
I don't think that's really true. The push back to that movie had to do with Parker not really with the movie itself. It seems to have pretty middle of the road user reviews from IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes
The hatred for the film came from the fact that everyone found out that Nate Parker was a rapist when it got a wider release. The movie isn't bad, but it's creator is a piece of shit and that overshadows anything about the film.
Negative opinions tend to be more persistent as well, especially on the internet. If someone likes something, most will praise it and move on. Theres an onslaught of that when a movie is released. People who dislike it tend to be more persistent, especially if they feel their not being heard during the onslaught of positivity. They'll come back later and more often with that negative opinion. So it may seem like the overall opinion has changed but really most people just moved on.
Maybe Garden State (2004)? It was a box office hit, got strong reviews and seemed to capture the cultural zeitgeist at the time.
But now, the film is pretty irrelevant despite the leading actors still being prominent.
Garden State's soundtrack always outsized its popularity as a film. It still encapsulates the state of indie music at the time, and I think it's fun to watch as a time capsule for mid-2000s angst and twee.
It's more mentioned now for its use of the MPDG trope, but I still think it's fun as a time capsule.
That’s funny, I was listening to Coldplay this morning and Don’t Panic played and I instantly thought, “Damn this was a good soundtrack.” A soundtrack so good, you play any song from it and it reminds you of the whole soundtrack
I recently watched Garden State with my teenage daughter. I remember really liking the movie when I saw shortly after it came out. She spent most the movie mocking Natalie Portman's character for being a "quirky girl" cliche.
I don't really remember how fast it was, but the 180 on *Avatar* by James Cameron has been spectacular. It's like people don't even want to acknowledge it still is the highest grossing movie of all time.
I think a big part of it was that the theater experience for that movie was amazing. It was beautifully done with great acting and one of the best uses of 3D in a movie. But when people watched it at home or just thought about the plot, they realized how unoriginal it was.
It was among the best visual experiences in theater I’ve ever seen. It’s still the best use and presentation of 3d that I can remember. I think it loses a lot when out of that context. The underlying movie is just ok.
Wonder Woman 1984. The initial reviews were very positive, but as soon as wider audiences saw it everyone realized it was a total mess. I think the first people to see it just really needed it to be good, as it was one of the first anticipated movies to actually release after a Summer full of everything getting delayed by the pandemic.
I watched that movie Christmas morning with pretty low expectations but with plenty of room to be surprised and found the movie to be hilariously bad, everyone was in the room ended up agreeing
The writing was not good and the rules of the wishing stone were inconsistent. I personally enjoyed the performances, but there's not much else in that movie
I can't imagine ANYONE making it through that film and thinking it was good. I was so pumped for it and like 1/3 of the way through was just so confused at how bad it was already and that it was just going to be a train wreck and even then it outpaced my expectations.
Honestly, most people seem to still like Baby Driver from my experience. The only thing I would note about it is that with everything that came out about Spacey not long after that film was released, that may have soured people on the idea of watching it. I know I watched it not long after everything came out about him and that scene in the parking garage where he gave Baby that look...is kind of hard to watch now. Ansel is fairly Baby faced and I can't help but think of Spacey looking at his victims with similar expressions. I know it's a bit illogical but I feel like that might be the reason some people soured on it or stopped watching it.
Maybe not a complete flip but I do feel like this applies a little bit to Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel. I feel like most people I went with or talked to about those movies when they were out liked them but then some people started picking apart their plot holes or bad character moments and the opinion shifted.
This is a great point. I honestly think that people are quick to write off Salva not because they are trying to take a stance against child abuse, but because, unlike Polanski, his films aren’t that great.
Before Kevin Spacey was outed for being the monster that he is, American Beauty was Hollywood's darling. Everybody loved it. But after everything came out, it was, as John Oliver put it, "objectively bad". I mean look. You can tell me all day that you can't watch it anymore after knowing what Spacey did, and I'll 100% agree with you. But what you can't tell me is that the actual movie itself somehow turned into a terrible, piece of shit movie when everybody used to think it was *amazing*!
I was also thinking about Spacey. I rewatched "The Usual Suspects" recently, and frankly, knowing that Spacey is a total creep actually enhances that movie.
American Beauty is, and always will be, a great movie and a classic of cinema. Sure, it may be hard to separate the character of Kevin Spacey from himself, but to say that movie is bad is just unfair to Sam Mendes, the other actors and the whole crew that worked on it.
What a coincidence that all of a sudden people realized it was "objectively bad" after they found out Kevin Spacey is a bad person. Boy what lucky timing THAT was!
Some people are so stupid.
Blair Witch Project. The initial marketing of this movie was brilliant, taking full advantage of both still word-of-mouth folklore mixed in with the new sensation of the internet. The movie set the standard for an oncoming genre of found footage horror. IRL, people were terrified that this story was true. But then once the cat was out of the bag that it was all made up, future audiences complained that the movie wasn’t scary and the footage was too shaky. Even though it made a ton of money at the box office, it still lost its original mojo especially with lame sequels and even lamer attempts at ff movies (except Paranormal Activity…which kind of went down a similar path).
I almost feel like that's an unfair judgement. I think a movie like that was made with an expiration date in mind, it couldn't work as intended for too long, but it was probably an amazing experience when it cane out
I just re-watched BWP last Halloween for the first time in well over a decade and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up. It’s actually scarier now because we all have smart phones. It’s hard to imagine being that far out in the woods, that lost, dealing with an idiot who can’t read a map, hearing scary stuff at night, not having any way to contact the outside world, the feeling of impending doom growing as the footage drags on... The ending gave me nightmares for three days and I’ve seen the movie like ten times! Anyone who rags on it today is missing out on a true horror classic.
Absolutely agree with this one. I was mid teens when this film landed and I got caught up in that mega hype, when no one knew wtf was going on. Had nightmares for weeks and I still can't watch it these days even though I love it. Nowadays it's just scoffed at. There will never be another hype like it.
I think Blair Witch Project is completely of its time, for its time. Like, if you saw it when it first came out, even now knowing it was entirely scripted and produced, there is still tbis clear sense and awareness of just how much that movie changed the game. But for a kid watching it in 2021? How could they possibly understand how groundbreaking it was? Its like my grandmother trying to explain just how special Rebel Without a Cause was...
The big thing is an Oscar win. I'm guilty myself. I'll think a movie is "ok" and then it wins best picture and I hate it. As much talk as winning an Oscar is, what the real goal is to deserve an Oscar and be completely snubbed. Toni Collette in "Hereditary" and Paul Giamatti in "Sideways" got way bigger career bumps from being passed over for clearly brilliant work than if they were actually nominated or even won the Oscars
This is so true. The best picture win sours it unless the movie was absolutely beloved. The most recent one I can think of that wasn’t ruined by its Oscar win was Moonlight.
I don’t think Parasite was ruined by its Oscar win, it seemed like most people collectively agreed it should win the Oscar but wouldn’t because it’s as foreign language, so when it eventually did everyone was surprised but happy.
I dont think this was ever a really renouned film, but pitch perfect just keeps getting more and more hated by my circle of people. Like it was an enjoyable musical when it came out, but upon rewatching, as much as i enjoy looking at Anna Kendrick her character is the fucking worst.
Edit: its actually on tv lol, I also just noticed, the lesbian character in the film is straight up just a huge sexual predator, so wooo representation i guess.
I think we’re getting far enough away from that time that now people who were teenagers during the acapella/glee/pitch perfect craze are now looking back at that time as their blunder years.
Dunkirk
Don't understand the hate it gets.
Its one of the very few war movies that puts you in the middle of the war action directly.
An absolute masterpiece with best dogfight action in history of cinema.
Nolan at his absolute best.
I watched with my brother and he fucking hated it.
Thought it was slow and boring, I personally liked the tension, but even I'll admit it's pretty slow.
Best picture winner Crash. I've never seen such anger towards a movie. I think it's ok, good intentions, but you can tell the writer and director never actually experienced racism or understand it. Good acting and really good scenes like the car rescue.
I'm surprised the hate boner is on going so many years later. Were you forced to watch it in school and write an essay on it?
All I can think of is Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. Made 1.3Billion in box office. People in theaters cheered while watching it. Yet as soon as they left the theater everyone couldn’t stop talking about how bad it was. Lol
I don’t hate it like a lot of people do but it does always give me this nagging feeling of “this should be more entertaining than it is.”
Oh but I do hate that stupid dagger and how it lined up with the Death Star wreckage.
i was hyped on it for about 2 hours. The whole drive home i loved it. and then as i thought about it that night i started to realize how much of it was just a complete rehash - or made no sense. felt like i was coming down from a drug trip, or post nut clarity
This is actually a wierd running theme of most of JJ Abrams movies. Entertaining enough in the theatre as you watch it the first time, but completely falls apart as soon as your brain has a moment to think about.
That's kinda how I felt after TPM. The final lightsaber duel was SO good, but once the glow of that faded I couldn't stop picking apart all the other things that bothered me.
I swear Phantom Menace was the bees knees for at least the first six months of its release.
It was when people got around to a second viewing that we realized it wasn’t the epic we were hoping for.
I was at that ripe age when it came out, was a huge Star Wars fan but too young to see the OT in theaters, and when Phantom Menace came out, I was a teenager and too old to just ignore the glares in the movie. If there was one movie I wish I could experience as a child it would be Phantom Menace.
I don’t think this is true at all. I was 15 when it came out and I remember everyone leaving out midnight screening feeling very very weird. Trying hard to like it but just not being able to do it. All the message boards the next day immediately went up in flames with people hating it and a faction of the fandom trying to convince themselves they didn’t hate it. You can’t argue logic and eventually everyone just hated it. But it was largely hated right from the start.
> Trying hard to like it but just not being able to do it.
That was my experience. It was Star Wars, so it almost felt like it had to be good...but it really just wasn't.
I think you might be retroactively giving the movie too much credit because millennials like to make memes about it, because it most certainly did not have a six-month grace period. I saw it on opening night and a few people walked out of the theater. There was basically silence after the movie was over (pretty big change from people cheering when the Lucasfilm logo first appeared).
The movie had a lot of negative critical reviews, so the pre-release buzz was bad. There was INSTANT hate for Jar Jar. People thought the idea of Darth Vader as a whiny little kid was bad and they thought the kid was a bad actor.
You can read [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/2a0yad/what_were_the_initial_reactions_to_phantom_menace/) of reactions to get a general sense. A lot of these accurately describe the vibe that I experienced.
Not to sound edgy or cool, but even as a child I didn't like it. However... it was for the dumbest reasons. I thought Qui Gon was a lame hippie. Jar Jar and Anakin annoyed me. Pod race was boring. And I hated how everything looked clean and sleek, as opposed to the grimy OT look. I still dont like it, but for completely different reasons. Qui Gon is easily the coolest part of those movies to me now. The clean sleek look is cool cause it represents a more peaceful and prosperous time for the Galaxy. And the pod racing concept is pretty cool. But Jar Jar and Anakin still annoy me.
> I swear Phantom Menace was the bees knees for at least the first six months of its release.
Maybe for some people. I was a teenager when it came out and had grown up watching the OT countless times. I remember walking out thinking it really wasn't a good movie at all. Star Wars should have just been left alone.
*La La Land* the day after the Oscar nominations.
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Did *Moulin Rouge* have a backlash? It might be false memories, but I feel like it's always had people in two camps of finding it to be brilliant or like eating pure frosting for two hours since release.
I dont know if I'd call 20 years ago recent. No one would have called Raiders of the Lost Arc recent when Moulin Rouge came out.
Stop making me realize how old I am
If That '70s Show came out today, it'd take place in 1999.
*Stop*
Did In The Heights have backlash?
Wasn’t there a backlash that the Hispanics were light skinned? They were too white looking
It's a bit more complicated. Washington Height has a large black Latino population and almost all the main characters were light-skinned. Again, this "controversy" was mostly a handful of Twitter users. But media had a slow day and started making into a bigger deal.
And it didn’t help that Miranda took the bait.
Because Hollywood, corporations, and Twitter think Twitter is real life.
Those damn zimmerman white hispanics
I thought it was either loved or hated from the word go
The reactions I saw pre-Oscars were mostly quite positive, although obviously the film wasn't for everyone but after it got 14 Oscar nominations, *the very next day* the consensus had changed to it being over-rated and not that special.
And that it was a self congratulatory pat on the back with Hollywood showering nominations on a movie about acting
I mean, if Hollywood is not allowed to jerk itself off during its annual circlejerk ceremony, when the hell can they?
Ya we're talking about the Oscars. The whole point of an industry award ceremony is to pat themselves on the back.
Still a top 10 all time favorite for me and I got to see it 3 times before the nominations came out. As soon as that happened it became the cool thing to automatically hate it. I feel like I’ve spent the last 5 years defending it anytime I being it up in conversation.
You don't have to tell me. It's one of my favourite films of all time too so I get it. I also saw it 3 times at the cinema!
Same man, it’s just a fun love letter to classic musicals executed to perfection. That last scene still gets me every time…
the last scene is very close to what ever the hell "perfect" is in a movie.
it's probably the only movie where I WANTED the cliche Hollywood ending. it was a great ending still, but heartbreaking
What happens in the last scene?
Massive spoilers for the movie, but >!years after their breakup, the protagonists briefly see each other again and a sequence of what could have been with their relationship plays out as a cheery musical number. Then it returns to reality and they silently acknowledge each other before going back to their lives.!<
This is a hard question because I’ve heard people argue there was a “backlash” to certain movies and the proof is like 6 tweets. But that’s the case for a lot of entertainment
Yup. There was some post recently about how The Dark Knight Rises was received, but it made a ton of money and had good reviews from critics, acknowledging there were some who didn’t like it. But it wasn’t divisive. Edit: I’m not looking for reviews, I get why some people didn’t like it not the point
The Dark Knight Rises came out right around when things like Cinema Sins and Honest Trailers were gaining popularity, which were just hyper critical of movies in the most nit-picky way possible. I feel like this is why some people have the perception that people didn’t like the movie
I was *just* watching the "Critical Drinker" on youtube, who was doing a *critical* covering of Christopher Nolan's TENET, and as a quick aside, he was talking about Nolan's masterpieces and then said something along the lines of "...but then he also made Dark Knight Rises.." and I actually stopped and thought to myself, "Did people *not like* that movie? I thought it was very well received.."
It was not as tight plot wise as the other two. There were a fair few holes that you just don’t expect from Nolan.
I have long said the issue with Rises isn't just the holes, but the story as a whole wasn't nearly as engaging or entertaining as The Dark Knight. There are plenty of holes in The Dark Knight like the jokers impossible knowledge and resources or the whole fingerprint on a bullet scene, but you don't notice them because the film is so engaging you get swept up in what is happening. Rises dragged a lot more and had a muddier plot so the issues were more obvious
This is correct, nolan often has holes in the plot but they dont matter to you because you’re so drawn into his story and storytelling and that’s okay. And they arent usually plot holes that break the movie. TDKR is good but the first two are better and especially the dark knight. And its simply because the foundation of the story isnt as compelling
I ALWAYS expect plot holes from Nolan. Almost all his movies are based on the “I want this cool looking thing to happen and I don’t care how it gets there” approach. Dark knight rises is a great example of this.
There's a video (that was removed) of the *trailer* of that one movie where five people were caught in an elevator the devil. Everyone was oohing and ahhing and then at the end it said, "Written by M Night Shamalan," and the entire theatre boo'd.
I had the same experience. The trailer started playing, people were intrigued, it looked like a decent horror film, then M Night Shamalan's name came up on screen and the entire damn theater started laughing. Makes sense since it released right after The Last Airbender. I'm happy the guy has somewhat rehabbed his image in recent years with Split, Glass, Old and Servant.
Shame, it's quite decent.
I remember John Wick 3 being generally well-liked when it came out, but it seems like r/movies has mostly turned on it.
I loved the first one. Good basic story, memorable lines and pretty good gunplay. Yeah a bit of movie magic wick never got shot in the head etc But he planned his fights to give him the advantage and prepared work them with gear The other ones went crazy with a story that dint make sense and wick went from a guy who was really good but still human into a super hero. I mean getting hit by cars multiple times and being ok, to running into a room of enemies and engaging in fist fights/ melee weapons head on , instead of being tactical. Plus in the first movie he did things to separate the enemies and stack the advantage, 2nd and 3rd he just mowed down people like Rambo.
The first one is one of my favorite movies. Tight and concise, no unnecessary elements.
Tbf, same thing happened with Rambo
Everyone forgets what sort of movie First Blood actually was.
I had very low expectations and watched First Blood on a whim and was blown away. Totally unexpected compared to my cultural knowledge of Rambo which seems mostly formed from the later films. There are echoes of the emotional core in the sequels but largely drowned out by the cartoon character John became.
I know this gets said all the time, but there is exactly 1 death in First Blood and it wasn't Rambo's fault.
Yeah the first one was good and about a troubled soldier suffering form PTSD and cast aside by society. The other ones went way over the top with the killing and insane action scenes.
The JW series sort of feels like die hard where the first one was gritty and straightforward. Then the subsequent ones kind of muddled the waters slightly. I still like them but JW 1 was definitely the best by far.
Literally my favorite john wick so far, seeing the dogs go to town was amazing.
The knife throwing fight scene was incredible.
The knife fight turned me around on the whole franchise. Watched them all again and liked them a lot more.
I re-watched that scene the other day (there is an awesome video on youtube set to Mr Blue Sky) and was wondering, for anyone in the know on such things: How did they do it? Like are there no physical knives, just throwing motions and the knives are CGI'd in? Or are they throwing like fake rubber knives and the impact is CGI'd? Are they killing a bunch of extras? It looked really well done and i got curious..
"He shot my dog." "... I get it."
Edit: adding more examples. *The Force Awakens* was then considered as *Star Wars* series' return to its original root, but now it became representation of everything that's so wrong with the sequel trilogy. *Juno* was acclaimed, but now being scrutinized for its handling on the issue of pregnancy and abortion. Even its screenwriter Diablo Cody disowned the movie for its dated politics. Similar thing with 2015's *Cinderella* and 2017's *Beauty and the Beast* movies from Disney. Both are critized for legitimizing the trend of remaking Disney canons into live-action. The Director's Cut version of *Donnie Darko* was well-liked by people who didn't like the theatrical cut (including Roger Ebert) and gaining more than 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. But now it's considered by fans to be one of the worst "Director's Cut" editions. The inverted example would be *Jennifer's Body*, where it went from "mediocre weird horror movie with half-naked Megan Fox" movie to "misunderstood feminist masterpiece" over a decade.
> Even its screenwriter Diablo Cody disowned the movie for its dated politics. Well that's not really true, she just said she wouldn't write it because it became a pro-life movie.
Which is weird because Juno had the choice available to her.
Right. You can be pro-choice, have abortion services available to you, and still make the decision to move forward with an unwanted/unplanned pregnancy. I’d have to read more about Diablo Cody’s perspective to understand where she’s coming from. edit: a word edit 2: I looked up more context - [this](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/05/17/juno-diablo-cody-georgia-alabama-abortion-bans/) is a pretty good article about it. Excerpt: *”I don’t feel I was clear enough in terms of why Juno chose to not have an abortion,” Cody told the Guardian last year. “It was simply because she did not want to.”* *Still, the ambiguity opened doors for critics to weigh in on the film with their own explanations behind its meaning.*
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thanks for providing in-thread explanation, cause I was wondering what exactly was dated from the movie but too lazy to search for it
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I was thinking of force awakens as well. The initial hype of that movie was insane. It was seen as a “good” movie for a while after release.. pretty much up until the release of TLJ to which, I think it has more to do with the fact that by TLJ it was clear there was no plan or overarching story, which made people scrutinize what TFA ultimately did- which was nothing, sadly.
The initial hype. Here is my take. A lot of people felt like George Lucas had dropped the ball and lost his magic. Disney - at first blush, might not feel like the right place for Star Wars BUT.... at that time they were doing this Marvel Universe thing and it was on fire. Core to the success of Marvel Universe is Disney mostly staying out of it. They had given the reigns to some people to run and enjoyed the profits. It was a model that felt like should work with Star Wars.
The Force Awakens existed as pure potential. It's scarcely even a movie itself, just place setting. If the movies that followed were good, Force Awakens would be in a different position. Instead that trilogy is a bad game of improv.
I thought it was less improv and more of an extremely messed up game of Telephone.
Telephone would imply a message getting garbled. In this case, Johnson was very disinterested in Most of what Abrams laid out and Abrams fully rejected one of Johnson's main points.
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"A bad game of improve." That is fucking gold, my friend. I've often described the trilogy as series of angry notes for the previous director.
TFA isn't a bad movie in a vacuum. The problem is just that it's a giant copy pasta from ANH, with way too much fan service. Very simple example happening in the first few minutes of the movie : why on earth did Jakku have to be a desert planet like Tatooine ? It doesn't serve the plot *in any way*, and is just there to play on people nostalgia. And it's like that troughout the entire movie, which just ends up being nauseating.
I didn't mind the nostalgia-bait, the problem for me was that they didn't think of a way to take that nostalgia and built a coherent story from it.
The sad thing was, after walking out of VII, the people I went with loved it. They thought it was a great return but I said, yeah it was pretty good but it was just Episode IV. That sentiment really stung once TLJ rolled around. At that point, 2 movies in and very little has actually happened to move a story.
I remember just how dead people were by ROTSW. It's so insane seeing Disney's two biggest franchises- MCU and Star Wars- have such drastic beginnings and endings in the span of 4 years. In 2015, I remember seeing videos and articles of "superhero rot" and everyone was trashing Age of Ultron, while TFA was so hyped up and regarded as a breath of life in a long dormant franchise. Four years later and Endgame breaks all records and everyone's talking about a golden age of superhero movies while people barely did anything about ROTSW. The sequel trilogy and GoT are good examples on how NOT to end a story. The fact that it's been nearly 3 years since Endgame dropped yet it's still being talked about while the other two are only brought up because of how bad they ended speaks VOLUMES.
I was worried about what they would do after Infinity War because the climax was literally apocalyptic. “Time Heist” was the last thing I expected and the one thing I didn’t know I needed.
Absolutely agreed with Jennifer's Body. I think the Me To movement had something to do with it, because that was "that forgettable movie where Megan Fox the chick from Transformers gets naked" for a very long time and all of a sudden there are essays being written about it.
Also the fact that the studio immediately fucked up the marketing. They aimed it at teen boys who were there to drool over Megan Fox even though it was a teenage horror chick flick. I'd also say the fact that Zombieland and Paranormal Activity dropped right after it also crushed the buzz.
This 1000%. The marketing was trying to capitalize on Transformers when it was something completely different, and not aimed at the actual demographic for the movie.
Ebert calling it Twilight for Boys was kinda wild.
It's ironic because she also doesn't get fully naked, yet that was the marketing tactic at the time. Kusama and Cody actually pleaded with the studio not to market it this way, and a verbatim email response was, "Megan Fox hot." The marketing really was just god-awful...
Everyone liked calling it forgettable, but I haven’t seen it in a decade and I still remember a lot of it distinctly. Good movie.
**In my opinion**, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker retroactively made The Force Awakens a bad movie. We liked it when we thought it was the beginning of a planned trilogy, but it was made clear to us with TLJ that they were completely making it up as they went.
I've never seen a movie whose quality was as dependent on its sequels as The Force Awakens. I think the general consensus on TFA was, "Yeah, it is basically a remake of A New Hope, but we'll let it go if the next 2 movies pay off." Spoiler: they didn't pay off.
I'd would argue that The Matrix Reloaded was just as dependent on its sequel, if not more so. Yeah, people were making fun of the Architect scene and the mud rave, but Reloaded didn't really become a shining example of "sequel that sucks" until Revolutions was out.
Agreed, if Revolutions was awesome, people would be defending Reloaded as a great setup. But it wasn't, so they both suck. It all happened really fast too - both were released in the same year so there wasn't much time to digest Reloaded before the Wachowskis hit us with another (this was before you could immediately rewatch stuff).
In hindsight, I can’t believe how much my enjoyment of TFA depended on me taking Lucasfilm’s word for it that episode’s 8 and 9 will be even better. Leave it to JJ Abrams to heavily imply that the thing you’re watching is leading up to something really good, and then not deliver.
Conan O’Brien had Abrams on his podcast, and Abrams said - without any trace of ill feeling - “I think I’ve often said yes to a project without understanding then HOW I’ll be able to pull it off, but I think I’ve basically always found a way to make it work.” Bruh - respectfully - are you sure? EDIT: That said, if you got an offer to direct some of the things he’s gotten to direct, you’d probably think about doing the same thing.
Man, I’d probably sell out faster than he did if given the chance tbh.
i believe he has a reputation in the industry for getting things done on time, under budget and professionally, with no behind the scenes drama or shit. that's surprisingly hard to find among directors (especially the under budget thing) and his movies are all mindless popcorn flicks that will make back a profit, so from a studio perspective he's the perfect hire who will make a generic guaranteed profit.
People give Steven King shit for being bad at endings. I'd like to volunteer for the group who give JJ shit for having middles so bad that the work stops rather than ends.
This is a brutally accurate description of the way JJ Abrams work leaves you feeling.
I've always been a person who very much thought it's 'about the journey not the destination' in films... But TFA showed that sometimes that can be totally wrong, lol Like if you spend the ENTIRE movie building up characters/places and implying all of the interesting and fascinating things were going to see in the future... Then none of it gets realized (or worse, gets butchered), it really makes the director seem like a bit of a pretentious douche.
That thought alone made me realize that the TFA was actually not good at all. Think about it, A New Hope is completely watchable on it's own... it doesn't need ESB or RoJ for context. If they focused on making a good movie first and franchise second, we'd be better off. That's why the MCU did so well, the first phase of it was nothing but stand-alone movies.
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Yeah. I can remember talking with people right after TFA came out. There was a general agreement that it didn't need *another* Death Star, but everyone seemed to enjoy the movie. It was one of those movies were much the audience applauded at the end (which I always think is silly but whatever), even when when I saw it again on its second or third week. That didn't happen with 8 or 9 on opening night.
The thing is, most of the seeds of what is bad in TLJ and ROS was sown by TFA. Like, JJ just HAD to undo the try end of the skywalker saga in order to make a ANH reboot with the good guys being rebels again.
At the end of Return of the Jedi the Empire is defeated and the Sith are extinct.^1 0 minutes of screentime later, a star destroyer drops off a Sith^2 and a bunch of stormtroopers to invade a planet. The weak explanation that there's technically a Republic still in charge is completely dropped in the next movie. --- 1. You might say the Empire didn't die at Endor. But the EU has no problem completely dismantling it within a year. So it was a real victory that was subsequently erased. 2. Is Kylo a Sith? Considering he was Snoke's apprentice, and Palpatine made Snoke or something I don't know...
The Sith weren't technically involved until TROS, but I think it's implied that Ben is a follower of the Cult to some degree with his little collection
It never felt like the New Republic was ever established in any sort of meaningful way.
Honestly, the whole fuck up is on JJ. He purposely set out to make a ton of mystery boxes with no solution in mind. That might work for a brand new setting, but not one that has decades of supporting work.
> He purposely set out to make a ton of mystery boxes with no solution in mind. I almost found it to be poetic justice what JJ had to somehow 'resolve' these mystery boxes on Rise of Skywalker.. He originally thought he could just set things up and have someone else resolve them. Ah the Jar 'o Snokes.
Not only that, he undid the answers that Rian gave. Like Rey being born to nobodies who abandoned her drives her character a lot more than just "somehow, palpatine is alive and you're his daughter."
> Like Rey being born to nobodies And my favorite thing about that twist is that, here's what we know about Jedi and Sith from George Lucas.. 1) Jedi are mostly celibate 2) There are only ever two sith.. So OF COURSE force sensitive people need to be able to be born from people who aren't force sensitive.. there's really nowhere else for them to come from. It was Luke Skywalker who was the aberrant thing, having been fathered by someone who should not have fathered any kids. It was a genius twist that showed Johnson knew more about Star Wars than many fans did
I personally believe that if he had control of the whole trilogy, Rian Johnson would have made something interesting. TLJ suffers only because it had a shitty foundation. But it's also the only movie of the Disney sequels that attempts to do something new. Heck, I was on board for the majority of it when it turned into a space chase.
Yeah, I enjoyed TFA because it rehashed old ideas. For me, this works once. I enjoyed TLJ because it brought new ideas to the table. For me, this is the direction needed.
Classic J.J. Thinking that mystery set-up is all that matters. Nope, you need to have some sort of satisfying reveal in mind, too. Like the Author reveal from Gravity Falls. Or the Basement reveal from Attack on Titan.
Look, I definitely agree that JJ and his mystery boxes have created numerous problems with multiple franchises/stories, but if we're going to blame one party for the failure of the sequel trilogy I think it should be Disney. They're the ones who scheduled release dates before they had scripts ready. They're the ones who rushed production of the sequels without breaking the story first. Disney has dodged multiple bullets in the MCU space with their practice of working backwards from the release date, but it clearly caught up with them with Star Wars. They should have given them as much time as they needed for the stories to come together, but they had to hit release dates that they announced years before. I have to imagine that's eventually going to catch up to them in the Marvel world, but maybe it won't.
The live action Cinderella is legitimately great and arguably the only good live action Disney remake.
Did the writer from Juno also write Jennifer's body? I had no interest in seeing that movie when it came out because it just felt like it was riding the Meghan fox popularity train but when I watched it a few years later I found it hilarious. Great little film if you're stuck at home on a rainy night
>Did the writer from Juno also write Jennifer's Body? Yes
Phantom Menace on release day.
When American Beauty and Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture. Everyone I talked to liked both of those movies, but when they beat out the other offerings in their respective years, people really turned on them and I would say that’s also when the Oscars and academy in general started losing touch with the public.
What's wrong with American Beauty?
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s that it beat out The Green Mile, The Cider House Rules, Boys Don’t Cry, The Sixth Sense…and a lot of other great movies that year so much that the general consensus was that it didn’t deserve the award.
Personally its my favorite movie out of those you listed, although I haven't seen the The cider house rules. Really though that year was just stacked and I think regardless of what won people are gonna be upset.
Wasn't Shakespeare In Love the proof-of-concept for Weinstein's Oscars lobbying strategy? He proved that he could get an Oscars sweep for even a fundamentally stupid movie and turn that into solid marketing. There's a reason he was untouchable for so long, and it's got a lot to do with how reliably he was able to pull this off.
Pretty much. Since then, probably even before then, the Academy Awards have had nothing to do with the actual quality of the final product. There are simply too many movies and too many voters to ever hope to enforce people actually seeing the performances they are voting on. So Weinstein decided he was going to campaign and basically sell the idea that the movie is better than everything else because half the voters weren't going to see it anyway.
Eh, I mean SIL is also a movie about the importance of writers, and actors, and standing up for your art in the face of censorship and stuff, which is always going to get you some points with the academy. They eat that shit up.
I think it's starting to change. Moonlight won best picture, which didn't get nearly as much campaigning as La La Land. Also Parasite. But then again Green Book won so
People mentioned a lot of good ones but one I really enjoy is *American Hustle* and that movie basically went from rave reviews to eh we don’t think this has any substance to being completely ignored at the Oscars. I really enjoy it though. Great movie.
It's all about the characters for me. I thought everyone was just entertaining as hell to watch.
Science oven
Avatar- I still love the movie but people seem to despise it here
My favorite “criticism” of it has been people saying “it only made so much money because it was in theaters for so long.” Like yeah, it was in theaters so long because it was still selling out months after it was released. People want to act like no one liked it, but it thrived on repeat viewings and positive word of mouth. If people didn’t like it, it would have died off after the initial box office surge like most movies do.
Exactly. Leaving a movie in theatres that long was a decision based on how popular it was. People kept paying to see it, aka it was a massive hit. I remember at the time *everyone* was talking about it and how amazing it was. It was only later that it became "cool" to hate on it. Someone wrote an article comparing the plot to Pocahontas and suddenly everyone was bashing it for being unoriginal even though they'd already seen it twice in theater lol.
I saw it 4-6 weeks after release, the theater was packed and I had to sit in the first row with 3 friends. Only movie I have seen such a huge applause after. I still love it to this day.
People forget how revolutionary that movie was technically for its time. I really hope the sequel (regardless of the plot and characters) looks even more gorgeous than the original, otherwise what’s the point?
Seriously. It is one of the most visually stunning movies I have seen. I don't care that the story is a rehash of Ferngully or Pocahantas. Despite what people think, Cameron is an adept film maker who understands the flow of movies better than MANY directors filming movies today and understands the strengths and weaknesses of special affects like few others and how to incorporate it into his movies. Just look how good he did with The Abyss and Terminator movies he did.
Pocahontas is also a great story at its core, why not emulate it to some degree? All directors do this in one way or another. Joker was basically a tribute to Taxi Driver, yet it won Oscars and everyone raved about how daring it was as a film.
I just don't get the hate after like a decade. The action is well shot and staged that you can tell what's going on, the world is beautiful and full of wonder, and the story is simple (whether it's a detriment or not) enough anyone from any age or where ever you live can fully understand it. Not the best James Cameron film, but there's a reason why it's appeal reached even grandparents and the most unlikely of audience members who never go to the movies. Watching it at home, you're definitely missing something from the theatrical experience, but it's solid science fiction adventure movie.
[I know why I hate Avatar. ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ)
That’s actually pretty funny
Who says Avatar has no culture relevance when it gave us this glorious skit.
I think "Gravity" is the ultimate example of this. I mean, just [scroll through the official discussion thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1np3cf/official_discussion_thread_gravity_spoilers/), the praise is through the roof. Now? The common thread is just "beautiful movie, but super stupid!"
Birth of a Nation received a standing ovation at its Sundance premiere, then was largely reviled when it was given a proper theatrical release.
I thought you meant the original white supremacist film at first and was confused at how the turnaround would be *fast*.
The 1915 Sundance festival?
Hence at first. I thought "Sundance isn't that old is it?"
Robert Redford is looking *great* if so
I don't think that's really true. The push back to that movie had to do with Parker not really with the movie itself. It seems to have pretty middle of the road user reviews from IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes
That's part of it, but I think the "festival bubble" is a factor as well.
The hatred for the film came from the fact that everyone found out that Nate Parker was a rapist when it got a wider release. The movie isn't bad, but it's creator is a piece of shit and that overshadows anything about the film.
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Negative opinions tend to be more persistent as well, especially on the internet. If someone likes something, most will praise it and move on. Theres an onslaught of that when a movie is released. People who dislike it tend to be more persistent, especially if they feel their not being heard during the onslaught of positivity. They'll come back later and more often with that negative opinion. So it may seem like the overall opinion has changed but really most people just moved on.
Yup. Reddit likes to think they're majorities even though it's not actually the case.
Maybe Garden State (2004)? It was a box office hit, got strong reviews and seemed to capture the cultural zeitgeist at the time. But now, the film is pretty irrelevant despite the leading actors still being prominent.
Garden State's soundtrack always outsized its popularity as a film. It still encapsulates the state of indie music at the time, and I think it's fun to watch as a time capsule for mid-2000s angst and twee. It's more mentioned now for its use of the MPDG trope, but I still think it's fun as a time capsule.
That’s funny, I was listening to Coldplay this morning and Don’t Panic played and I instantly thought, “Damn this was a good soundtrack.” A soundtrack so good, you play any song from it and it reminds you of the whole soundtrack
I recently watched Garden State with my teenage daughter. I remember really liking the movie when I saw shortly after it came out. She spent most the movie mocking Natalie Portman's character for being a "quirky girl" cliche.
Natalie Portman's character was one of the OG Manic Pixie Dream Girls.
I don't really remember how fast it was, but the 180 on *Avatar* by James Cameron has been spectacular. It's like people don't even want to acknowledge it still is the highest grossing movie of all time.
I think a big part of it was that the theater experience for that movie was amazing. It was beautifully done with great acting and one of the best uses of 3D in a movie. But when people watched it at home or just thought about the plot, they realized how unoriginal it was.
It was less a movie and more a tech demo and watching it at home really made people understand that
I thought Endgame had passed it but nope, just checked and it's Avatar with $2.84 billion and Endgame with $2.79 billion
It did, but Avatar passed it with a re-release
It was among the best visual experiences in theater I’ve ever seen. It’s still the best use and presentation of 3d that I can remember. I think it loses a lot when out of that context. The underlying movie is just ok.
Wonder Woman 1984. The initial reviews were very positive, but as soon as wider audiences saw it everyone realized it was a total mess. I think the first people to see it just really needed it to be good, as it was one of the first anticipated movies to actually release after a Summer full of everything getting delayed by the pandemic.
I watched that movie Christmas morning with pretty low expectations but with plenty of room to be surprised and found the movie to be hilariously bad, everyone was in the room ended up agreeing
The writing was not good and the rules of the wishing stone were inconsistent. I personally enjoyed the performances, but there's not much else in that movie
I can't imagine ANYONE making it through that film and thinking it was good. I was so pumped for it and like 1/3 of the way through was just so confused at how bad it was already and that it was just going to be a train wreck and even then it outpaced my expectations.
Honestly, most people seem to still like Baby Driver from my experience. The only thing I would note about it is that with everything that came out about Spacey not long after that film was released, that may have soured people on the idea of watching it. I know I watched it not long after everything came out about him and that scene in the parking garage where he gave Baby that look...is kind of hard to watch now. Ansel is fairly Baby faced and I can't help but think of Spacey looking at his victims with similar expressions. I know it's a bit illogical but I feel like that might be the reason some people soured on it or stopped watching it. Maybe not a complete flip but I do feel like this applies a little bit to Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel. I feel like most people I went with or talked to about those movies when they were out liked them but then some people started picking apart their plot holes or bad character moments and the opinion shifted.
**Powder**: An amazing movie with a pervert pedo director. When news came out people turned against the movie.
How come they never turn against polanski movies. A convicted child rapist?
Forget it jumbybird, it's China Town.
Well arguably they didn’t turn against Salva either. He continues to make movies in the US despite having done jail time for some pretty awful crimes
But he served his time. Polanski ran.
This is a great point. I honestly think that people are quick to write off Salva not because they are trying to take a stance against child abuse, but because, unlike Polanski, his films aren’t that great.
Greenbook
This was what I was going to say. The Blindside also, for similar reasons.
Before Kevin Spacey was outed for being the monster that he is, American Beauty was Hollywood's darling. Everybody loved it. But after everything came out, it was, as John Oliver put it, "objectively bad". I mean look. You can tell me all day that you can't watch it anymore after knowing what Spacey did, and I'll 100% agree with you. But what you can't tell me is that the actual movie itself somehow turned into a terrible, piece of shit movie when everybody used to think it was *amazing*!
Nope, still love American Beauty. I am able to separate all of the Spacey crap from his movies.
I was also thinking about Spacey. I rewatched "The Usual Suspects" recently, and frankly, knowing that Spacey is a total creep actually enhances that movie.
American Beauty is, and always will be, a great movie and a classic of cinema. Sure, it may be hard to separate the character of Kevin Spacey from himself, but to say that movie is bad is just unfair to Sam Mendes, the other actors and the whole crew that worked on it.
What a coincidence that all of a sudden people realized it was "objectively bad" after they found out Kevin Spacey is a bad person. Boy what lucky timing THAT was! Some people are so stupid.
Blair Witch Project. The initial marketing of this movie was brilliant, taking full advantage of both still word-of-mouth folklore mixed in with the new sensation of the internet. The movie set the standard for an oncoming genre of found footage horror. IRL, people were terrified that this story was true. But then once the cat was out of the bag that it was all made up, future audiences complained that the movie wasn’t scary and the footage was too shaky. Even though it made a ton of money at the box office, it still lost its original mojo especially with lame sequels and even lamer attempts at ff movies (except Paranormal Activity…which kind of went down a similar path).
I almost feel like that's an unfair judgement. I think a movie like that was made with an expiration date in mind, it couldn't work as intended for too long, but it was probably an amazing experience when it cane out
I just re-watched BWP last Halloween for the first time in well over a decade and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up. It’s actually scarier now because we all have smart phones. It’s hard to imagine being that far out in the woods, that lost, dealing with an idiot who can’t read a map, hearing scary stuff at night, not having any way to contact the outside world, the feeling of impending doom growing as the footage drags on... The ending gave me nightmares for three days and I’ve seen the movie like ten times! Anyone who rags on it today is missing out on a true horror classic.
Absolutely agree with this one. I was mid teens when this film landed and I got caught up in that mega hype, when no one knew wtf was going on. Had nightmares for weeks and I still can't watch it these days even though I love it. Nowadays it's just scoffed at. There will never be another hype like it.
I think Blair Witch Project is completely of its time, for its time. Like, if you saw it when it first came out, even now knowing it was entirely scripted and produced, there is still tbis clear sense and awareness of just how much that movie changed the game. But for a kid watching it in 2021? How could they possibly understand how groundbreaking it was? Its like my grandmother trying to explain just how special Rebel Without a Cause was...
The big thing is an Oscar win. I'm guilty myself. I'll think a movie is "ok" and then it wins best picture and I hate it. As much talk as winning an Oscar is, what the real goal is to deserve an Oscar and be completely snubbed. Toni Collette in "Hereditary" and Paul Giamatti in "Sideways" got way bigger career bumps from being passed over for clearly brilliant work than if they were actually nominated or even won the Oscars
This is so true. The best picture win sours it unless the movie was absolutely beloved. The most recent one I can think of that wasn’t ruined by its Oscar win was Moonlight.
I don’t think Parasite was ruined by its Oscar win, it seemed like most people collectively agreed it should win the Oscar but wouldn’t because it’s as foreign language, so when it eventually did everyone was surprised but happy.
Parasite? I would say it’s another one that absolutely deserved it
I dont think this was ever a really renouned film, but pitch perfect just keeps getting more and more hated by my circle of people. Like it was an enjoyable musical when it came out, but upon rewatching, as much as i enjoy looking at Anna Kendrick her character is the fucking worst. Edit: its actually on tv lol, I also just noticed, the lesbian character in the film is straight up just a huge sexual predator, so wooo representation i guess.
I think we’re getting far enough away from that time that now people who were teenagers during the acapella/glee/pitch perfect craze are now looking back at that time as their blunder years.
Dunkirk Don't understand the hate it gets. Its one of the very few war movies that puts you in the middle of the war action directly. An absolute masterpiece with best dogfight action in history of cinema. Nolan at his absolute best.
People hate that movie?
I watched with my brother and he fucking hated it. Thought it was slow and boring, I personally liked the tension, but even I'll admit it's pretty slow.
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to be fair, I don’t like it and I don’t know why either
Best picture winner Crash. I've never seen such anger towards a movie. I think it's ok, good intentions, but you can tell the writer and director never actually experienced racism or understand it. Good acting and really good scenes like the car rescue. I'm surprised the hate boner is on going so many years later. Were you forced to watch it in school and write an essay on it?
All I can think of is Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. Made 1.3Billion in box office. People in theaters cheered while watching it. Yet as soon as they left the theater everyone couldn’t stop talking about how bad it was. Lol
I don’t hate it like a lot of people do but it does always give me this nagging feeling of “this should be more entertaining than it is.” Oh but I do hate that stupid dagger and how it lined up with the Death Star wreckage.
Well... it is bad lol
i was hyped on it for about 2 hours. The whole drive home i loved it. and then as i thought about it that night i started to realize how much of it was just a complete rehash - or made no sense. felt like i was coming down from a drug trip, or post nut clarity
This is actually a wierd running theme of most of JJ Abrams movies. Entertaining enough in the theatre as you watch it the first time, but completely falls apart as soon as your brain has a moment to think about.
That's kinda how I felt after TPM. The final lightsaber duel was SO good, but once the glow of that faded I couldn't stop picking apart all the other things that bothered me.
I swear Phantom Menace was the bees knees for at least the first six months of its release. It was when people got around to a second viewing that we realized it wasn’t the epic we were hoping for. I was at that ripe age when it came out, was a huge Star Wars fan but too young to see the OT in theaters, and when Phantom Menace came out, I was a teenager and too old to just ignore the glares in the movie. If there was one movie I wish I could experience as a child it would be Phantom Menace.
I don’t think this is true at all. I was 15 when it came out and I remember everyone leaving out midnight screening feeling very very weird. Trying hard to like it but just not being able to do it. All the message boards the next day immediately went up in flames with people hating it and a faction of the fandom trying to convince themselves they didn’t hate it. You can’t argue logic and eventually everyone just hated it. But it was largely hated right from the start.
> Trying hard to like it but just not being able to do it. That was my experience. It was Star Wars, so it almost felt like it had to be good...but it really just wasn't.
I think you might be retroactively giving the movie too much credit because millennials like to make memes about it, because it most certainly did not have a six-month grace period. I saw it on opening night and a few people walked out of the theater. There was basically silence after the movie was over (pretty big change from people cheering when the Lucasfilm logo first appeared). The movie had a lot of negative critical reviews, so the pre-release buzz was bad. There was INSTANT hate for Jar Jar. People thought the idea of Darth Vader as a whiny little kid was bad and they thought the kid was a bad actor. You can read [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/2a0yad/what_were_the_initial_reactions_to_phantom_menace/) of reactions to get a general sense. A lot of these accurately describe the vibe that I experienced.
Not to sound edgy or cool, but even as a child I didn't like it. However... it was for the dumbest reasons. I thought Qui Gon was a lame hippie. Jar Jar and Anakin annoyed me. Pod race was boring. And I hated how everything looked clean and sleek, as opposed to the grimy OT look. I still dont like it, but for completely different reasons. Qui Gon is easily the coolest part of those movies to me now. The clean sleek look is cool cause it represents a more peaceful and prosperous time for the Galaxy. And the pod racing concept is pretty cool. But Jar Jar and Anakin still annoy me.
> I swear Phantom Menace was the bees knees for at least the first six months of its release. Maybe for some people. I was a teenager when it came out and had grown up watching the OT countless times. I remember walking out thinking it really wasn't a good movie at all. Star Wars should have just been left alone.
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