For me the first thing that comes to mind is Tales from Earthsea. I don’t think it’s excellent or anything and has plenty of problems but people act like it killed their dog. While it has its problems that have been covered extensively, I think it has a beautiful atmosphere and art.
IMO it would have been better received if it wasn’t advertised as an Earthsea adaptation and was just its own thing.
Rat Race is one of the funniest movies of all time, I didn’t care what the ratings say.
Oh wow, it got bad ratings? 100% agree with you. Love that movie.
That’s one of those movies that’s better than it has any right to be. Remake “It’s a mad mad mad mad world”, and now we have Smashmouth? Nah.
Same with “Hot Tub Time Machine”. Should be awful, is actually good.
Sometimes the reasons critics think movies are bad are actually features, not bugs.
Oooh cock doggies!
Titan AE is at 61% on RT, but I fucking love it.
Aw man, I rewatched that for the first time in a long time a while ago and it did not hold up nearly as well as I was hoping. I was absolutely crushed.
I liked Thor Love and Thunder, something I’ve been clowned on for every time I say it lol. I get why a lot of people hate it but it was enjoyable to me.
Not animated, but since you’ve hit the frontpage and everyone else seems to be ignoring that…
1994’s Street Fighter. It’s terrible, but Raul Julia hams his way out of the screen for you. It’s Street Fighter: The Pantomime, and it’s glorious.
Between that, Tim Curry in The Three Musketeers, and Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, I can’t decide which of them was best at saving a mediocre cocaine fuelled movie by playing a panto villain in the midst of undeserved po-faced seriousness.
Not animated, but since you’ve hit the frontpage and everyone else seems to be ignoring that…
Haha yeah. I initially thought about doing something about it but by the time I noticed, there was already a decent amount of discussion happening so I left it. And then it blew up like crazy while I was asleep.
Robin hood was a massive movie in my childhood. The kid across the road had the whole set of toys, didn’t even know they were just.unsold star wars figures
This was Sucker Punch for me
I still can’t tell if Sucker Punch is an ingenious retelling of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or an excuse to film scantily clad women while pretending you have something serious to say, but it’s certainly fun to watch.
Tbh, from all the shit Snyder has released since. It’s mostly just spectacle for spectacles sake, but I had fun watching it, and the story inside a story inside a story aspect was fun
From the top of my head:
Time Trap
Dalíland
The AmericanI love that movie. =\
The number of times I’ve watched a highly rated movie only to find it’s not good. cough oppenheimer cough
watching oppenheimer felt like watching a 3 hour compilation of trailers for oppenheimer. everything was so dramatic, there was no downtime, and they always had some kind of music playing. it felt like every scene wasn’t allowed to last more than 5 minutes
Agree with you on that. Many of the “oscar bait” movies are not that great for just watching. For instance, “the Revenant” was not a great picture in my opinion.
What probably elevates them is watching for all the minutiae in the acting and really focussing on the actors instead of the greater picture. However, I think great moments have to be earned through screemwriting. A great example is “the Wire”. Lives caught short, loves truly lost, and a realisation you are just part of a greater machine. These are all earned moments of pure emotion that films often do not get because of their tight focus. I do not mean to encourage film makers to lengthen their movies, please for the love of god, your movies are lengthy enough.
I love Van Wilder. The soundtrack is top-notch, it has superstar talent, and quite frankly, it’s basically Deadpool without the superhero stuff. Last I checked it was below 20% on RT.
“write that down”
That is not a bong. That is for my schlong!
You just remind me I should check Tales from Earthsea.
By the way, congrats for this post, getting nice traction!
The Aladdin live action remake was shat on mercilessly by the internet, but I thought it was a fun, true to the spirit of the original while introducing a few new ideas to keep it interesting, and (imo very respectfully) stayed out of Rob William’s lane by not trying to recreate his genie. And Will Smith did a great job with his version.
/shrug
I didn’t really follow the online conversations around the movie, but I did watch it and it’s not entirely that long ago since I watched the animated movie either. If I was to try to judge the movie without the context of the orighinal, I’d say it was fine, nothing about it was terrible but I also didn’t find anything about it particularly good or memorable. I think Will Smith did a fine job and I don’t think he’d be anywhere near the top of the list of what I would criticise about the movie in that case.
But I do think context matters, and in context I think it comes out looking pretty poor. Genie as written for the live action movie pales in comparison to the animated one. In terms of craft I think the live action one feels like a soulless board-room directed husk, and I really miss the feeling of a creative voice in the whole thing.
If you’re going to remake something, I it should be better, or enough of a reinterpretation to be considered distinctly different.
I am glad others liked it, but if I someone asked me which they should watch I would tell them the original animated movie because I think it is a better piece of entertainment, and that makes the modern one feel like an absolute waste of time, money, skills and effort that could have been spent so much better.
We LOVED this film, and even convinced our local cinema to have a sing along one night.
The first time we watched it we had to leave the cinema early due to a tornado warning. But we were so pleasantly surprised by what we saw (expected trash after those awful trailers) that we went again. And then again.
Are you my friend? I’ve had to stop taking any of his movie or TV show recommendations without extra verification. He thinks that everything he watches is great. I kinda envy how he can enjoy literally any TV show or movie.
Not animated, but trust me, if you’d actually watched Manos: The Hands of Fate, you would not have enjoyed it in any capacity.
Even in the MST3k episode, it was an ordeal.
It is truly amazing how they managed to make an hour-and-ten-minutes feel like three hours. I (barely) finished watching it, and couldn’t believe how little time had actually passed.
Manos initially took me a few times to get through (even with MST3K), but now when I randomly run across it on the dumb industries twitch stream or the MST3K YouTube/twitch streams I get a little excited. It really doesn’t make my “skin crawl” like it used to, but it’s still terrible.
I’ve seen it with dumb industries, rifftrax, and MST3K.
I can’t imagine watching it more than once. I’ve just been trying to forget about it for the last fifteen years.
The master would not approve lol
I like the Vin Diesel film xXx. It’s loud, dumb, and nothing like what I usually enjoy, but somehow it manages to scratch enough mental itches that I’ll watch the whole thing through every few years.
My rule is that if the critic score is too high I won’t like it, and the audience score needs to be higher than the critic score and we have a banger on our hands
Are we talking about the Ghibli Earthsea movie? I actually enjoyed it, even though I read the books when I was younger. It was an interesting way to tell a large part of the story and doesn’t deserve the hate it gets IMO. But it’s also not an amazing adaptation either, it’s in a weird spot.
Yes, I was referring to the Ghibli movie.
As it happens, I just discovered this nice chap: https://youtube.com/@CinemaWins “Because liking things is more fun than not liking things.”