30 Day Movie Challenge - Day 21

[trinityvixen]

Our lab/floor dedication--a.k.a. a "Thank you for paying for our space, rich doctor man!" party--is tomorrow. I've done zero science today. I've just been tidying and tucking every last goddamned thing I can into cabinets or drawers out of sight. I still think my boss is going to come in tomorrow (she's home today grant writing) and find a million more things for me to hide/throw out. Oh well.

Day 21 - The most overrated movie
I never like mob movies/stories/TV. It doesn't appeal to me at all. I sympathized with Meg Ryan's character in You've Got Mail, and I think she was right: mob stories are such guy movies. They're not for women at all, and I couldn't hardly find a thing to relate to in this movie. I hear the sequel is better. So fucking what? This thing was monstrously long, and nothing about it appealed to me--not the random violence, not the "honor" code among the mafiosos, not Michael Corleone's eventual slide into the family business, nothing.

Worse, I think this is one of those movies that people overhype because it's ZOMG art or something. Whatever. It's long, not much happens, and what does happen is all stupid instead of tragic, and blah blah blah. You cannot care a goddamn about the people in this movie, so you certainly can't care whether they fail or succeed or die or whatever I'm done talking about this POS.

Day 01
Day 02
Day 03 - 06
Day 07
Day 08
Day 09
Day 10
Day 11-13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17-19
Day 20

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

This is how I feel about Alien.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You know, it's funny about Alien. I know it's good objectively, but it's never the one I want to watch. I almost always want to watch Aliens. Even Alien Resurrection. Alien is, perhaps, too arty for me.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

No one remembers that, for the first hour of Alien, nothing happens. And even after stuff starts happening, there's this completely incomprehensible plot about the ship's computer and it still moves pretty slowly. I was bored by that movie.

...and still haven't seen any of the others.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The others are more entertaining because they embrace the horror instead of looking from the outside with slight detachment. I mean, for all that Veronica Cartwright was horrified in Alien, there's a lot of emotional voidage going on.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, it is Ridley Scott we're talking about.

Oh! That would be my most overhyped movie: Bladerunner.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

God, I feel like I should find that movie amazing and whatever, but I was so bored. I thought the version without the narration was just incomprehensible.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Ditto! I saw that one first and it made no sense. Then I watched the one with narration and, yes, the voiceover is crap and Harrison Ford sounds like it's such torture that he has to record this, but IT'S NECESSARY. I had a whole fight about this on my podcast. I was saying you can only say you like the version with the voiceover better because you saw the one with it first. And take it from a newbie, it doesn't make sense without. And I do not think a film you have to watch multiple times just to figure out the plot is a good film.

Even leaving that aside, it's a slow goddamn movie with a stupid ending. Either one.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Hm, it's been a while since I've seen it but I remember enjoying the Godfather. Then again, I'm a guy. :)

I'm tempted to say Matchpoint—I already posted that one, though. Moulin Rouge? I never saw the appeal. Same with Titanic.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Titanic or Avatar would have been phenomenal choices, and they were almost my choice here. I hated Titanic, but I don't think the effects in that one were overrated. The story blew goats, but the boat sinking was fantastic. Avatar, I must grudgingly admit, did the special effects right as well, and as much as I think that movie was overrated, it, too, did something well enough to deserve at least some of they hype. (The key word there being "some.")

But The Godfather is this revered movie and I couldn't fathom why. This "tough guys being tough thing" is fine for a Jason Statham movie, but it's not art. Blech.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

I still haven't seen Avatar, though your statement sums up what I've heard from pretty much everyone. I remember enjoying the Godfather but I never revered it. There are plenty of über-hyped movies I didn't think were all that. Forrest Gump, for example.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Honestly, Avatar probably isn't worth seeing not in a theater--or not in 3D. When I've seen it in the cold light of an HD TV, it's looked less good. In the theater, I was impressed at the nearly-reaching-the-other-side escape from the Uncanny Valley. But just one TV? It looked cartoonish.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Problem is, I can't see the 3-D regardless.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

The first Godfather is not a good movie anymore, except as a prelude to the second part; the only things that matter at all are Michael's character and the contrast that comes from the two films together. It was something completely new when it came out and spawned the whole genre, which has collectively proceeded to drain any meaning from it by turning the entire thing into a tired formula based pretty much on directly copying its original elements ad-nauseam. If it involves crime in any way, it's using the elements The Godfather defined - they're still pretty much the only ones. As such, it's interesting from a cinema-as-a-whole perspective much moreso than its own merits. It's kind of a shame that it's become what it has, really, considering how powerful it was on first release.

The Godfather Part 2 is a completely different film that has more in common with something like The Usual Suspects or Unforgiven than its own namesake. It's a Shakespearean tragedy played out within a modern setting - more royal intrigue than mobsters. The pace is smoother, having multiple perspectives running in parallel instead of the plodding monolith of the first, less empty space between content set in tighter scenes (it's hands down a much better directing and editing job and was written more dominantly by F.F.C.), as well as good use of multiple distinct settings. Any sense of glory and honor is replaced by ugliness and the distance between normal life and the mob is stark and constant - the characters are to be despised and pitied for the world they've created around themselves, an even more terrible distortion of the old-world tribal survivalism that came before. The final scene is soul-crushing on par with Old Boy, but without needing any element of shock.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It may the stagnation of The Godfather that did it. Strangely, this hasn't deterred me from wanting to, eventually, see The Godfather II. I'm not excited about it, but it's definitely on my infinitely long list of want-to-have-seen, don't-want-to-actually-watch movies. It will just take a while to stop resenting the first one to bother.