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  • All the Presidents Men. I can see why its a classic, but every time I try to sit down and watch it, i wake up at the end with the typewriter going.

  • I hate 20th Century Classic that has been so impactful on film making that it suffers from the Seinfeld effect. Every aspect that it pioneered is just so cliched now in retrospect - how dumb were people back then to have been entertained by something pop culture has completely imbibed over the past XX years.

    I found the special effects to be laughable; especially the practical ones. How could you watch anything made before CGI matured to a decent level?

    Don't even get me started on the actors. None of them went method and abused their fellow cast and crew in the name of art. Additionally the script did not past the Bechdel test which completely ruined any sense of realism that the characters might have been attempting to portray.

    20th Century Classic is just one example. There are hundreds of films that don't even have colour cinematography. Pretentious people try to tell us black and white cinematography is "more dreamlike", pul-lease! Why would you want to watch something that doesn't look like real life? You might as well be reading a novel at that point - and the whole point of movies is to completely replace novels so we can consume stories more efficiently.

    Don't @ me on any of this. Just hop on your penny farthing bicycle and ride off into the sunset to your hipster neigbourhood.

  • Titanic

    • Titanic is better if you interpret it differently:

      Jack never existed. He was a coping mechanism for Rose to get away from crippling depression and self harm.

      The whole movie can be interpreted that way, and it makes it much more interesting. There is no direct evidence for Jack's existence, and everything we hear about him interacting with others is from interviews with Old Rose.

      In fact, some parts of the film make more sense when watching this way. Rose's near-miraculous ax hit to free Jack from handcuffs? Never happened. Not getting caught in cargo storage despite having a very involved tail who apparently just gave up? Never happened -- or at least, the part where Jack and Rose have sex in the car never happened.

      There is a nude drawing of Rose which she says was done by Jack; however, it is actually signed "JD", so technically could have been any commissioned artist with those initials. In fact, Cal could even have set it up himself -- again, you only ever get Old Rose's version of events. Though we see Rose given the Heart of the Ocean diamond while on board Titanic (and she is wearing it in the drawing), there is once again no reason that must be the case, and since the drawing isn't dated, it could even predate her voyage. The letter she claimed she wrote to Cal about said drawing is not found with it, despite the two documents apparently being stored together.

      And, note that a "Jackdaw" is a type of bird with various connections in lore -- one of which being that Jackdaws appear as a precursor to death or an omen of death. Rose claims she met Jack Dawson when he saved her from a suicide attempt.

    • Propeller guy was the best part of the movie.

    • Titanic would’ve been a better movie if they’d cast someone other than DiCaprio. But it probably wouldn’t have been as big of a hit.

  • I don't really get the hype for Citizen Kane.

    Though, I kinda think it might be because growing up, this movie was spoiled in almost every cartoon I ever saw ("Rosebud" was the punchline of so many jokes) and maybe not knowing the ending would have made it better. 🤷🏻‍♂️

    • A lot of the hype was in the metanarrative around the movie - remember that it bombed in theaters and was only carried to far later acclaim. Newspaper journalists loved the fact that it called out one of their worst nightmares (W.R. Hearst) in very specific ways. Then the cinematographers caught all the tech that Welles used and tried to figure out how to make it all work for them. Actors loved it because it was a lot of great character work. 'Film buffs' started to enjoy it thereafter, in part because it had inspiration from films like Rashomon. Then you have the auteur directors who will always love Orson Welles, in spite of everything and anything against doing so. Mercury Theatre on the Air fans also liked the movie because it shared a lot of the same cast (and was only 3 years out from that show).

      I'll admit, that's where I came at it from. My family was in papers, and was in a paper that actively fought the Hearst syndicate; one of the characters in the movie has elements of my grandfather in him, because he made sure to have people go into NYC to review Mercury Theatre productions and thus Welles cared about him as an editor. And then my experience having gotten briefly into stage and screen: The performances are amazing. Many of the sets are so perfectly evocative that they become a character unto themselves. The montages are technically inspiring to this day, and the scene transitions are pure technical excellence.

      That's just what makes Kane good as a film.

      The plot is one of a death-mystery of a 'great' man, of trying to approach a man's life and sum him up in just a few inches of text on a page. While Rosebud is the butt of jokes (and may well have been a nasty jab at Marion Davies), it's more of a chilling point. The point is not about the thing itself. It's the treatment of the thing. It's the last thing he thought about, and the whole movie is a quest to figure out what it "means" - and no one finds out, even though they spend this whole film exploring who the man was from vignettes of his existence. In the end, if it meant anything but a fleeting final thought, it still just goes in the furnace with the rest of his identity that can't be sold off at auction. It didn't define him, not really - in spite of what the editor in the smoke-filled newsroom wanted to push as his narrative. One word is never enough to define a person who lived a full life. But a full life that ended up hurting a lot of people is best defined by the wreckage left behind (human and junk). A drunk ex-wife, dead children, a disgraced media empire, a half-built house full of stuff for the furnace, and most painfully, no true friends to really speak well of him.

      That's what makes Citizen Kane good as a movie.

      So I'll say this - Rosebud is meaningless. It's a cheap parlor trick of misdirection, and like all such tricks people latched onto it. Instead, ask yourself something when you're watching that movie. When you're gone, what will you leave behind? And what will you do, starting right this moment, to leave behind the legacy you want?

    • That right there is the millennial experience.

      So many culturally defining movies came out before the 1980s that by the time you're being raised in the 90's, they're making children's media that references it. I knew the plot of Star Wars long before I saw it.

      My favorite example is The Mask of Zorro, which...not an old film, but it came out when I was slightly young for it. A few years go by, I'm in high school, and Shrek comes out. Then it's sequel, with a swashbuckling orange cat voiced by Antonio Banderas. And then I eventually catch Mask of Zorro, and laugh through the entire thing because holy shit the main character sounds exactly like Puss In Boots.

    • A lot of things that were once creative experiences have been redone to death to the point that it can be difficult to understand what the whole hubbub was with the original.
      So, yes, you have to think of it in the context of the era, which may require looking up what was made at the time, what had come before and what came after. It's a bit like paintings or other pieces of art, some of them are interesting beyond what they just represent, but for what they introduced in the world as a statement when they were made (which, admittedly can sometimes be a bit obscure). There too, a little work on the public's part is required to understand why one piece and not another is usually held in high regard (you're then totally free to disagree, or not enjoy it, but context matters quite a bit).

  • The godfather movies.

    I understand they influenced many other movies but they are just so fucking boring.

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