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Movies you hate

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Gryff:
Catharsis? I think that would definitely be an aspect of it.

Aphi:
Ah, that's exactly what I meant! I just lost the word. Thank you. "Catharsis".

JLM:
ok three more.

Happiness - Todd Solondz bets everyone that he could shoot a film of him taking a  metaphorical 1.5 hour crap on celluloid and they would think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.  He then releases Happiness.  He wins.

Buffalo `66 - Vincent Gallo makes a movie about the city where he grew up, using it's losing football team and love of fatty foods (gasp!  what originality!) as the backdrop for a lowlife loser who for some reason manages to stockholm syndrome a girl into actually thinking he's a worthwhile human being. Ends up unintentionally paralleling his own life.  17 year old Christina Ricci gets drunk off her ass and commits public urination at a local bar to deal. (wish I was making that last part up...)

Waking Life - Richard Linklater, still high off the fumes from Dazed and Confused, thinks he can stretch a half-hour short about the dreaming experience to an 80 minute movie with "trippy" animation and stoner metaphysics. People walk out of the theater during the premiere.  Alt-news critics across the country proclaim the movie a "mind fuck" that people will be "tempted to see in altered states" and then insist that the film needs to be appreicated sober, thereby alienating any potential audience.

Inlander:

--- Quote from: Merkava ---
--- Quote from: Inlander ---(Rant about Fight Club)
--- End quote ---


I don't think that was the point of the movie at all.
--- End quote ---


I thought in this post-modern age the point of a work of art is whatever we, the viewer, make of it?  Regardless, if nothing else this is a thread about opinions.  What I wrote is what I took away from Fight Club, and no amount of telling me I'm wrong is going to change the fact that that's my overwhelming impression, and that I find it utterly repugnant.

Garcin:
Man, I could go on and on.  I'll do my best to keep it short.  Just proffering my own opinion here; certainly not telling anyone that they are wrong about their's.

A very, very mentally ill narrator (Edward Norton), so closeted emotionally that his rage, sexuality, and most of his intellect is channelled into an alter ego, starts a cult wherein members find out that endorphins (natural doping chemicals released when you get hurt and when you fight) make them feel good.  The cult members are the most alienated members of society, and identify themselves as such.  Narrator, through his alter ego, proceeds to destroy buildings.  His cure to his mental problems involves, not lithium, but shooting himself in the face.

I'm didn't leave that movie feeling that it endorsed the members of Fight Club or the narrator himself -- and certainly not the alter ego.  These are truly limited people, who don't know how to properly rebel, and end up worshiping a figment of a delusional's imagination.  I don't believe that Chuck Palahniuk created Norton's character to provide someone to identify with, beyond the fact that Norton is alienated and dissatisfied, and the reader/viewer might be alienated and dissatisfied.  I believe that Palahniuk wrote Fight Club to shock and provoke, and the changes made in the movie certainly allowed it to accomplish that goal.  Norton plays an anti-hero.  While I don't believe authorial intent is everything, I do believe it is relevant.  And yes, I am privy to the fact that enormous changes were made to the plot and characters of the book.  Irregardless, the movie's "message" to me, was to be provocative, and beyond that, to mock the gullibility of the dumb and disenfranchised.

But to blame the movie for the idiots who inevitably walked out of it wanting to join a Fight Club?  It never occurred to me.  And interpreting to say something true about mens' violent sides?  That would have involved identifying with the cult members which, again, never occurred to me.

End monologue.

On topic: I really disliked Magnolia.  I thought it failed intellectually and artistically.  I found Tom Cruise's performance to be neon polyester, and to this day can't figure out why it was critically acclaimed.

EDIT: Spelling.

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