this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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i feel like it’s much harder when you finish a movie, and you hate it, and then find out it’s one of the most critically acclaimed movies of all time.
this was my experience watching taxi driver. to this day, i have not been able to find a single other person who disliked that movie as much as i did
Taxi Driver is a movie I can recognize as being a great piece of art that I don't enjoy.
I turned off Oppenheimer, felt so pretentious and over the top serious to me. I already knew people love it, though.
thank you! i also couldn’t stand that movie. watching oppenheimer felt like watching a 3 hour trailer for oppenheimer. i can’t understand nolan’s refusal to let a scene last for more than 1 minute
Wife and i turned it off halfway because it was sooooo boring
I get this, other than Pulp Fiction, I dislike all of Tarantino's films.
I don't like the style or the pacing, I don't like the revisionist take on events.
But people generally like his films.
i can sympathize with this. i also didn’t like many of the tarantino movies that i’ve seen for similar reasons. the feet stuff also doesn’t help his case.
It's the pacing, it's very uneven
Inglorious Basterds for me, I hated Pulp Fiction just like the rest of them. The first Kill Bill was watchable, the second was trash. Reservoir Dogs is the one I disliked most.
Inglorious bastards had some great moments. But overall I didn't like it.
I cannot stand 2001 A Space Odyssey
It's glacially paced, there's like 1 good scene with HAL and Dave and the rotating set is neat with him running around the edge. It's about 20 minutes of decent movie padded to an agonising two and a half hours of pretentious nonsense.
People go "oh, but it was groundbreaking at the time!" We'd had Star Trek for two years by that point. It really was not that groundbreaking.
I feel like you have to go in knowing it's extremely slow and methodical, it really gives room to breath and take in the sights and such. Idk it's a very interestingly shot movie and I wish more were like it, seems like people's attention spans aren't long enough though.
Also seeing it in a real theater makes a big difference
Seeing it in a real theatre while stoned makes a huuuuuge difference. "It's full of stars!!"
Both of those movies are on my watchlist. My family saw 2001 A Space Odyssey and they HATED it.
Star Wars came out 9 years after 2001 (edit: and the original series Star Trek doesn’t have near the realism of 2001). The visuals absolutely were groundbreaking -- they still hold up, and look better than all but a handful of space movies that came out before about the 90s.
Your point with the pacing is fair, but I think about half that is an artifact of the time or a byproduct of watching it on a couch with a smartphone instead of in a theater.
exactly how i feel about it too. the 5 minute long segment that was just nature footage with weird visual filters was also particularly hard to watch.
i also found the whole obelisk thing super repetitive. i was hoping that they would go into more detail about the obelisks, and explore the topic more. but it ended up feeling like they were asking the question “what’s a list of weird times and places where we could put an obelisk”, and that was the extent of it.
Oh my god I just watched taxi driver and thought it was mediocre at best. Gave it 2 1/2 stars. Saw that it sits at 4,2?!?
Taxi Driver resonates much more powerfully when you or someone close to you has suffered from delusions.
To the perfectly sane mind Travis is being insane without reason, and in a boring way.
I imagine the high score TD had gathered over the years is because there are many people that sympathize with Travis, and maybe see him as an anti hero.
taxi driver felt like it was asking the question “what if we made a movie where nothing happens?”. and apparently, if you make the main character “disturbed” enough, the answer is that the movie becomes one of the greatest films of all time.
Usually when I see nothing burgers like taxi driver I at least feel stupid and like I am missing something. But I don't. It just feels empty. I'll watch some video essays to see someone explain their fever dream to me, but I'm sure itll not change my mind.
I also have to say I hate how they used the same song every 5 minutes. (A taxi driver fan is cringing right now because I don't understand the stylistic choice)
the movie felt like a version of american psycho that took itself way too seriously and tried to romanticize the "troubled and disturbed vigilante" trope. having a bit more humor would have gone a long way i think. i'm not saying the movie should have been a comedy or anything, but something like the business card scene from american psycho would have helped. something to show that the movie wasn't taking itself so seriously. the movie just feels like watching them point at this guy and say "whoa he's pretty fucked up and twisted isn't he? aren't the streets so dirty and messy and full of crime? and he's really messed up and he doesn't like the grimy city."
it felt like the whole point of the movie was just to say "this is the day to day life of somebody who is messed up in the head, and by the way, we're going to try to make him look really cool and jaded", but that's not exactly a novel concept. i didn't gain anything from that. if they wanted to show a jaded and disturbed character, i think it would have been better to have a bit of a plot, and to make it so that more things actually happened in the movie
Looking at you, Mulholland Drive.
That's how I felt about Paranormal Activity. It was like I spent the entire movie waiting for something scary to happen. A thing just... stood there. Every "night" on screen felt the same: a being... just standing there. Not standing there sharpening a knife. Not standing there ominously stroking people's cheeks. Nothing attacked or even made threats to do so. It just. fucking. stood. there.
Then when something finally started to happen, the movie ended.
I don't know if my standards for "scary" are too high, but I found the entire film (save for those last few seconds) to be extremely boring. How it's so popular (and even spawned a sequel?!) is beyond me.
That was how I felt about Blair Witch. Full disclosure, I don't like horror to begin with, but to me the movie was about a group of people in the woods with a scary thing somewhere, and when they finally find the thing it ends.
It's like if Texas Chainsaw was about a bunch of teenagers who stood around while you hear a chainsaw running somewhere in the distance, the cuts to black right when the killer shows up.
Blair Witch′s whole shtick of being the first (at least well known) found footage film is interesting from historical perspective, but that's about it. Much better than Paranormal Activity though.
It's been a while and I can't remember which one it was that I saw, but I remember that ending coming out of nowhere. It's like oh, there's a ghost or something haunting the place, ok. Signs of evil or something, a person floating while sleeping, too iirc.
Then suddenly there's hundreds of witches or cultists surrounding them outside and it just ends!?
Maybe it would have been scary if I was the type to buy into moral panics?
It was just kinda creepy and then weird. Felt like "rocks fall, everyone dies" kinda energy.
Absolute trash for me as well. I watched it alone when I was slightly drunk, thinking oh boy, let's put on something scary. Absolutely nothing happened. Few movies have left me angry. Insane it has such good critic score.
Same, not for Taxi Driver, but for The Deer Hunter, Chinatown, Life is Beautiful, Amour...
i also wasn’t very impressed by chinatown. i remember feeling like i spent the whole time waiting for the movie to “start”, and then it ended
Was also very underwhelmed by taxi driver.
it’s nice to know i’m not the only one
The French Dispatch for me.
God I hated every second, and it only got worse. That's the kind of movie you'll need to play on repeat and I'll spill all my secrets to make it stop.
i couldn’t even finish the french dispatch. i watched it for what felt like 3 hours, only to find out 45 minutes had passed. there was no way i was going to suffer through another hour. i liked some of the other wes anderson movies i’ve seen, but the french dispatch was torture.
I’d imagine this happens a lot more often than the OP’s scenario. Some complete garbage becomes “critical darling” for whatever reasons.