Ask Lemmy

Films where I don’t recognize a single actor among the whole crew are almost always better than ones where I’ve seen such and such actor in other movies. Just more immersive. And even if they’re not the best actors I’d much prefer that over whatever the hell Chris Prat or Tom Cruise or Leo D are up to.

Terminator is better than Terminator 2, and as cool as it is Terminator 2 should never have been made (or should have a different script).

I know the mob is raising the pitchfork, but hear me out, there are two main ways time travel can solve the grandparent paradox, these are Singular Timeline (i.e. something will prevent you from killing your grandfather) or Multiple Timeline (you kill him but in doing so you created an alternate timeline). Terminator 2 is clearly a MT model, because they delay the rise of Skynet, but Terminator is a ST movie. The way you can understand it's an ST is because the cause-consequences form a perfect cycle (which couldn't happen on an MT story), i.e. Reese goes back to save Sarah -> Reese impregnates Sarah and teaches her how to defend herself from Terminators and avoid Skynet -> Sarah gives birth to and teaches John -> John uses the knowledge to start a resistance -> The resistance is so strong that Skynet sends a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah -> Reese goes back to save Sarah...

The awesome thing about Terminator is how you only realise this at the end of the Movie, that nothing they did mattered, because that's what happened before, the timeline is fixed, humanity will suffer but they'll win eventually.

If Terminator was a MT then the cycle breaks, i.e. there needs to be a beginning, a first time around when the original timeline didn't had any time travelers. How did that timeline looked like? John couldn't exist, which means that sending a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah was not possible, Reese couldn't have gone back without the Terminator technology, which they wouldn't have unless the resistance was winning, and if they are winning without John, the Terminator must have gone back to kill someone else and when Reese went back he accidentally found Sarah, impregnated her and coincidentally made a better commander for the resistance which accidentally and created a perfect loop so that next time he would be sent back and meet Sarah because she was the target (what are the odds of that). Then why is the movie not about this? Why is the movie about the Nth loop after the timeline was changed? The reason is that Terminator was thought as a ST movie, but when they wanted to write a sequel they for some reason decided to allow changes in the timeline which broke the first movie.

Horror films are where art flourishes and it has a huge culture of being outside of Hollywood which is just a plus. Also the acting is usually way better

I like The Last Jedi.

That should be controversial enough.

This post is so confusing. Do I upvote opinions I strongly agree with or down vote them?!

Last year's DnD movie is the best film of the last ten or so years. It succeeded on every level, except in the box office.

My hypothesis is that Hasbro insisted on branding it "Dungeons & Dragons" to push the brand, and non-gamers figured it wasn't for them. If they'd have made the main title "Honor among Thieves", all the game nerds would have seen the DnD logo, and others wouldn't have been turned off *. As it stands, people will find it and it'll become the new "Starship Troopers" that bombed but shines forever in retrospect.

* See "Arcane".

Interstellar is a terrible movie that doesn't say or do anything special and I still don't understand why anyone thinks it's so amazing.

I did really like the robot guy though.

Tarantino is overrated. You have to watch a lot of movies to come to this realisation, because otherwise you don't realise his movies are often in large part a collage of other movies. Movies which did what he does better. That means that it doesn't actually matter that Tarantino is overrated for most movie goers. More generally, this is why critics' opinions don't actually matter that much. They've watched too many movies and likely know too much about movies, to tell the average audience goer if they'll enjoy a movie.

Once you've watched a few thousand movies, and especially if you've ever studied film or read a few books about it, you'll often find you enjoy interesting but shit movies more, than very well made but unoriginal movies. People who truly love film, invariably aren't snobs. They enjoy absolute trash, they enjoy arty farty stuff. If someone has a related degree or even a doctorate or works in the industry, the likelihood is high that they're also a fan of B-movies. They don't need to pretend to be knowledgeable, because they are. A film snob will bore you with the details of a Tarkovski movie. A cinephile is more likely to bang on about 80s horror movies, lesbian vampire sexploitation movies, Albert Pyun's Cyborg, or Troma's The Toxic Avenger.

Every animated movie looks the same now

The original Star wars trilogy was overrated, the sequels were underrated, and I'd rate them all to be equally mediocre.

The original Blade Runner movie is not nearly as good as the sequel. The sequel highlights how lesser the original's plot was. We overly praise the first one because of the Tear in the Rain Speech.

The Mario movie was incredibly mediocre, despite its high production value. I'm talking MCU-levels of truckloads of money spent with shockingly little to show for it.

I enjoyed Sucker Punch. I'll admit it's very male gazey, but it's still a fun movie and has a killer soundtrack (am a woman)

Mine is- the Marvel/DC superhero movies all but entirely ruined cinema.

That "The Man from Earth (2007)" is the best movies there is. I recommend it to people all the time but no one seems to realise how profoundly interesting it is. And it doesn't need any scenery or special effects. It's literally just conversation and dramatic music, tuned to perfectly tell a story that touches on many philosophical questions. I just love that film.

I actually liked Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Both main actors were objectively terrible, but I still liked the movie 🤷‍♂️

Interstellar is a bad movie. The story takes too long, the supposedly smart characters are acting obviously dumb, and the whole "we solved it all along because we figured out timetravel" trope is the most lazy way to wrap up a story.

Oh and of course the small artifically built space colony near Jupiter does not care for fitting many humans, but instead is a shitty american suburb with lavish lawns. Because who needs to safe people from other cultures amirite?

Titanic is not a good movie.

Napoleon Dynamite is garbage.

it's actually spelled film

Blade runner 2049 was a boring slideshow of backdrops with the "bwaaa" music overlaying it and occasionally plot happened. What plot is that? I don't fucking remember.

Gonna try to phrase this an inflammatory way:

People who like bad movies have been conditioned by consumerism to not appreciate art. They believe spectacle, humour, and a tight plot are 'good enough', and they don't value thoughtfulness, novelty, beauty, or abrasiveness nearly enough. Film is more than a way to fill time and have fun. Film is more than an explosion, a laugh, and a happy ending.

On an unrelated note: Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favourite movies.

Christopher Nolan hasn't made a truly good movie since The Prestige. Everything since then has been too long, too convoluted, and/or too loud (or in the case of Oppenheimer, not loud enough).

Can I do a TV show?... I'm gonna do a TV show.

The Mandalorian is boring!

They should have called it "Shiny Boba Fett and Baby Yoda travel planet to planet doing stuff".

I watched The Princess Bride and couldn’t understand why it gets so much love. I found it really gruesome and unfunny, and Robin Wright’s princess was bland and unlikable.

Saving Private Ryan is a pro-war movie.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is a cyberpunk movie.

Mars is a dystopian, broken society in which cyberware is so ubiquitous that we only ever see one Martian without visible augmentation. Every character in the movie does what they do for purely selfish reasons, with the exception of the idiot Droppo, the old man Chochem who remembers society for what it was before it went to hell, and the mythological embodiment of generosity himself. When Chochem suggests that Mars needs a Santa Claus, the immediate response isn't to research and emulate St. Nick, nope. Martian society is so degenerate that the first idea is to commit a crime: to kidnap the jolly old elf. And all of Earth's governments are incapable of stopping them.

Cyberware, broken society, selfish characters, rampant crime, laughably inadequate government? What genre does that sound like?

When I pointed out that Santa Claus Conquers the Martians predates Blade Runner, the film that most people consider to be the first cyberpunk movie, by some 18 years, at a tabletop session of Cyberpunk 2020, I was less than popular with those assembled.

I decided to not press my luck by pointing out that it came out 4 years before the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Hooray for Santy Claus.

The Godfather, extremely overrated and very boring. Saw it many years ago, and maybe my taste in movies have changed a bit, and I consider rewatching other movies I did not like, but not that one.

The Breakfast Club is overrated

Off topic but TIL there's no sort by controversial option on Lemmy. :(

Pee Wee’s Big Adventure is the quintessential road movie and it’s rarely been done better.

Filming on film and showing in the theater is wildly outdated and unecessary. At the same time we have reached so much bloat in digital content that even the act of sorting what is worth watching takes a lifetime and feels disappointing. It also feels like a guantlet to find anything for a rewatch to the point I give up and just do other things like write tepid takes on lemmy.