'Good' Movies, TV Shows, Books Etc. You Dislike

[alohadave]

"Where The Crawdads Sing"
I contend that this was in no way a good book, though I admit it was very popular, and I have friends (whose taste in reading I otherwise respect) who enjoyed it.
To me, it featured a pointlessly convoluted plot, written by a supposed naturalist who clearly understands wild fauna far, FAR, better than she understands humans. Its main character is endlessly, repetitively described as having a very particular way of interacting with the world, but the plot hinges entirely on her acting completely contrary to that personality. And a bunch of supporting characters who are barely more than a collection of stereotypes. And, apparently the only city in North Carolina that the author had ever heard of was Asheville, until someone clued her in to the presence of Raleigh and Chapel Hill in the last two or three chapters.

I only saw the movie, but it was totally unbelievable how a reclusive hermit who literally had one day of schooling in her life managed to pull off a complicated murder that required very specific timing and covered her tracks enough to fool a jury.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I only saw the movie, but it was totally unbelievable how a reclusive hermit who literally had one day of schooling in her life managed to pull off a complicated murder that required very specific timing and covered her tracks enough to fool a jury.

Ummm.... spoilers!

 

[BelleCanzuto]

I couldn't get into either Breaking Bad or Mad Men.

Same here for Breaking Bad, but I thought about binging it to see if having less time to think about each episode would make it more enjoyable.
Mad Men I enjoyed for, I can't quite remember, three or four seasons. I agree with GunHill that it went on at least a season too long. I know I didn't watch all of it.

, I just can't get behind his elevation to the status of Literary God and the performative thing where we have to read genius into his every line.

I second what Simon wrote about his wordplay. I was actually surprised at how many turns of phrase just from Hamlet that are common clichés now. I do think he's better staged than read, and there are some good movie versions (David Tennet in the aforementioned Hamlet being one). But his work is awfully dry on the page.

most of the Marvel films are pretty tedious

I enjoyed the first Iron Man, but have only watched the others after they've made it to basic cable, and I'm bored and wanting something I don't have to pay attention to. Oh, and in the mood to give no fucks that there's nothing resembling a plot.

West Side Story - the 1961 version. Not a believable depiction of gangs

West Side Story was supposed to be realistic?

 

[BelleCanzuto]

I only saw the movie, but it was totally unbelievable how a reclusive hermit who literally had one day of schooling in her life managed to pull off a complicated murder that required very specific timing and covered her tracks enough to fool a jury.

Got it in one!
This probably didn't make the movie, but in the book there's a scene about how she's about to have her first period. And her 17 year old male friend 1) figures out what's happening based on her vague complaints of stomach upset, 2) tells her that's likely what's happening and 3) in anticipation of this, had gotten health pamphlets from school and given them to her ahead of time, so she has plenty of accurate info.
In my experience? A 17 year old boy wouldn't even be able to say the word 'period' in that context, much less have been comfortable educating a girl he sorta liked about it. That's just one of many instances of her characters not being believable as people.

 

[alohadave]

West Side Story was supposed to be realistic?

You didn't sing and dance your way through gang fights?

 

[gunhilltrain]

Problem with West Side Story is that there is ZERO chance you could run through Spanish Harlem yelling "Maria" and only one woman comes to the window.


On a more serious note, I really don't understand why anyone likes Easy Rider. The ending is such a bailout.

It's not Spanish Harlem, it's a neighborhood around 65th and Amsterdam that would soon be demolished for Lincoln Center and other projects.

I've considered writing an essay about Easy Rider. Good music, but the movie itself inadvertently reveals exactly what was misguided about the "counter-culture." I was fourteen in 1969, so I believed much of that myself.

 

[gunhilltrain]

You didn't sing and dance your way through gang fights?

Maybe it's impossible to make a musical about street gangs that makes any sense.

 

[gunhilltrain]

If you like Breaking Bad, check out Better Call Saul. It may be even better, though I didn't love the ending.

I did try one season of Better Call Saul, which is a weird show because it's supposed to be a prequel. It seemed to meander a lot.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I recall you saying something like this in another thread several years ago. I was struck by it because almost nobody is willing to say they dislike Shakespeare.

Indeed. I'm not saying the emperor is bare-balls naked, only that the magnificence of his brocade is somewhat offset by the holes in his pants.

I think you have to look at Shakespeare in the context of his time and his job. He was the Steven Spielberg of his time, with a knack for writing great entertainment, but he just so happened to be an extraordinary poet and wordsmith at the same time. Nobody turned more great phrases than Shakespeare. His inventiveness with the language was unsurpassed.

Strong agree.

I can imagine that if one's main experience with him is table-reading--I'm not entirely sure what that means--his work might not seem as impressive.

Table read = people sitting around a table (or these days a Zoom connection) reading aloud, without the physical performance. Unless the actors are really getting carried away.

I've seen a number of his plays performed on an Elizabethan-style stage and it all makes sense when you see it that way.

I've seen quite a few of them performed, either live (including Hamlet in the Globe) or on recording. Not to mention various adaptations, modernisations (McKellen's Richard III is excellent), and Drunk Shakespeare. It does play better on stage, and I make allowances for that.

But, to pick an example, I've never seen Henry VIII performed live. It's very rarely performed live because – hot take incoming – it's just not very good. Certainly not worth burning down the Globe for. Mostly it's just Shakespeare and Fletcher pandering to the Tudors, and in particular Elizabeth I (or her memory; there's argument over whether it was written during her lifetime) while erasing anything that might be politically unpalatable. Suffice it to say that Shakespeare's version of Henry VIII ends with Anne Boleyn still alive and well. It's an understandable choice given the politics of the day, but not one that makes for great art.

If you look at him as somebody who was writing for the crowd rather than as a "great man" I think it does him more justice.

A much better take than the kind of lionisation I'm grumbling about here. I have no issue with acknowledging him as a very successful popular entertainer, but that involves acknowledging that some of what made him successful was playing to the tastes of his age - an age when bear-baiting and public executions were popular entertainment - and that those parts of his work are probably not best treated as timeless, universal wisdom that modern writers ought to emulate.

I'm not only talking about moral-values stuff like racism, misogyny, antisemitism, although those are certainly part of it. Our notions of how to structure stories have shifted since Shakespeare's day. For instance, "Taming of the Shrew" begins with a framing device, but it doesn't close out that device at the end; we never get a resolution to the story of Christopher Sly & co. I presume for Shakespeare that seemed like a reasonable thing to do, but I suspect I'm not the only modern reader who'd find the conclusion more satisfying if he'd bothered to wrap up that framing story too. There are other such examples though I'd have to do a deep-dive to jog my memory.

 

[Areala-chan]

Shakespeare was absolutely the James Patterson of his day and age: he appealed to the lowest common denominator, was marketed to the masses, and survived to be taught in schools centuries later by virtue of the sheer glut of his output being essentially impossible to erase from history.

I shudder to think that in three hundred years' time, Patterson may be held up as the pinnacle of English writing in the 20th and 21st centuries simply by virtue of it being impossible for anything short of planetwide nuclear holocaust to obliterate the literal hundreds of millions of copies of his books in print.

 

[mildlyaroused]

In terms of recently acclaimed movies, I didn't like the Avatar movies or the Dune movies. I think Avatar is frankly horrendous, nuanceless, on-the-nose, and frightfully generic. Other than the leading CG use, I can't find any value. As for Dune, I can respect that they're much better movies than I give them credit for: maybe I just wasn't in the right state of mind while watching them, but they felt episodic to the point of exhaustion. I'll try again in a few years.

I also hate the TV show Glee, which I KNOW has a cult following...

I'm sure there are dozens more things I'm contrary about, but those ones are fairly recent and off the top of my head.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I hated Friends when it first came out. It was all quip, actor freezes, emotes at the camera, laugh track, move on - with a bunch of well-annoying characters who seemed to think it was funny to be stupid.

Now others are saying it's dated, of it's time, aged poorly, offensive, whatever - I feel vindicated. And it was always on on a channel somewhere. Pile of shite.

I saw Westside Story on TV last year. Incredibly stylised and stilted to the point I honestly don't know if it was intended to be a comedy. A few good tunes and set pieces.

Shakespeare - any play - needs to be acted, because the physicality is part of it. I saw a terrible Waiting for Godot once, where the actors didn't move much and spoke their lines. Same script, with McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Callow and Pickup - one of the funniest things I've ever seen, constant movement from two pairs of entertainers.

There's a reason the rarer Shakespeare plays aren't shown much. I've never seen Henry IV (1 or 2), but currently there's an edited version called the Player Kings with McKellen, where six hours of script with Tudor-era political references is edited down to two hours of the good bits with modern references. A fair few of his plays could benefit from that (and do - the recent Fiennes Macbeth omitted the Porter, who I always enjoy, but I can't deny it improved the pace and building tense atmosphere of the play.)

 

[gunhilltrain]

I hated Friends when it first came out. It was all quip, actor freezes, emotes at the camera, laugh track, move on - with a bunch of well-annoying characters who seemed to think it was funny to be stupid.

Now others are saying it's dated, of it's time, aged poorly, offensive, whatever - I feel vindicated. And it was always on on a channel somewhere. Pile of shite.

I saw Westside Story on TV last year. Incredibly stylised and stilted to the point I honestly don't know if it was intended to be a comedy. A few good tunes and set pieces.

Shakespeare - any play - needs to be acted, because the physicality is part of it. I saw a terrible Waiting for Godot once, where the actors didn't move much and spoke their lines. Same script, with McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Callow and Pickup - one of the funniest things I've ever seen, constant movement from two pairs of entertainers.

There's a reason the rarer Shakespeare plays aren't shown much. I've never seen Henry IV (1 or 2), but currently there's an edited version called the Player Kings with McKellen, where six hours of script with Tudor-era political references is edited down to two hours of the good bits with modern references. A fair few of his plays could benefit from that (and do - the recent Fiennes Macbeth omitted the Porter, who I always enjoy, but I can't deny it improved the pace and building tense atmosphere of the play.)

I've heard that some realtors claim that young people would move to New York based mostly on the Friends TV show. That shows the power of media. Anyway, those days ended a long time ago.

I suspect the creators of the original West Side Story stage version (Stephen Sondheim among others) knew nothing about gangs. They claimed to have been influenced by Romeo and Juliet, but I think the analogy is weak. Musicals are tricky to make believable.

 

[SimonDoom]

Shakespeare was absolutely the James Patterson of his day and age: he appealed to the lowest common denominator, was marketed to the masses, and survived to be taught in schools centuries later by virtue of the sheer glut of his output being essentially impossible to erase from history.

I shudder to think that in three hundred years' time, Patterson may be held up as the pinnacle of English writing in the 20th and 21st centuries simply by virtue of it being impossible for anything short of planetwide nuclear holocaust to obliterate the literal hundreds of millions of copies of his books in print.

I think this is not a fair comparison, because nobody, nobody thinks of James Patterson's work as great art. Whatever you think of the contrivances in Shakespeare's plots, there's no denying his gift with the language. Nobody would make the same claim about Patterson. Nobody will remember Patterson 100 years from now, but they will continue to remember Shakespeare.

 

[THBGato]

Shakespeare was absolutely the James Patterson of his day and age: he appealed to the lowest common denominator, was marketed to the masses, and survived to be taught in schools centuries later by virtue of the sheer glut of his output being essentially impossible to erase from history.

I think this is not a fair comparison, because nobody, nobody thinks of James Patterson's work as great art. Whatever you think of the contrivances in Shakespeare's plots, there's no denying his gift with the language. Nobody would make the same claim about Patterson. Nobody will remember Patterson 100 years from now, but they will continue to remember Shakespeare.

I agree with @SimonDoom Don't forget that Shakespeare had loads of contemporary writers, but apart from Johnson and Marlowe, who of them still gets performed? Kyd? Middleton? Fletcher? Greene? Dekker? Not really. Even his contemporaries rated him, hence why somebody published a bootleg of his sonnets and the first folio was published posthumously.

For a real James Patterson comparison, check out his Spanish contemporary Lope de Vega - he wrote something close to 1,800 plays (!!!) in his lifetime. However, having lived in Spain, I can tell you he has nowhere near the reputation of Shakespeare (I once met a student who had been to school called Lope de Vega and had no idea who he was!) Totally overshadowed by Cervantes and Lorca these days.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Attack on Titan is another manga that was (is?) a massive phenomenon that I only just experienced myself recently, and I have to wonder how it became as huge as it did as early on as it did when the story is at its absolute least interesting, but I do admit I think this was something that did become better as it went on. The art certainly did improve in any case.

Recently, some anime-loving students of mine finally managed to persuade me to watch this show. I can't say that I like anime, but I am always up for trying to find good sides in things that don't immediately appeal to me. Also, for the sake of their enthusiasm, I wanted to really give it a go. Oh boy. After making myself go through ten episodes of this show, I am failing to understand how anyone above the age of twelve can bear watching this crap.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Some of the "classics" I'm not a fan of.
Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane come to mind.

 

[gunhilltrain]

In terms of recently acclaimed movies, I didn't like the Avatar movies or the Dune movies. I think Avatar is frankly horrendous, nuanceless, on-the-nose, and frightfully generic. Other than the leading CG use, I can't find any value. As for Dune, I can respect that they're much better movies than I give them credit for: maybe I just wasn't in the right state of mind while watching them, but they felt episodic to the point of exhaustion. I'll try again in a few years.

I also hate the TV show Glee, which I KNOW has a cult following...

I'm sure there are dozens more things I'm contrary about, but those ones are fairly recent and off the top of my head.

James Cameron used to be able to do decent action movies like The Terminator and Aliens. But as he became more successful, he became more full of himself. He gambled with Titanic and won big. My take on that is that he could have cut it down to about two hours and deleted most of the "Old Rose" prologue and epilogue. Some of the ship scenes could have been trimmed too.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Some of the "classics" I'm not a fan of.
Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane come to mind.

Gone With The Wind - I don't know, was Margaret Mitchell too pro-Confederate? The Scarlet and Rhett plot doesn't seem that compelling.

Citizen Kane was perhaps too ambitious. I don't know how it could have been done better.

 

[RetroFan]

The 2001 David Lynch film 'Mulholland Drive' received much critical praise and while I can't dispute it was well made, I disagree that it is a good movie.

So many people say of this film that they didn't understand or 'get' it, and I'm one of them. I love twists and turns in movies/TV shows/books, but IMO this has to make sense in hindsight. Like the Sixth Sense, the revelation at the end that Malcolm is dead all along makes sense when you think back to scenes in the film. But nothing about Mulholland Drive made sense to me, it was just utterly confusing. It it was just me I would have conceded that I somehow missed the point, but when so many people have the same reaction that speaks volumes.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Gone With The Wind - I don't know, was Margaret Mitchell too pro-Confederate? The Scarlet and Rhett plot doesn't seem that compelling.

Citizen Kane was perhaps too ambitious. I don't know how it could have been done better.

Citizen Kane has amazing cinematography even by modern standards. Thinking of having to invent half the techniques is mind-blowing. But the story is thin by modern standards, and the dialogue seems stilted. I actually preferred watching RKO281, which is 'making of CK' - but I did see that first.

Gone with the Wind seemed to go on for ever.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

Gone With The Wind - I don't know, was Margaret Mitchell too pro-Confederate? The Scarlet and Rhett plot doesn't seem that compelling.

Citizen Kane was perhaps too ambitious. I don't know how it could have been done better.

We tried showing GWTW to the kids. We didn't make it past the opening party.

My daughter's commentary: "I hate ALL these people." Imagine it delivered with all the scorn a tween girl can muster.

She did allow that Melanie didn't seem too bad.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey"

"And they did beg for mercy, but Achilles laughed and slew them all until the river ran red. Then he enslaved their daughters..."
"And then, because they had lain with the suitors, Odysseus did hang Penelope's slave girls."

What a bunch of misogynistic, uber-violent tosh. Scary when you think that this stuff is held up as examples of Classic literature that writers, for centuries, aspiring to imitate and were used to teach generations of political leaders. No wonder the world celebrates feckless, violent bullies and allows them to gain positions of power.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are hilarious with the right translation. The Greeks are such a bunch of frat-boy bros!

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

I hate most popular stuff--Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Batman--too violent and mean.

All my media tastes are weird. I actually enjoyed CATS for example. Skimbleshanks alone made up for the bad CG.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm not prepared to admit that either of the two Avatar films was "good," although obviously most people disagree with me. I thought the first one was "meh" and the second one was dreadful. I couldn't see the appeal. Everything about both seemed so cartoonish and fake, including the characters and dialogue and plot.

There's definitely a generational thing here, because this stuff doesn't bother my kids. Too much CGI bothers me. The excess of people doing things that defy gravity and other physical laws bothers me. One of the things I like about Tom Cruise movies is that even though there obviously are a lot of special effects involved, to a considerable degree you're watching real people moving through environments the way real people do. An old-fart problem I have with ensemble super hero movies (which everybody these days seems to love) is that if too many people are super then nobody's really super.