You Have Poor Taste in Movies

 

Every now and again, a movie will come out that is near universally loved. Critics love it and fans will defend it until the day they die. God forbid you don't like it though.

To Hell with all that, here's a few movies that are either universally loved or have a rabid following that I are OK to hate.


  1. Clerks

I don't like Kevin Smith. I know that's the “in” thing to say these days, but I've never really liked him. I don't need to hear endless forced Star Wars references spoken in dialog that nobody would use in real life. Aside from the dirty goth kids in high school, have you ever heard anybody talk like a Kevin Smith character? Anybody?

Clerks is a movie that I avoided watching for a long time. Though Mallrats was a staple of my high school movie watching schedule, it's not a good movie. That was the only movie by Kevin Smith that I knew about for a while, and Clerks just sounded stupid. Maybe it's because I worked at a gas station/convenience store for my entire high school career... and for another 5 years after I graduated. I was living that hell, I didn't need to watch a movie about it.

When I finally got around to it, I saw what I expected: a cheap, poorly made, poorly written piece of trash. I don't care what he had to do to make the movie, I don't care if it was a supposed breath of fresh air when it came out, and I don't care about what everybody else thinks about the movie. I also don't care if it only cost like $27 thousand to make; it plays like a movie that was thrown together for no money in their free time with people that have no acting talent.

And Silent Bob... not only in this movie but as a character... garbage. The only worse repeated director cameo is Quentin Tarantino in all the various roles he's played. But at least his movies range from good to amazing. Do we really need a cliché silent character that only talks once as a way to give sage like advice to make the main character come to a revelation? We've only seen that thousands of times.

Do yourself a favor and go watch El Mariachi if you want to see what's possible on a REAL shoestring budget.

Looking back at what I just wrote, I guess this is more of a tirade against Kevin Smith. So lets see. I don't think this movie is funny. The closest I came to getting a hardy laugh was the Berzerker song. The story goes nowhere and the characters are unlikable. I know what kind of people you see coming into stores like these as I've seen it first hand. What was depicted in the film was very vanilla. There is just so much more that could have been done.

And for the record, I thought Kevin Smith started to do an about face with Zack and Miri. So much for that.



  1. Blood Simple

I love the Coen Brothers. I love all the essentials (yeah- Lebowski), and Miller's Crossing is one of my all time favorite movies. Take away Blood Simple, and I like every single Coen Brothers movie for various reasons. Even The Ladykillers.

The problem is that I can't really put my finger on why exactly I don't like this movie. The performances are solid, the story is good, and the cinematography is good for what it is. But when I watch this movie, it seems to lack the quirky charm of their other movies. I can't really go on a tirade here because I see value in the movie and it led to an astounding run of movies by the brothers.

I just really don't like the characters. I never really got attached to anybody, so the movie ended to a “meh.” It's missing Rooster Cogburn, Uncle Arthur, Osborne Cox, Anton Chigurh, Garth Pancake, Miles Massey, Dave Brewster, Delmar, Walter Sobchak, Marge Gunderson, Amy Archer, Charlie Meadows, Leo, and H.I. McDunnough. These are characters that either knocked it out of the park as a lead or a supporting character and made the movie feel alive. These are characters I felt connected to. They were people I want to know. Personally, I don't have one of these in Blood Simple.

The best/worst thing that happened to me because of this movie was when I decided to rework a scene from this movie in one of my directing classes and stated to my class that it's a scene from the only Coen Brothers movie that I don't like. My teacher responded by saying that this movie was one of his favorites and what inspired him to go to film school.

Somehow, I still got an A in that class.



  1. Aliens

Alien is one of the greatest movies of all time and is easily in the top 10 of horror AND Science Fiction movies. It's a movie that was built on rock solid cinematography and performances to build a sense of dread that's nearly unparallelled by anything else out there. There are scarier movies out there, but Alien is more about raising tension to a fever pitch and delivering the scares when it needs to. And it helps that you have Ian Holm and John Hurt giving excellent supporting performances.

Aliens has Bill Paxton.

I can honestly stop there and have my point proven. Nothing against the guy, but come on! Yes, he is entertaining and can put in a good performance if the role is right (see Near Dark), but a good actor he is not.

To be serious, Aliens took everything that I loved about Alien and threw it in the toilet. There is no horror factor and no tension. It's just a big dumb action movie with an emphasis on dumb. I don't see why this has such a large and rabid fan base.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with taking a movie in a different direction from it's predecessor. But here you could replace the aliens with any random creatures and the movie would be no worse. More important, it would also be no different. This entry took a movie that broke new ground and stood on it's own as something truly original and made it something generic. Alien arguably made the modern “monster movie.” Aliens was just another action movie. And for that, I hate it. But it could be worse: it could be Alien: Resurrection.