Opposite of a guilty pleasure: what movies have you recently seen that you didn't enjoy or even hated but you had to admit were good movies?

I just saw Aguirre: Wrath of God.
I enjoyed Wrath of Khan more.

The Assistant. Plus 10,000 others going back.

The biggest gap for me between aesthetic admiration and subjective (lack of) enjoyment was maybe Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth. It reminds me of Chuck Eddy on Jimi Hendrix: "This is amazing... when does it end?"

Kinski as Khan would be interesting.

I had frustratingly indifferent reactions to both Pain and Glory and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

The better portion of Scorsese's filmography.

Good thread idea, hard to come up with anything at the moment. Peter Greenaway, maybe.

Hard To Be A God was quite the ordeal

I don't watch films anymore, but back when I did, anything by Terrence Malick.

all three of the films Charlie Kaufman wrote and directed

agree about Hard To Be.A God

I thought it seemed cool but didn’t finish watching so yeah

So we're talking about an innocent displeasure eh. Sounds like a Patricia Cornwell novel.

Fassbinder, aside from Ali (which I adored)

Fassbinder is tough. Ali is my favorite of his too

One of my faves ever tbh.

I suppose this applies to a lot of "difficult viewing." What comes to mind for me is Come and See, the Soviet WW2 film directed by Elem Klimov.

Good call

Ali is incredible. also one of my favorites ever. godard makes these kinda movies for me. also, the 400 blows.

which i haven't recently seen. just one of those movies where it's like ok.. i get it. not for me. same with fellini tbh.

i don't agree on aguirre though or most herzog, just totally entrancing and enjoyable for me.

Every Kurosawa Samurai film.

;_;

Malick is my definitive "I get why this is good, but I'm just not into it" filmmaker.

I tried Stalker again last night but all that yellow/sepia made me sleepy. When I woke up it was regular colors but I'd missed too much. Will try again earlier in the evening. Maybe not.

Also listening to Russian talk made me sleepy. Doesn't happen with every other foreign language.

Ohhh, I just remembered a recent one: Hagazussa. There's a lot to appreciate and it's often beautiful to look at but I just found it...kinda repellent?

(I'm more often surprised by how much I legit enjoy classic films that I expect to be stuffy, boring, etc.)

I couldn't finish Hard To Be a God, partly because my mother had died the day before, but also I sensed after an hour or so that it wasn't going to have any point besides drowning the viewer in shit. Come and See is hard to take, but there's a point to sitting through it.

Stalker, Synecdoche New York and most Godard and Herzog are some of my favourites, though. I'm more likely to be bored by complicated plots than by slowness. Kurosawa I often find a little tedious.

The Color of Pomegranates is sui generis but I got bored of it after around half an hour.

When I finished Heaven Knows What I remember saying “that was brilliant and I never want to see it again”. Same for Enter the Void.

and Hard to Be a God

"wouldnt watch again" is imo not at all the same thing here

The Favourite was clearly doing something stylistically interesting with great performances but it left me pretty blank.

Duck Soup and Wiseman's NYPL documentary,
but I managed to sit through all of Wiseman.

I do not understand the question

"Guilty pleasure" is such an odious concept

I cannot imagine feeling guilty for enjoying a work of art or entertainment. Cigarettes, sure. a MOVIE???????

The Favourite was clearly doing something stylistically interesting with great performances but it left me pretty blank.

The whole way through The Favourite, I kept wishing I was watching the same story and the same cast with a different script and director.

The Revenant is my answer for this. There's obviously a huge amount of work and care gone into it, but it is a SLOG.

:( @ Duck Soup

a lot of work and care went into tons of bad movies, it doesn't make them good or admirable. the only thing that matters is if the movie works. I agree that The Revenant is a slog and 100% not worth shooting out in the real frozen tundra

xp

"Guilty pleasure" is such an odious concept

I've always thought it's a completely wrong-headed term, and that a better description is "embarrassed pleasure." I can't imagine feeling guilty for liking a movie or song; there are, though, lots of movies and songs where I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit how much I like them.

L'Avventura. I just could not muster up any fucks to give about those people

I think the "guilt" in "guilty pleasures" acknowledges something is trash and therefore sanctifies it.
We don't really have an equivalent phrase in English to recognize something is good outside of our personal tastes.
"difficult viewing" isn't quite it -- it could be really easy viewing for someone else!

I'm fine with "dumb pleasure."

"Guilty pleasure" is such an odious concept

― flappy bird, Wednesday, February 3, 2021 6:25 PM

I can understand guilt when someone is getting some kind of pleasure from someone's pain or misery, even if it's a fictional character, especially if it's sexual. I can imagine people having lots of ethical questions about enjoying depictions of suffering.
I remember seeing a guy saying he felt guilty laughing at the guy in Borat who is getting his vases smashed.

I've felt guilty for a very long time for enjoying things that are 80% mediocre or very poor and 20% vital. I've been trying to drop this shame but it's really about keeping the right amount of it in my life.

Come and See is hard to take, but there's a point to sitting through it.

Can you share the point in a sentence or two, bearing in mind that I already know that war is bad and that people will often mistreat each other given the opportunity?

Solaris (the original) was not at all enjoyable; I watched it an hour a day for three days because I just couldn't take any more than that at a time. But sure, it's a classic example of something.

Felt this way about that Blade Runner sequel a few years back.

I like Prometheus better, tbqh.

2001 (Kubrick) also in this category for me.

if i didn't like it it's not good

Come and See is really intense and horrific, but I wouldn't say I find it hard to sit through. It's completely riveting.

I really really want to enjoy Hard To Be A God but... Pffff

Also, having seen it twice now, I'm not 100% sure Parasite is quite all it's cracked up to be

I can't recall the director of Hard To Be A god actually completed the film himself. Maybe he would have edited it down if he hadn't died?

I might have loved a much shorter version because some scenes look amazing. Brilliantly realized world.

what's my take on Cassavetes?

unperson, the "point" of Come and See is that even through all the atrocities the main character encounters, there's a scene near the end showing his ability to retain his sense of compassion and mercy. But I wouldn't tell anyone "you must sit through" any film, and this one is certainly tougher than most.

Also, Tarkovsky's Solaris is maybe his slowest movie. I'm sure time goes backwards at some point in the middle.

Battle of Algiers and The World of Apu

Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line' and 'The Tree of Life' have some beautiful sequences but they are slow and sleepy. Tree of Life is pretty much like being stoned even sober...to go from that family story to that dinosaur sequence was a big WTF...it looked cool though.

Read the 'The Thin Red Line' as a teenager, it eventually deserves to be made into a more conventional film I would think.

The Phantom Thread.

Kinji Fuksaku's Graveyard Of Honor is an unflinching display in making your protagonist entirely irredeemable and seeing how that plays out, but without even a hint of dark humor around it. It's a pretty brilliant occasion of a filmmaker taking away the fig leaves that made his previous films work as entertainments, but god what an unpleasant experience.

Certainly didn't hate it, but I really don't get all the fuss over Minari. Poking around online after watching it this morning, I was a bit surprised that I couldn't find any significantly dissenting opinions on this one.

It wasn't great or anything but it was a lovely movie with a nice score and an underrated performance by Yeri Han, who played the Steven Yuen character's wife

Hard to Be a God was one of two films I've watched in the last several years that I couldn't finish. The other was Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Tetsuo isn't that long though

I know people love those films but I can't take the chaos and dysphoria of them, it's my own issue I know

I did like Hard To Be A God and Stalker but not as much as I wanted to and have to admit I was often bored. But I really admire that Hard To Be A God created such a convincing setting.

yeah it did, it was memorable

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Hard to Be a God until this thread.

I was psyched to see Tetsuo many years ago, but yeah, for a short film it sure felt like an eternity.

L'Avventura. I just could not muster up any fucks to give about those people

― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Wednesday, February 3, 2021 1:31 PM (nine months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Seconded; also La Notte (I found myself wishing these people would just have babies and repress their worldliness and wanderlust in the name of parenthood).

As for Minari, did the filmmaker truly mean to present an invasive plant from a different ecosystem as a metaphor for the Korean-American experience?

feels to me like like L'Avventura is Antonioni's signature film. There weren't any major plot points, Anna just disappears. The whole thing was so open-ended. it still seems very fresh

I tried to rewatch Tetsuo this week, but the version on Kanopy is cropped to widescreen

I think William Gibson's writing in The Peripheral is better and more mature than in Neuromancer, but I was able to finish Neuromancer, and I never got past a few chapters in The Peripheral. Meanwhile I'm easily digesting The Peripheral miniseries...

Speaking of Tetsuo and objectively excellent but subjectively tedious stop-motion body horror, Mad God was also hard to sit through.

It took me 3 or 4 nights to watch Solaris last month. I kept falling asleep!

Not a film, but a book: W G Sebald's 'Rings of Saturn'. Good grief this bloody book has taken me months to read. It's fantastic. But man it's also very slow going for me.

The better portion of Scorsese's filmography.

― avatar of a kind of respectability homosexual culture (Eric H.),

Another vote for Hard To Be A God, the uncontested winner of the thread

Speaking of books: anything I've read by William Golding, excluding 'Lord of the Flies', elicits a 'I can tell why this is really good' mixed with 'God I hate this'.

ha, Tetsuo and Mad God might be the most sheer pleasure I've had watching movies this year.

I see your Martin Scorsese and raise you one Peter Greenaway.

The better portion of Scorsese's filmography.

― avatar of a kind of respectability homosexual culture (Eric H.),

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Saw that. Was what I referring to. Maybe I should have quoted for clarity. Perhaps I used up all my limited energy this morning trying not to misspell Scorsese.

My ultimate "watch this, it's good for you" director is maybe... Eisenstein? Though I found Ivan 2 not so bad recently.

I don't like Cassavetes but I don't know that I'd even say he made "good movies".

Can’t think of many… most films I dislike, I consider them to be “bad films”. Hal Hartley, most of Fassbinder, half of Greenaway, for example

The only applicable films I can think of are the ones that form a part of “film history” and one has to regard their innovative aspects— Texas Chainsaw Massacre fits the bill, here, I didn’t enjoy it but I appreciated it

I absolutely adore both Ivan the Terrible installments on a very "this is fun" level

The camp elements were more apparent to me on this recent rewatch, inspired by an article by Andrew Britton: "Sexuality and Power, or the Two Others".

I actually don't even really process it as camp, more alien

Camp alien? Like Harvey Korman as The Great Gazoo?

Like Bea Arthur tending the Cantina Bar

I wouldn’t serve you with Bea Arthur’s check!