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?

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!