Works where you were surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers

[Peelee]

Oh, that reminds me: one for me is Definitely Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Watched the movie after seeing everyone seemed to love it, including some friends of mine, and was not impressed at all. I recall feeling like it wanted to be funny, but didn't how to; and beyond that I guess you can say I found it forgettable, as I remember very little else of it at this point (granted it has been over a decade).

I read Lucat's post and almost replied immediately to say exactly what you said.

[Zevox]

I read Lucat's post and almost replied immediately to say exactly what you said.

Ah, it's not just me then.

[Eldan]

I really enjoyed A Feast For Crows for what it was- a character study on Cersei Lannister. It helped that I had just started the series and wasn't waiting on it or waiting for Dance afterward for years.

The bigger problem with those two books is that the bloat started to set it, GRRM started to get lost in his own garden, and the overall plot doesn't seem like it's making any progress. Dance was the bigger offender of the two, but it hurts both books that there was a lack of follow-up to all of the various plots and arcs that were being explored. If I had gone into A Feast For Crows after years of anticipation, anxious to see resolutions or at least major developments to the long-running plot, I might have been far more frustrated with it. But after having powered through the first three books in relatively short order, the change of pace was actually kind of welcome.

In retrospect, I definitely think Dance with Dragons is the low point in the series. I really liked Feast of Crows, and moreso on a re-read, but Dragons just has such long stretches where nothing happens. And entire viewpoint character plotlines that just go nowhere and feel pointless. Man did I ever not care for Ser Whatsface in Dorne, or Quentyn Martell.

[Ionathus]

It almost feels like it was meant to be two movies. The first movie being where Hancock learns not to be a misanthrope and actually be a hero, and a second movie where his long lost love returns. Both halves are decent on their own, but as part of the same movie the plots don't mesh well.

The commentary I usually see is that the first half of the movie was really good, and the second half ruined it. But I like your take on this better.

I think with an entire movie's runtime to work with, that second movie could have worked. Cut out or dramatically tone down the misanthrope stuff and give us a better arc for understanding the "immortal duo" and why these things matter. The premise for that second half was interesting and compelling: immortals who are paired for eternity but become mortal when they stay together -- that's a cool storytelling idea. The problem was that it came out of nowhere and didn't have any groundwork laid to build an interesting story in the time they had left.

Also the fact that the plan the "main villains" cook up is to shoot the invincible guy, and it only works because he happens to be -vincible now for reasons they couldn't have possibly predicted.

[halfeye]

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.

[Peelee]

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.

Spoiler

Show

[Mordar]

Because I didn't watch it until years after it came out, I wasn't surprised that I'm the only human on the planet who likes the John Carter movie, I just don't get why.

I don't think people didn't like it...I think they just didn't pay to go see it. My recollection may be off, and I liked it (because lots of reasons, including the actors from Rome and Dejah...even useless Willem Dafoe can't ruin all of them)...I don't recall strong dislike from any sector other than Disney Finance.

Ditto the Jason Momoa Conan movie. It's got everything a barbarian movie should have, biceps, boobs, blades and blood.

You know the John Krasinski show on Amazon about the CIA employee? If they called that "John Bryan" it'd be a pretty alright show. If they'd have called the Momoa debacle "Barney the Not Very Civilized" I might have been able to stomach it. Had some cool scenes. No part of it Conan.

Is it a minority opinion to suggest that Momoa is a bargain basement, buy-one-get-three-free version of the Rock, and my favorite role of his is singing and dancing in the TMobile commercial with the kids from Scrubs?

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.

The Great Wall of China is bland and boring.

Oh, here's a potentially good one (and fully honest): Kurt Cobain was crap. Nirvana is a blight on Dave Grohl's resume.

- M

[Tyndmyr]

The Mona Lisa is bland and boring.

Excellent take.

I feel like half the stuff in the art world is borderline insane, and why this is the most famous painting just seems to be weird. It doesn't have any unusual composition or anything going for it, it's just a portrait.

One thing I've heard about professional movie critics -- I think I once heard a professional movie critic actually say this -- is that they watch a lot more movies than you or I do. A lot more. A professional critic might watch a movie every day of the week, or at least one every other day. Most of them also probably watched an unusually high number of movies when growing up, that's why they became critics.

Eh, in the post-pandemic world of streaming on demand, I feel like this is less of a thing than it used to be. I've seen an absolute crapton of movies, and there are a nigh-infinite number of them on tap at any point. Having seen lots of movies isn't really a rare trait nowadays.

I don't think "if you completely change the structure of the movie then it's not a good movie" is really the criticism you think it is.

Something relying solely on a twist is okayish the first time, but it doesn't make for a rewatchable film. Non-sequential storytelling isn't that weird, and a great film that uses it, but has other advantages as well, such as Pulp Fiction, is gloriously rewatchable. Memento doesn't have that.

Nah, appreciation for John Carter has increased over time, to the point that it qualifies as 'officially underrated.' John Carter, like Solo, is another case of marketing failures overwhelming basically everything about the film itself. Disney basically strangled the marketing push for the film and also couldn't find it in themselves to title the movie 'John Carter of Mars' for inexplicable reasons. The movie failed catastrophically at the box office as a result and was considered in the general consciousness to be a failure until enough time passed for revisionist criticism to occur and permeate the internet.

John Carter isn't a great film - it has significant story, pacing, and acting problems (Dominic West, in particular, seems to have no idea what he's doing in the film at all) - but it's a fun film with some genuinely great visuals and set pieces that deserved better treatment.

John Carter suffers from having multiple sets of bookending on either side of it, resulting in a lot of stuff that isn't actually the main story you've sat down to see. However, it absolutely could have been awesome.

The film within a film that is inside of Fall Guy is basically "John Carter, but awesome" if you are craving that. Fall Guy is a solid flick in general, not a bad thing to grab while it's in theaters. Bit of an homage to stuntmen, and definitely a lot of stunts in the movie, which I enjoy.

[Peelee]

Non-sequential storytelling isn't that weird, and a great film that uses it, but has other advantages as well, such as Pulp Fiction, is gloriously rewatchable.

Keeping in mind this thread is for works where I'm considered rhe minority:

Pulp Fiction is wildly overrated. It's still ok, which for me is miles better than some other stuff Tarantino has done.

Although I've never been surprised to discover I'm in the minority on this opinion.

[Errorname]

I feel like half the stuff in the art world is borderline insane, and why this is the most famous painting just seems to be weird. It doesn't have any unusual composition or anything going for it, it's just a portrait.

It's a perfectly fine painting, but it was made famous when it was stolen and recovered.

[Cazero]

It's a perfectly fine painting, but it was made famous when it was stolen and recovered.

Weird, I was sure it was made famous by virtue of being the works of someone famous.

[Mordar]

It's a perfectly fine painting, but it was made famous when it was stolen and recovered.

While that was a popularizing moment, I think it carries with it several qualities that make it so important/regarded/known - the advanced realism of the portrait, the depiction of light/shadow, the anatomy underlying the portrait (maybe LdV's greatest skill was in depicting anatomy, and that's saying something!), the value placed on it by contemporaries, and yes, the placement in the Louve (story says both the museum and the artwork gained fame together).

Yup, it isn't very exciting, but the artistic importance is based on fundamentals. It is the Celtics, not the Lakers. If you're old enough to know Larry and Magic.

My favorite piece in the Louve by far...Winged Nike of Samothrace. Maybe the Greeks couldn't paint but they could shape the heck out of stone.

Minority take: Gothic German architecture crushes Hausmann. But Hausmann's urban design (what he was actually supposed to do, I think) makes places look much more livable.

- M

[Peelee]

Weird, I was sure it was made famous by virtue of being the works of someone famous.

Indeed, just like Ginevra de’ Benci, Adoration of the Magi, and Salvator Mundi. All of which were done by the same dude who did Mona Lisa. Now, just a shot in the dark here, but how many of these were you familiar with before I named them?

Fun fact, assuming anyone says "none of them", there was even a boost to Salvator Mundi's fame when it sold for half a billion dollars not too long ago. But even then, still largely under the radar in general modern cultural zeitgeist.

Louve


Louve

Louvre.

Those wacky French!

[Errorname]

Weird, I was sure it was made famous by virtue of being the works of someone famous.

It was a known piece of art from a famed artist, but it wasn't definitive and universally recognizable in the way it is now prior to it being stolen

[Mordar]

Louvre.

Those wacky French!

Absoluvrey correct.

The shame.

- M

[Tyndmyr]

Keeping in mind this thread is for works where I'm considered rhe minority:

Pulp Fiction is wildly overrated. It's still ok, which for me is miles better than some other stuff Tarantino has done.

Although I've never been surprised to discover I'm in the minority on this opinion.

Love the film myself, probably very close to the perfect movie, if I had to pick one.

Tarantino does maybe get a little overhyped, though. His average film is pretty good, better than Hollywood's average, but, say, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gets a little too fixated on a specific era, and unless you really, really want an ode to hollywood, it's a bit thin. Oh, it's got a coupla great scenes, but all in all, it's a B tier film at best. Not to mention his foot thing coming up in basically all his films.

[PirateMonk]

I really enjoyed watching The Book of Henry and was surprised to later learn it had gotten fairly negative reviews. Although my rebuttal to the critics can be summed up as, "you say 'tonal whiplash and bizarre plot twists' like that's a bad thing", so maybe I should have seen that coming.

Conversely, I watched Team StarKid's The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals last year despite being unenthusiastic about the premise because the sequels seemed interesting. It wound up being a bit worse then I expected (most of the songs didn't do much for me and it didn't walk the line between entertainingly meta and obnoxiously meta very gracefully), though at least the lead actors were charismatic enough to render it watchable. While browsing the franchise's TVTropes page, I learned that the show attracted a substantial new fanbase, many of whom disliked the (far superior in my view) sequels.

As a more marginal example, I rewatched The Adventures of Tintin (2011) a few years ago and was surprised in retrospect by how nonexistent its lasting cultural impact has been.

[Rodin]

In retrospect, I definitely think Dance with Dragons is the low point in the series. I really liked Feast of Crows, and moreso on a re-read, but Dragons just has such long stretches where nothing happens. And entire viewpoint character plotlines that just go nowhere and feel pointless. Man did I ever not care for Ser Whatsface in Dorne, or Quentyn Martell.

The problem with Feast and Dance is that they were meant to be a single book. GRRM started writing and realized he had way too many ideas, so he split them - one focusing on the south, the other on the north and east.

That’s where the bloat sets in. There isn’t enough forward progress because the two books take place mostly simultaneously. Plot build-up is slow in the side plots because what would have gotten a few chapters in previous books (or not shown directly at all) is now given large portions of a book. Separating the regions means we get nothing from some characters for an entire book, but then they get half a book to themselves. Or vice-versa.

Dance is worse I think because there aren’t as many interesting factions in the North and around Daenerys. If the two books had been interwoven with the bloaty side plots cut down I think they would have been better received.

[KorvinStarmast]

Kurt Cobain was crap. Nirvana is a blight

Yes. And Pearl Jam is overrated. (I know, tastes differ, but I was wearing flannel shirts back in the 70's...).

[Peelee]

Yes. And Pearl Jam is overrated. (I know, tastes differ, but I was wearing flannel shirts back in the 70's...).

I'm not a fan, but also, I don't think people were buying records because of the flannel.

[Eldan]

Louvre.

Those wacky French!

Wacky English, really. In French, the r isn't silent.

[Mordar]

I'm not a fan, but also, I don't think people were buying records because of the flannel.

Because it is crazy hard to play a flannel record!

- M

[Peelee]

Finally pegged down something that had been gnawing at me:

Something relying solely on a twist is okayish the first time, but it doesn't make for a rewatchable film. Non-sequential storytelling isn't that weird, and a great film that uses it, but has other advantages as well, such as Pulp Fiction, is gloriously rewatchable. Memento doesn't have that.

Would I be surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers of i think that not every movie needs to be rewatchable?

[Tyndmyr]

Finally pegged down something that had been gnawing at me:


Would I be surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers of i think that not every movie needs to be rewatchable?

They don't have to be, but it's a definite plus when they are.

[Vahnavoi]

I feel like half the stuff in the art world is borderline insane, and why this is the most famous painting just seems to be weird. It doesn't have any unusual composition or anything going for it, it's just a portrait.

Especially when it comes to older art, good part of it stems from them being artifacts of age, and reviewed from viewpoint, of it being non-trivial to produce quality work. You, on the other hand, live in an age when there's massively more people and both the knowledge and the means to generate equivalent works is more widespread.

Related, I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority for defending "unnecessary remakes". There is no such thing. The thought of an "original" that can't be improved on or shouldn't be replicated is by-product of an age when it's too easy to record and copy performances. This is an anomaly. It has been overwhelmingly more normal to keep art alive by re-enacting it. Just giving new people something to do is a justification for re-enacting or remaking a work. The value of a finished re-enactment or remake may vary, but should only be decided after the fact. I have spoken.

[pita]

I find the ending of The Good Place upsettingly bad but most people I talk to about it put it as one of the best TV finales of all time. I also don't absolutely hate the Lost ending (I think it's a mixed bag caused by mismatched writer/audience expectations) so maybe I'm just weird about endings.

[Ionathus]

Related, I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority for defending "unnecessary remakes". There is no such thing. The thought of an "original" that can't be improved on or shouldn't be replicated is by-product of an age when it's too easy to record and copy performances. This is an anomaly. It has been overwhelmingly more normal to keep art alive by re-enacting it. Just giving new people something to do is a justification for re-enacting or remaking a work. The value of a finished re-enactment or remake may vary, but should only be decided after the fact. I have spoken.

Same. I'll often think "...why are they adapting this?" but I'll stop short of saying remakes shouldn't happen. There's always another potential story to tell, and the best adaptations give us a new look or perspective.

Obviously if the remake sucks, then I'm happy to dunk it in the garbage and blame the studio for churning out uninspired nostalgia bait. And if a studio gets a reputation for this, then they no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. But all things being equal, if I don't already have a reason to mistrust the creative team, I'm almost always on the side of "let them cook" when it comes to adaptations or remakes.

I find the ending of The Good Place upsettingly bad but most people I talk to about it put it as one of the best TV finales of all time.

This is indeed a certified minority opinion as far as I know! Everyone I've talked to has really loved The Good Place's ending, myself included.

[pita]

This is indeed a certified minority opinion as far as I know! Everyone I've talked to has really loved The Good Place's ending, myself included.

Gonna spoil the hell out of it

Spoiler: The Good Place

Show

There were two huge missteps in the last season that tanked it, IMO.
The first, and minor one, is the character of Brent. The Good Place sort of avoided the question of actual Evil in the show. "Does Hitler deserve redemption". The worst character in the show was Eleanor, who was selfish, a little cruel, mean, and in part thanks to Kristen Bell being low-key one of the best actresses alive, incredibly charming. We were on Eleanor's side throughout her redemption, and we loved it happening, and we loved the relapses, and we loved everything about her. Brent, on the other hand, was the sort of evil we get to know in real life. Brent wasn't trash the way Eleanor is, he was evil. He was unpleasant to be around. He was overall terrible. And he brings to question this core idea that the show tries to answer, "does everyone deserve a chance", and the show sorta answers it with "not really". We see, after everyone has found their perfect selves, that Brent still sucks. This is minor, but serves as a bit of a damper on the last season as a whole, as he's a big part of it throughout its first half.
The second thing, the thing that made me go "you seriously went and did this?", is this: The entire show, the core premise of the later seasons, is that these four misfits made each other better people. That it was what they had gone through together that molded them and made them better. They were supposed to torture each other, and they did, but they taught each other how to work on their worst parts. Basically, the Good Place was saying "the real good place is the friends we meet along the way".
After we went through a whole arc of "these people are better people because of who they'd been with and the lives they've shared", something that goes so far as to make Chidi decisive, the answer the show comes to is "Heaven kinda sucks, actual death is better". They had the perfect answer of "The Good Place is the people you love" right there in their hands and went with "The Good Place can only be good with suicide". It was bull**** and it pissed me off. My gut feeling was that there was a bit of a How I Met Your Mother thing going on, where they had the ending they wanted in mind and tried to reverse engineer it and it didn't work, and they still did it in spite of going with a new ending that fit where they were with the characters.
TLDR: The Good Place betrayed the hell out of the premise it had developed for three and a half seasons in order to deliver A Big Idea that didn't work for me.

[Tyndmyr]

I find the ending of The Good Place upsettingly bad but most people I talk to about it put it as one of the best TV finales of all time.

I'm with you on that.

Fortunately, if you simply pretend the last episode does not exist, the penultimate episode also works gloriously as a finale with a wildly different message.

[Ionathus]

Gonna spoil the hell out of it

Spoiler: The Good Place

Show

There were two huge missteps in the last season that tanked it, IMO.
The first, and minor one, is the character of Brent. The Good Place sort of avoided the question of actual Evil in the show. "Does Hitler deserve redemption". The worst character in the show was Eleanor, who was selfish, a little cruel, mean, and in part thanks to Kristen Bell being low-key one of the best actresses alive, incredibly charming. We were on Eleanor's side throughout her redemption, and we loved it happening, and we loved the relapses, and we loved everything about her. Brent, on the other hand, was the sort of evil we get to know in real life. Brent wasn't trash the way Eleanor is, he was evil. He was unpleasant to be around. He was overall terrible. And he brings to question this core idea that the show tries to answer, "does everyone deserve a chance", and the show sorta answers it with "not really". We see, after everyone has found their perfect selves, that Brent still sucks. This is minor, but serves as a bit of a damper on the last season as a whole, as he's a big part of it throughout its first half.
The second thing, the thing that made me go "you seriously went and did this?", is this: The entire show, the core premise of the later seasons, is that these four misfits made each other better people. That it was what they had gone through together that molded them and made them better. They were supposed to torture each other, and they did, but they taught each other how to work on their worst parts. Basically, the Good Place was saying "the real good place is the friends we meet along the way".
After we went through a whole arc of "these people are better people because of who they'd been with and the lives they've shared", something that goes so far as to make Chidi decisive, the answer the show comes to is "Heaven kinda sucks, actual death is better". They had the perfect answer of "The Good Place is the people you love" right there in their hands and went with "The Good Place can only be good with suicide". It was bull**** and it pissed me off. My gut feeling was that there was a bit of a How I Met Your Mother thing going on, where they had the ending they wanted in mind and tried to reverse engineer it and it didn't work, and they still did it in spite of going with a new ending that fit where they were with the characters.
TLDR: The Good Place betrayed the hell out of the premise it had developed for three and a half seasons in order to deliver A Big Idea that didn't work for me.

Spoiler: The Good Place finale

Show

1. IMO The show doesn't say "not really" to the idea of Brent's redemption -- it says "not yet." As they're devising the final afterlife test that ultimately gets implemented (you're tested, you get feedback, you're rebooted, you try again), they acknowledge that some people may never break out of the cycle if they're truly that selfish/ignorant/cruel. But that's up to them. We even see a little moment of Brent in the finale, multiple Bearimys into the future, and he's still going through the process for the umpteenth time. Maybe he'll figure it out one day.

Keep in mind that the second set of humans was, morally speaking, "roughly equivalent" to the original Team Cockroach. When they're setting up the test, The Judge has some line about how the Bad Place is required to send four test subjects who had similar point totals. So Brent sucks, more than any other human in the cast by a long shot, but probably not orders of magnitude more. His real barrier to improvement is less any actively evil intentions and more his absolute lack of self-awareness or empathy.

Ultimately, it was a tricky thing to write about. You can't really get away with depicting truly cruel or depraved people going through these tests: depicting a serial killer as a test subject would completely ruin the tone of the show. But I think they leave it as elegantly as they can, with a solution that "scales" to both minor evil like Brent and the more abhorrent evil they had the good sense to not depict: eventually, with infinite time and effort to work with, anyone who's trying to improve themselves will get there. That's the point of "the new system."

2. As for the finale itself: nobody can tell you how to feel about the showrunners' philosophy. If it wasn't to your tastes, then it wasn't to your tastes, and I'm sorry the ending hurt the experience for you.

That said: I don't think your preferred message is as incompatible with the show's conclusion as you think. They do get better together, as friends. They do conclude that people working together make each other better. They spend countless ages in the true Good Place together. And they save most of humanity from unearned eternal torture. They accomplish what they set out to do. And then, eventually, they've had their fill of it. That doesn't cheapen the experiences they had. Human life is all about change and impermanence. Given how many layers-within-layers Team Cockroach's afterlife experience was, it feels quite consistent with the rest of the show that they would end on "moving on to the next thing."

they had the ending they wanted in mind and tried to reverse engineer it

I hope this doesn't sound snarky but...keep in mind this is kind of what you're doing right now. You had formed an expectation of the ending in your head, and as a result you weren't receptive to the message they had to share because you were waiting for them to say the thing you wanted to hear. I disagree with you pretty strongly that this comes out of nowhere. The message of change and impermanence is baked into the entire show from the get-go.

Goodness knows I've done this same thing a bunch -- most recently with Hadestown, which I enjoyed the first time but felt they fumbled the ending. After a conversation with several people and reading some analysis of the show, I've re-evaluated my own conclusions and done a complete 180 -- I believe wholeheartedly that they executed exactly what they were going for brilliantly. As a result, it's turned from one of my least favorite endings into something that resonates very deeply.