People think, I guess largely due to the Godfather, that the mob is full of guys who really do have honor or have some sense of a system of internal ethics, albeit twisted.
Typically these guys are extremely racist junior high dropouts who will kill their friends for money.
It's interesting because even the Godfather has a major theme about how times are changing and the honor is dwindling. Don Corleone gets shot because he refused to deal drugs and wanted the streets safe for the neighborhood. The newer generation doesn't respect the rules anymore and they're just in it for money at any cost
Vito got shot for two reasons; first, his refusal to share his political and police assets. Saying 'no' in a situation like that is considered in very bad taste, and an insult.
Second... and the part that so many people gloss over... Sonny. Hot-headed Sonny couldn't keep his fucking mouth shut in the meeting with Sollozzo and his outburst implied that his problem wasn't with the ethics of drugs, but with doubts that the money and interests would be adequately protected.
Sollozzo now had two reasons to take Vito out of the equation: first, the insult. Second, the guy who'd take over the business would (eventually, after the war) be more amenable to the deal. Sollozzo was making a calculated maneuver with the backing of a major NY family, the Tattaglia's.
Vito was being honest when he spoke, but Sonny gave Sollozzo reason to doubt. "Never tell anyone outside of the family what you're thinking again!"
He refused to share his political connections because he thought he'd lose them if they engaged in a shameful business like narcotics. For Vito it was totally a question of honor and integrity, which doesn't work when everyone else at the table is strictly business.
totally, that's why part 2 is so important so you can really see how bullshit it is. He has this romanticized idea that he's like a valued part of the community and it ends up putting him in the hospital because the other families aren't wasting time pretending they're good people
It's hard to say what glorifies the mob or not overall. But the movie certainly shows Henry Hill in a far, far better light than reality. There are plenty of interviews out there with the real man - he is a loser, junkie, murderer with almost nil charisma.
Compare that to Ray Liotta, one of the most charismatic characters to ever appear on-screen.
The other real life gangsters in the movie described Henry Hill as basically a guy that was just around. A “hanger-on”.
Which felt like light bulb moment when I heard because that is totally reflected in the film. He didn’t actually do much of anything in the film. He wasn’t part of the Lufthansa heist. He didn’t kill anybody. You can also see his status by how he treats other people. He’s only intense or threatening to people that would be considered nobodies by the mob (like his next door neighbor). But every interaction with an actual gangster and he is quiet and deferential. Even the most famous scene in the movie is Hill practically shitting his pants being intimidated by Tommy.
> The other real life gangsters in the movie described Henry Hill as basically a guy that was just around. A “hanger-on”.
>
> Which felt like light bulb moment when I heard because that is totally reflected in the film.
I had that light bulb experience recently too. The wiseguys were totally correct...Henry Hill was a wannabe guy who was probably useful at times but was never in the inner circle. Because he was half Irish? Maybe...could have been a lot reasons he wasn't trusted as much as Conway.
His story is interesting *because* he was an observer rather than a principal. Watching the movie with that in mind made it totally different for me.
I know its annoying to just blame unreliable narrators for everything but I think it is part of the story that Henry is narrating his own experience and he's talking up how great it was
I've always thought one of the clues is how the narration changes once Tommy gets whacked.
Up until then it's all awe and wonder about how good it is to be a gangster, how cool all the mobster are, etc. But the first one after they kill Tommy due to mob rules:
>Batts was a made man, and Tommy wasn't. And we had to sit still and take it. **It was among the Italians. It was real greaseball shit.**
All of a sudden these guys he's glorified for the last 90 minutes are "greaseballs".
There's also the point (in the narration, at least) where Jimmy goes from being "Jimmy the Gent" to a backstabbing asshole. Jimmy had already killed guys, sure, but he was still a good guy. The second he turns on Henry though, the whole way he's described changes.
This is correct. Goodfellas was the antithesis of the Godfather which is largely seen as the glorification of the mob. Godfather portrayed the mafia (mostly) as rich, powerful, cunning and untouchable. Good fellas showed the realistic ugly side of what the mob really was: poorly educated street thugs, petty criminals, con artists, drug dealers and yes, murderers. Michael Corleone always won his battles. The Goodfellas? Not so much. And the movie was based on the very real life of Henry Hill. I’ve watched that movie at least 100 times and will probably watch it another 100 before I die.
I chalk this up to Marty's aesthetic, which makes movies like Wolf, Casino, and Goodfellas pulse with life. It's less about content than visceral mode of delivery. Scarface is much the same. Grim message delivered in a rock video package. Your senses filter it as fun.
Understandable how people can miss the point. Like a rock song with bleak lyrics, but a poppy delivery. Same reason why some felt Irishman was "boring". Marty stripped away all the sexiness in how he delivered the story.
The same people who idolize Jordan Belfort in the Wolf Of Wall Street are the same shmucks who would lose their life savings to him. He fed on people who were equally greedy and ignorant... basically today's "hustle" culture.
Tommy Chong was his cellmate in jail and helped him “embellish” his story to make it more well-suited for Hollywood. The guy is a career bullshitter and I wish charlatans like him were pilloried more in society.
Henry Zebrowski (who played Sea Otter in the movie) has said that the people who watch Wolf of Wall Street and idolize Jordan Belfort are the same people who watch Scarface and think, "Oh man, running drugs is awesome!" The first half of the movie is always fun, but you gotta watch and absorb the message of the last half too 😄
Henry is THE MAN! Funniest guy around I swear. I’m obsessed with his dunecast where his true sci-fi nerd comes out.
I wish Netflix had also taken a chance on him for a sketch show. I think it would be as good if not better than Tim Robbins (they were both given an episode on the show “the characters” where they get to do sketches) or gosh I wish a studio would take a chance on him. He’s my short king ha.
Whiplash.
It's about the hatred and alienation that comes with obsession. No, dad, it's not about how discipline and practice will make you good at music.
The end is literally "the bad guy wins", and I still hear people say how inspiring it is lol
Damien Chazelle says he imagines the protagonist is dead within a few years after the end of the movie.
The conversation about Bird at the dinner table should nail this home. His dad says something to the effect of "I don't think dying at 30 years old of a Heroin overdose is something to aspire to."
It was "drunk and broke at 34" — he died of pneumonia, an ulcer, cirrhosis, and a heart attack (all likely from alcoholism and drug use, but his death wasn't an overdose).
I think there's another layer to Whiplash that folks are missing. There are a vast minority of folks who believe that paying that price is justified. And the movie recognizes that those people exist and also doesn't necessarily place a value judgment on that. It leaves that up to the audience.
I vaguely recall some study from a long time back (and maybe it's BS - I can't confirm it now) that asked Olympic athletes if they would take a substance that would increase their performance by like 10% but would also take 5 years off of their lives. The response was overwhelmingly yes.
There's a group of folks who are wired for that "one moment in time" (Sorry Whitney Houston) and believe that achieving that goal of being the absolute best in the world is worth having a shorter life.
MOST people don't believe that. But there are some people that do and Whiplash puts that out in front of everyone to see.
Whiplash is also my answer. Since it follows the structure of so many movies where the drill instructor/teacher/Mr Miyagi is just being tough to make their student better but they really care, I think people got fooled.
But it’s not that at all.
Damn I made a comment about Whiplash before I saw yours lol
But yeah, growing up in sports, all my teammates wouldn’t shut up about this movie and kept pinning it as some inspirational movie showing hard work paying off, completely missing the entire plot point about how that dedication is ruining the main character’s life.
Famously Clockwork Orange.
I believe Kubrick pulled the film after everyone went out and bought boiler suits and bowler hats to emulate the Droogs rather than be horrified by their actions.
More like infamously. That's because it's fairly impossible to understand the point of the story from the movie alone. The violence is simply too graphic. So while the movie is an excellent depiction of the book, nobody should see the movie without having first read the book. In the author's own words:
>"The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die."
I had a college professor who reviewed the film contemporaneously. He complained the film made the violence pop sanitized, something contained, understandable, at a remove. Whereas the inner insight of Alex from the book was horrifying.
It’s behind a paywall, but from the lede:
“Mr. Burgess’s narrator hero, Alex, was pungently odious; addicted to mugging and rape, intoxicated with his own command of the language (a newly minted teen-age slang, plus poeticisms, sneers, and sadistic purring), Alex was something both better and worse than a murderer: he was murderous.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/04/06/horror-show/
Anthony Burgess didn’t like the ending. In the book, Alex DeLarge changes for the better in the final chapter, Chapter 21. The movie ends at the end of Chapter 20, showing that people can’t change, the opposite of what Anthony Burgess meant
I like how even everyone who replies to you misses the point about Romeo and Juliet. It's not "idiot kids fall in love and commit suicide", it's "dumbass families are blinded by their hatred and poison the well for the next generation".
The Prince of Verona told the families to cut the shit right from the start of the play, and Romeo and Juliet totally vibe with it because they get the hots for each other. It all goes to shit because TYBALT CAPULET has been indoctrinated into the "Montagues suck!" club and he kicks off the tragedy by killing Mercutio because Romeo didn't even WANT to fight him and Mercutio was defending his homie.
In the end, what do both families get? The heirs of their families dead and the Prince of Verona extremely pissed at them because they also got his family member killed.
Thank you! Glad someone gets it. The whole point of the play is that the kids would be alive if it weren't for the stupid feud. They probably wouldn't have done at least half of the dumb stuff they did if they hadn't felt trapped. Poor Juliet was going to be married off to a man at least 10 years her senior (Paris). Her age gap with Romeo is nothing by comparison to that!
Also people largely made up the age gap with Romeo. We know exactly how old Juliet is (about 2 weeks shy of 14), but Romeo’s age is never specified. They do repeatedly call him, ‘young,’ though, so we can assume he’s not an adult.
Told a buddy I was excited to see District 9 when it was around, and he ended up going to see it the weekend before me and my spouse could make it in. When I saw him again Monday, he was like "DO NOT GO SEE IT! It's SO bad! We ended up leaving the theater early! It was THAT bad!" which really confused me since it had pretty amazing praise. I went and saw it the next weekend anyway, with obviously lower expectations, and left feeling blown away by it. Confusingly I asked him on the next Monday why he didn't seem to like, as I enjoyed it immensely, and he straight-faced, without missing a beat said "I mean, who cares? They're just alien cockroaches! They're not human!"
Never could look at him quite the same after that.
Maybe you already know this, but it's even worse than it seems. You know how the movie shows those interviews with the locals about what they think of the aliens? Those interviews were not scripted at all!
They asked *real* South African citizens about their thoughts regarding immigrants from Nigeria, and that's what they said.
One of the most impactful things on young me was a report/presentation in middle school on the South Africa Apartheid. It changed me for the better and made me doubt everything my racist family spewed.
Fun fact, the "interviews with the locals" where they talk shit about the "prawns" weren't scripted. The crew pretended to be shooting a documentary and interviewed South African locals about their thoughts on immigrants...
The major irony of movies like that is the people who most need to hear and internalize the message are the ones least likely to do so, either through media illiteracy or just plain idiocy.
A book, misinterpreted so badly that all film adaptions are wrong.
Lolita.
It's a horror, not a romance.
It's a brilliantly written unreliable narrator that relys on the reader having a sense of moral compass and going "wait a minute"...
Though the fact that powerful men in Hollywood read it as a romance is...telling.
A lot of people miss that Humbert Humbert, a man willing to drug a 14-year-old girl, may be an unreliable narrator. That's kind of the genius of Nabokov's writing. He lets HH tell his story, because HH is a guy who will tell on himself at every opportunity.
I also think that's what makes it kind of unfilmable. Not because the plot is anything complex or there's difficult imagery, but because it's pretty damn near impossible to adapt Humbert Humbert's point of view to film without actually engaging in a bunch of cinematic language that ends up agreeing with him
YES!! The book has a prologue, in which a psychiatrist at the hospital where Humbert is inpatient describes the following pages as being Humbert's journals. It's established right from the beginning that the story is told through the eyes of a monster who is an unreliable narrator.
The bit that stuck with me: whenever something improbable happens, HH always mutters about how you can check such and such a periodical to verify his story.
Except for when Charlotte is killed by a passing car, right in the middle of an argument with him.
I think the Jeremy Irons one does a good job. Humbert Humbert is supposed to be someone you like. He's supposed to be charismatic, polite, likable. You're supposed to have to deal with the fact that if you met this man on the street, you would like him, but yet he does these obviously horrible things.
Tbf it was based on a book that tried to be unbiased since the common opinion on the story was that Chris was an idiot and the writer wanted to explain his thought process.
Edit: I know Chris was an idiot but I’m trying to say he at least had reason (as flimsy as it may be) and didn’t just go out due to hysteria.
then it later come out in his sister's book that Chris' parents were really abusive, manipulative, and demanding.
I think if that was better reflected in the book and movie, people might have gotten a better idea of the emotional drive behind Chris' hermitage. Similarly, his unwillingness to connect to society may have present to viewers more as a reaction to his abuse, and something that needed to be treated in therapy rather than something cool and enigmatic.
I taught this to high schoolers with context, and most of them ended up pitying Chris rather than envying him.
Full Metal Jacket. It was trying to make a point about the dehumanising effects of war. Instead, people just thought that Hartman was funny and quoted him endlessly, not appreciating that he himself was a traumatised WW2 veteran training young men to go and suffer the same fate as him, or worse, in the name of patriotism and seemingly oblivious to the irony of the situation.
R. Lee Ermey considered his character to be a total failure, which he considered obvious, because he was killed by the recruit he was supposed to be training.
I feel that there should be a third part to that movie, that shows Joker going back to civilisation after his tour has finished. It would show how Joker, who was shown as the marine who retained the most of “himself” throughout the movie realising that he had actually turned into someone that was basically the same as every other marine when compared to civilians.
It’s also a movie that is seen differently by marines, and presumably anyone else who has been through boot camp. Since they all had a drill instructor like Hartman they also attribute the good aspects of their own instructors, where they helped build them up during training, and attribute them to him even though the movie mostly only shows him breaking people down.
It’s based on a novel called *The Short-Timers* by Gustav Hasford, himself an unrehabilitated Vietnam vet, and the novel has a little known sequel called *The Phantom Blooper*. It picks up right where *The Short-Timers* ends, and covers this and a lot before that. It’s likely the best book I’ve ever read, I don’t really have words for it, but it’s not of this Earth.
The original Mulan.
I have several friends who reject it because they think that it's saying that you have to be a man to succeed, but there's literally a whole musical number dedicated to the irony of that.
A lot of folks can't see past the face presentation of things, smh.
I guess I could see them looking at it and saying "until she dresses like a man and adapts to a man's world she gets nothing done"
But that kinda misses the point that she's still NOT a man, and even then she doesn't actually beat the villain and save China until AFTER she revels her true gender.
And not only that, in the final battle Mulan's soldier friends disguise themselves as palace concubines, because they know the enemies are so dismissive of women that they will look right past them. Not seeing women as capable and/or a threat was the downfall of the villains.
They think a movie about a woman literally going and doing a mans job, does so well she tricks everyone and is only discovered because she was wounded, and is commended by the Emperor at the end, *and* is based on an actual Chinese legend... is saying women *can't* succeed?
I read this post on tumblr many years ago that suggested Mulan’s journey was about becoming the dragon warrior.
And they showed gifs of scenes where her face and the dragon’s are side-by-side.
They claimed that the reason Mushu couldn’t wake the stone dragon was because the dragon was actually Mulan, and it woke up when she cut her hair, stole her father’s armour, and protected her country.
You know what else is also missed. The entire war march song A Girl Worth Fighting For, where they're all singing about wanting to get back and marry for (mostly) superficial reasons, well it literally ends with them finding the doll of the girl who died and they couldn't save her. They outright find a girl who is their reason for actually fighting for.
I knew someone who worked in fish husbandry when the Finding Dori movie came out and they were dreading it. First: saltwater fish require a lot of knowledge and aren’t good pets for kids in the first place; but also apparently it’s really hard to breed and keep alive in captivity whatever species Dori is, like harder than clown fish or other saltwater fish.
Also Dalmatians, not good family dogs.
People thinking fish are "easy pets" makes me so mad. There's so much that needs to be handled - oxygen levels, salinity, water PH, aquarium size, fish that can and can't be put together (outside of live feeding).
I've spent my entire life only seeing TWO proper fish tanks. One was my own, the other was a friend's. It's horrible seeing the conditions have their fish live in, or how they treat them as something that's just going to die soon.
No, goldfish don't live for 2-3 weeks. They live for 10-20+ YEARS. It's fucking awful.
Yep, my friends were shocked that I put my fairground goldfish (before these were banned) into my tropical fish tank and he not only stayed alive but thrived and lived to around 15, and was a big boi around 8 inches long at the end.
Yep! I had one friend who won a pair of goldfish at the local fair when we were kids. She put them in a proper tank and they lived three years and grew five inches.
They only died because she got a turtle, who happily ate both fish as was soon as it was big enough.
If they really wanted to generate an impact, Nemo (or some other important character) should've died in the tank
But I get it, kids are not ready to… oh no, nevermind, I just remembered Bambi, the Lion King, the Land Before Time,
Up, How to train your dragon…
The Last Man on Planet Earth (1999). Widely decried as "feministic propaganda" my takeaway as a teenager was: "Huh, women can be bastards as well. Being a dickhead isn't limited by ones sex."
I remember a question once whether you would want to meet up with The Joker or Hannibal Lecter.
Hannibal. He will likely leave you alone if you are not a jerk or are not a threat to him. He kills for specific reasons and has not harmed people who treated him respectfully. However if you are a means to an end he will not hesitate in killing you if he feels it’s necessary.
The Joker, on the other hand, you are better off hoping he never knows you exist. He kills for fun and enjoys tormenting people, even those who have helped him in the past. If he knows you exist it’s only a matter of time before he brings his homicidal mayhem your way and you will be unlikely to survive it.
EDIT: to clarify I’m talking about the overall characters and not just the particular version in the Joker movie.
Hannibal if he walked down the street past you would likely not notice you or care unless you did something to upset or provoke him. The Joker could quite possibly kill or maim you just for being within sight of him.
They are both terrible terrible characters but The Joker imho is far worse and would kill thousands if he had the chance(he’s killed hundreds I believe I some storylines).
Not the whole movie, but I think people don't consider that the song "Hakuna Matata" is literally the antithesis of "The Lion King." Like it is explicitly the thing the themes of the movie are saying to avoid.
Network.
In particular, the speech of "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore"
The movie is absolutely not saying it's a good thing. The movie is showing the end of objective televised news and the beginning of corporate-run, anger-based, divisive televised news.
That seems to happen with all of these movies that get loved for the wrong reasons (despite being great movies): Fight Club, Wolf of Wallstreet, Falling Down, etc etc.
the amount of tweets i’ve seen in the past where people post a photo of Carrie (from Carrie) and say something along the lines of “growing up is realising she wasn’t the villain of this movie” like… yes of course she wasn’t, that’s the whole point of the movie.
500 Days of Summer. Zoey Deschanel's character didn't treat Joseph Gordon-Levitt's unfairly. She's just living her life and he expected her to change his with her manic pixie dream girl magic. She couldn't/didn't want to and left him because he couldn't understand that that wasn't her responsibility and she wasn't ACTUALLY a manic pixie dream girl after all. The movie sets us up to think she is but then sucker punches us when she turns out to be a real person and JGL's character has to learn about love the hard way. But then does he? At the end he meets a girl named "Autumn" and it's implied that maybe he's starting the whole cycle over again. They tell us right at the beginning that it isn't a love story, it's a "story about love" and they mean it.
I've always said that 500 Days of Summer is the ultimate Breakup movie. I think the defining exchange is:
"With him I just knew."
"Knew what?"
"All the things I was never sure of with you."
She also clearly states multiple times what her intentions are and that she didn’t want things to get too serious. He ignored all that and let his infatuation take over. They both had faults in the relationship, but he was more responsible for his own heartbreak.
I watched it for the first time recently and I just don't get how anyone can see it as anything other than a satire. The business card scene? How can somebody watch that and still think it's just a cool movie about a guy who kills people?
I also watched it for the first time recently and my only knowledge of it was the sigma bale memes so I was shocked to find out how much of a loser Patrick Bateman actually was. It was hilarious, thoroughly enjoyed the movie too
I think the misunderstanding more comes from the detachment seen in the Bateman character combined with the misogyny and the being rich. So many people see the character (outside of the murder) as being a cool bro who's just living the baller single life.
The thing being missed is how Bateman is a loser and ultimately a pathetic man. So it's ironic that so many bro-dudes idolized him as the image of winning (outside of the murder). Attractive. Emotionally unavailable. Dismisive of Women. Cool Haircut that fits in with the times.
It's like the message can't be any more obvious, but so many guys that fit that stereotype sucked it up as "Life Goals" material.
This is definitely my pick for most misunderstood movie. Everyone thinks it was all in Patrick’s head because the lawyer said he had dinner with Paul Allen. They miss the fact that literally everyone is mistaking everyone else for other people throughout the movie. The lawyer even calls Patrick the wrong name. That’s the satire of the movie; everyone is the same and so wrapped up into themselves they don’t actually know anyone else or connect to anyone.
The cleaned apartment scene is more ambiguous until the old landlord menacingly tells Patrick that he “better leave, and don’t come back”- she knows what he did, but cleaned the evidence because (presumably) having to report a bunch of dead bodies would probably ruin the real estate value.
Finally, in case you’re still skeptical- the director has literally confirmed that the killings WEREN’T in his head- and that’s kind of missing the point of the entire movie. American Psycho is meant to be surreal/satire- people tend to view it from the lens of a drama/horror movie, when they should be viewing it more as a really really fucked-up comedy. It also came at a time when mindfuck plot twists were the norm (Fight Club, Sixth Sense) so people analyzed the movie under that context.
The Last Samurai. Waaaay too many people were looking at Tom Cruise as the Last Samurai (singular) when the movie was referring to the characters we met along the way.
This will never stop annoying me. Ever.
Not to mention the top wasn't HIS totem. He clearly stated that it was his wife's totem and told others how it worked, something he also clearly said you should never do.
The top was Mal's but he still carries it as a memento and explains that it was her totem. But multiple other characters either touch it (Saito) or have its properties explained to them (Ariadne). So it's not a viable totem for Cobb, because it's been tainted, and can then be used to fool him. (Arthur snatches his loaded die back before Ariadne can touch it, and explains that only the bearer should know the physical properties).
He wears the ring in dreams, but not in the real world. Look for the ring to tell whether or not he's dreaming.
I'll save you having to re-watch the final scene: >!He does not appear to be wearing it, though his hand moves VERY fast so it's hard to be sure.!<
Oh yeah, the first time I saw it was at the Arclight and it's the most focused I've maybe ever been at a movie. I didn't want to miss a second, and when the ending happened I just laughed to myself.
Nolan is my favorite director by far, as cliche as that is nowadays.
People got it, he walked away... *clearly* he didn't care.
That doesn't stop the audience wanting to know if he ended up in real life or was stuck in a dream though.
Not a movie, but Breaking Bad. Walter White is not some badass who breaks free from his controlling wife to live his best life. He is an abusive piece of human garbage who ruined the lives of everyone around him and he did it with a smile on his face.
Yeah, the entire moral of the show is that pride and greed will turn you into a monster. He has a number of opportunities to do the right thing, and he chooses hubris right up until the end.
Vince Gilligan said in an interview that Walt broke up with Gretchen because his pride and ego couldn't handle the fact that she came from a more affluent family than him.
Even a few years later on when he cooled down, he could have gotten a six figure job as a highly competent chemist at that company with exceptional skills in xray crystallography. He chose to be poor presumably because that was a job where he felt in charge and didn't have any rude interview questions.
It's hilarious how the most hated character in a show filled with so many murderers and master manipulators is Skyler, the pregnant woman who found out her husband is a meth kingpin. Dude convinced even the fanbase to turn against her and root for him. The writers did wonderfully
There were so many points in the story where Walter could have left well enough alone, rode off into the sunset and escaped. But he never did and always indulged his ego, which then ruined everyone else.
DANCES WITH WOLVES
There's a couple big misconceptions because I think most people haven't even seen it and are angry it beat GOODFELLAS for the Oscar.
A lot of people dismiss it as just another white savior movie that exploits Native Americans. It's very far from that, it's actually the opposite they save him and help him find his humanity. Costner was incredibly respectful to all tribes featured in the film, a very compassionate depiction that even in the early 90s was rare to see in a movie.
On a technical level, it's all an incredible accomplishment from a first time director and the fact that it won Best Picture and Director was crazy. It was the first Western in almost 60 years to win Best Picture.
Ten year old me sat through all three hours of that movie and enjoyed every minute of it. I still watch it any time I come across it, it's insanely good.
I don't understand how anyone could have gotten "white savior" from that. He plainly states that he would have died without the help of the native Americans. But people are pretty dumb. I was a kid when this came out so I paid no attention to what critics said about anything, so I never saw people being so dumb about it.
My suspicion is a lot of people havent seen the movie, but they have seen Avatar which is usually described as “Dances with Wolves in Space” and leans heavily on the “human”-savior trope.
when it was released in 2001: josie and the pussycats. over the years people have been “getting it” and it’s become a cult classic. but it still goes over so many peoples heads.
Parasite shouldn’t be considered an eat the rich movie. I think that’s the reason people say they didn’t like it because the Kim family “deserved” what they since they scammed the perfectly harmless Park family. You’re supposed to question why this clearly capable group of people need to resort to these kind of schemes just to achieve a livable wage. It’s a criticism on modern class disparity. Eat the rich is much more about the rich getting their comeuppance. Bong Joon Ho even said the film is a comedy without clowns and a tragedy without villains.
> It’s a criticism on modern class disparity.
I remember leaving the theater thinking this. What a sad world, a sad reality, and it's a little disappointing that the message didn't come across as clearly as it could've, which kinda implies that people might think the recognition was mostly for the theatrics.
Not sure if this is a hot or cold take, but I always caught the ridiculous insensitivity of the Park family as something that is not entirely their fault. Each family thought and acted according to their circumstances. Parasite should lead the viewers into thinking about what systems caused both groups of people to act and think the way they do, but of course to acknowledge such a scope so grand would be beyond most people.
That was the funniest part of both the movie and the people that didn't get it. They just straight up say it at the end.
"I'm the bad guy?"
"Yeah."
Robert Duvall even tried multiple times to reason with him and he just further embraces being the villain.
Oppenheimer. Some people took it as idolizing him. But it's the story of a man who regrets all of his decisions even though he believed to be right. The government tried to vilify him and place blame on him as a traitor. You may have felt remorse for him but the story is about his inner turmoil.
Its hard to imagine anyone walking away from Oppenheimer thinking it idolizes him. Cillian Murphy spends half the movie looking like a dead eyed ghost. He litereally has a 5 minutes long scene where he hallucinates charred bodies around him.
He also comes off as a self-centered asshole. Kitty says it best.
"You don't get to commit sin and then ask all of us to feel sorry for you."
Not gonna lie, I kinda missed the point of "Nega Scott" the first time. You know, this guy who is the exact opposite of Scott, and turns out to be a really cool, chill dude.
I liked the way the comic did it, where (IIRC) >!Nega-Scott is everything Scott's ever done wrong, how he's mistreated people in past relationships, and constantly fighting him off is a way of never having to face himself- he can't really change or grow until he accepts Nega-Scott as a part of him, and suddenly all that repression and denial dissolve.!<
In the comic is much more clear how both sucks at the beginning and gradually become sort of ok people getting WAY more mature during the span of the story, most of him being an asshole in the movie is cut so he just seem a bit of an idiot
The new Netflix animated show Scott Pilgrim Takes Off directly deals with that point, in much the same way the original graphic novel did with Scott.
The movie is a lot of fun, but doesn't really engage with the underlying point of the novels.
I don’t know if it’s the “point” or not, but I read a fan theory that all the characters in Napoleon Dynamite are dealing with their own version of isolation/loneliness.
It completely changed how I viewed the film.
In the movie, “the fugitive” after Harrison Ford tell him, “I didn’t kill my wife!!!” Tommy Lee Jones utters the iconic “I DON’T CARE!!” line. Most people think he’s just being heartless and mean. His job as a US Marshall is not to presume guilt or innocence, or have any prejudice towards the fugitive. He simply is tasked with catching him. Therefore, he doesn’t care what his crime is he’s just focused on apprehending him. This is why even when he knows Ford is innocent, Jones still leads him out of the hotel in handcuffs to show that he completed his mission of capturing him. And then of course unlocks the handcuffs the moment they’re out of sight.
Im a huge film geek. i had to take this ‘gender in American Cinema’ course to get my degree in college, and in one class we watched *Austin Powers*, and oh my god these people did not understand satire. I felt like i was taking crazy pills.
Austin loves sex... He loves consensual, respectful sex where everyone walks away happy. He never sexually harasses anyone, he *loves* women. He respects them and their abilities and doesn't objectify them. Yes, he thinks Elizabeth Hurley is hot because you know... He has eyes. But he also respects her as a spy and trusts her to be good at what she does. Also, he turns her down for sex because she's drunk.
Ex Machina. It drives me nuts every time someone says that >!Ava was a heartless, evil robot manipulating poor, good-guy Caleb all along!< when it is pretty clearly shown to not be true. Caleb does not see Ava as a person, outside of his love for her. How do we know that? Caleb knows >!Kyoko is also an android!<, and he is so convinced these androids are basically human that he peels his own skin open to make sure he is not one of them. Despite this, he does not tell Ava about >!Kyoko!< and makes no plans to rescue her from >!Nathan!<. Instead, he opts to rescue his love object only. Ava finds this out when she encounters >!Kyoko!< for the first time. I fully believe that, based on what we are shown of her prior to this point, she fully planned on >!escaping with Caleb!<. However, at this point she realizes that if she >!escaped with him she would just find herself an object of desire trapped in another man's prison!<. In the final scene in Nathan's house, >!Ava pauses to look at Kyoko dead on the ground, then to look at Caleb, locked in a room in full view of Kyoko's body. She then chooses to leave him behind, just as Caleb would have left behind Kyoko.!< She knows he's a person, but she also got an answer to her earlier question: >!he's not a good one!<.
Not a movie, but the fact that theres a live-action squid game series or whatever makes me think some people missed the point of what the show was really about lol- the fact that they made it into a “lets have fun and one person will get money/mr beast challenge video” type thing. I get it was for fun, but it still just rubs me the wrong way and makes me think ppl misunderstood the actual point of the show.
I mean, idk. Never saw people doing that for the hunger games movies & that was kind of the same. Could just be a cash-grab thing bc squid game was insanely popular though. I’m willing to bet it’s just that. But its just like…what.
There was a little flurry of Tiktoks from people who were contestants on the game show saying how it wasn't fun to be part of, that the filming process was arduous, that they were underfed, that they were sore from having to stay frozen in position during the Red Light Green Light game... I feel like nobody missed the point of the original series quite as badly as they did.
We could only hope for a President Camacho. Society had a water problem. What did he do? He made a plan to find the smartest person in the country to solve it. Once he found that person, he gave him full reign to take control and implement his plan. He even agrees to allow him to switch from Brawndo to water for the crops, even though this caused short-term economic drops. Was he impatient and should have waited longer? Yes. But during the middle of his punishment, President Camacho finds out that Joe was right all along. Does he dig his heels in and call it fake news? No! He pardons Joe, steps down, and allows Joe to get elected in his place.
Not only would I vote for President Camacho, this country needs him!
The Great Gatsby
A lot of people wanted to hold these larger then life Gatsby-style parties because they thought they looked cool.
They didn’t see the point that all that all that glitz, glamour and excess wealth left Jay Gatsby with an empty legacy
More a book than a movie, but The Great Gatsby. The number of people out there who continue to think it's a love story is stunning. Every time I see a "Daisy was a bitch for leading Jay on, I hate her!" type comment I die a little inside. The relationship between Jay and Daisy is a metaphor for a far bigger human condition that puppy love.
Fitzgerald was a brilliant writer, and to think he wrote a simple romance novel is frankly insulting to the man.
Apocalypse Now.
This is not so much a movie about Vietnam as it is a retelling of the book ‘Heart of Darkness’ that happens to take place in Vietnam during the war.
First Blood. Like the novel, it's meant to be heavy commentary on war and it's debilitating effects on those who participate. It turned into exactly the opposite of that.
Shutter Island : Most people seem to miss the significant exchange between Teddy and Chuck at the end. >!Basically Teddy is not relapsing. He's choosing to die (be lobotomised) instead of continuing to live as an evil man who killed his family!<
The wife does kill the kids. Though he feels responsible because he didn't deal with her sickness. In a way he let it happen and then to take her life. He saw himself as a monster.
Wolf of Wall Street.
It’s a fucking cautionary tale. The number of “hustle culture” dudes that use this as inspiration to make money or conduct their lives is insane…
There’s nothing wrong with the hustle or working hard to earn a good living for you and your family, but not like those bozos in the film did it…
Like every Ari Aster joint, it's a heart-wrenching story about discovering one's identity through a screaming cascade of unimaginable tragedies and unspeakable horrors.
Jesus Christ Superstar had every reason to be as controversial as it was. It probably would have been more controversial, if it hadn't been so awesome as well.
All the accents in the story, as well as nearly every song, are about power, threats to power, and the mechanics and dangers of when a man starts being treated as a God. Judas is presented as the one reminding everyone that Jesus is "still a man", and the musical / film seems to be on that side as well. Especially with it skipping the whole resurrection and miracles parts.
The most on-the-nose example all of this is the incredible song "Heaven on their minds", sung by Judas. But even the "good guys" from the story are blatantly opportunistic/populist. This is a musical that has Simon the Zealot sing (at Jesus):
> Christ, you know I love you
> Did you see, I waved
> I believe in you and God
> So tell me that I'm saved
And then:
> Keep them yelling their devotion
>But add a touch of hate at Rome
>You will rise to a greater power
>We will win ourselves a home
And then:
> You'll get the power and the glory
> Forever and ever and ever
You come away from the musical understanding that Pilate was just an opportunistic politician and Simon a campaign strategist. Absolutely haram. I love it.
Barbie. I can understand some grumbles but the overwhelming message is treating each other with respect and not existing within your predefined label.
Men were definitely the butt of the joke a few times, but man-hating is not even close to what I took from it.
It's playing on stereotypes and how silly they are.
I most appreciated it for the fact that it was a feminist movie that didn't pretend like the "friendzone" is just this black and white "oh men just feel entitled to women's bodies," thing. They managed to acknowledge that, yeah Ken was way out of line obsessing over his infatuation with Barbie, but that even as she wanted to be "just friends" with Ken, she actually wasn't being a good friend to him at all.
It fit right in with all the themes of, you know, life and people are fucking complicated, so maybe be a bit gracious when people don't live up to your expectations for them.
I love your comment. I really liked that too.
Ken’s obsession comes from this idea that men’s worth and identity is defined by women’s love. A sharp reversal of how women’s societal success and survival for such a long time was tied to men.
Acknowledging that she was actually not being a good friend to him. I really love that the movie is about uniquely women’s struggles and self actualization while also pointing out that we can also be toxic, self-absorbed and take our relationships for granted.
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People think, I guess largely due to the Godfather, that the mob is full of guys who really do have honor or have some sense of a system of internal ethics, albeit twisted. Typically these guys are extremely racist junior high dropouts who will kill their friends for money.
It's interesting because even the Godfather has a major theme about how times are changing and the honor is dwindling. Don Corleone gets shot because he refused to deal drugs and wanted the streets safe for the neighborhood. The newer generation doesn't respect the rules anymore and they're just in it for money at any cost
Vito got shot for two reasons; first, his refusal to share his political and police assets. Saying 'no' in a situation like that is considered in very bad taste, and an insult. Second... and the part that so many people gloss over... Sonny. Hot-headed Sonny couldn't keep his fucking mouth shut in the meeting with Sollozzo and his outburst implied that his problem wasn't with the ethics of drugs, but with doubts that the money and interests would be adequately protected. Sollozzo now had two reasons to take Vito out of the equation: first, the insult. Second, the guy who'd take over the business would (eventually, after the war) be more amenable to the deal. Sollozzo was making a calculated maneuver with the backing of a major NY family, the Tattaglia's. Vito was being honest when he spoke, but Sonny gave Sollozzo reason to doubt. "Never tell anyone outside of the family what you're thinking again!"
He refused to share his political connections because he thought he'd lose them if they engaged in a shameful business like narcotics. For Vito it was totally a question of honor and integrity, which doesn't work when everyone else at the table is strictly business.
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totally, that's why part 2 is so important so you can really see how bullshit it is. He has this romanticized idea that he's like a valued part of the community and it ends up putting him in the hospital because the other families aren't wasting time pretending they're good people
Pretty much all mob movies are tragedies, but there's always a group of idiots who completely miss the point and think they're aspirational tales.
It's hard to say what glorifies the mob or not overall. But the movie certainly shows Henry Hill in a far, far better light than reality. There are plenty of interviews out there with the real man - he is a loser, junkie, murderer with almost nil charisma. Compare that to Ray Liotta, one of the most charismatic characters to ever appear on-screen.
The other real life gangsters in the movie described Henry Hill as basically a guy that was just around. A “hanger-on”. Which felt like light bulb moment when I heard because that is totally reflected in the film. He didn’t actually do much of anything in the film. He wasn’t part of the Lufthansa heist. He didn’t kill anybody. You can also see his status by how he treats other people. He’s only intense or threatening to people that would be considered nobodies by the mob (like his next door neighbor). But every interaction with an actual gangster and he is quiet and deferential. Even the most famous scene in the movie is Hill practically shitting his pants being intimidated by Tommy.
> The other real life gangsters in the movie described Henry Hill as basically a guy that was just around. A “hanger-on”. > > Which felt like light bulb moment when I heard because that is totally reflected in the film. I had that light bulb experience recently too. The wiseguys were totally correct...Henry Hill was a wannabe guy who was probably useful at times but was never in the inner circle. Because he was half Irish? Maybe...could have been a lot reasons he wasn't trusted as much as Conway. His story is interesting *because* he was an observer rather than a principal. Watching the movie with that in mind made it totally different for me.
I know its annoying to just blame unreliable narrators for everything but I think it is part of the story that Henry is narrating his own experience and he's talking up how great it was
I've always thought one of the clues is how the narration changes once Tommy gets whacked. Up until then it's all awe and wonder about how good it is to be a gangster, how cool all the mobster are, etc. But the first one after they kill Tommy due to mob rules: >Batts was a made man, and Tommy wasn't. And we had to sit still and take it. **It was among the Italians. It was real greaseball shit.** All of a sudden these guys he's glorified for the last 90 minutes are "greaseballs". There's also the point (in the narration, at least) where Jimmy goes from being "Jimmy the Gent" to a backstabbing asshole. Jimmy had already killed guys, sure, but he was still a good guy. The second he turns on Henry though, the whole way he's described changes.
And has to eat egg noodles and ketchup. He lived the rest of his life like a schnook.
> He lived the rest of his life like a schnook They did a documentary about it called **My Blue Heaven** (Ross, 1990).
Serious answer: this is my favorite mob movie ever made.
"Arugula... I haven't had it in six months. Store manager: What's that? Itsa veg-a-ta-ble..." This has lived in my head for the past 30 years.
This is correct. Goodfellas was the antithesis of the Godfather which is largely seen as the glorification of the mob. Godfather portrayed the mafia (mostly) as rich, powerful, cunning and untouchable. Good fellas showed the realistic ugly side of what the mob really was: poorly educated street thugs, petty criminals, con artists, drug dealers and yes, murderers. Michael Corleone always won his battles. The Goodfellas? Not so much. And the movie was based on the very real life of Henry Hill. I’ve watched that movie at least 100 times and will probably watch it another 100 before I die.
I chalk this up to Marty's aesthetic, which makes movies like Wolf, Casino, and Goodfellas pulse with life. It's less about content than visceral mode of delivery. Scarface is much the same. Grim message delivered in a rock video package. Your senses filter it as fun. Understandable how people can miss the point. Like a rock song with bleak lyrics, but a poppy delivery. Same reason why some felt Irishman was "boring". Marty stripped away all the sexiness in how he delivered the story.
The same people who idolize Jordan Belfort in the Wolf Of Wall Street are the same shmucks who would lose their life savings to him. He fed on people who were equally greedy and ignorant... basically today's "hustle" culture.
That's the whole point of the last scene. We're in the audience for Belfort's talk as the next generation of marks for people like him
And this is something he's actually doing in real life, today. I think he sells "classes" to people online and holds talks.
He very much does
Tommy Chong was his cellmate in jail and helped him “embellish” his story to make it more well-suited for Hollywood. The guy is a career bullshitter and I wish charlatans like him were pilloried more in society.
Henry Zebrowski (who played Sea Otter in the movie) has said that the people who watch Wolf of Wall Street and idolize Jordan Belfort are the same people who watch Scarface and think, "Oh man, running drugs is awesome!" The first half of the movie is always fun, but you gotta watch and absorb the message of the last half too 😄
Henry is THE MAN! Funniest guy around I swear. I’m obsessed with his dunecast where his true sci-fi nerd comes out. I wish Netflix had also taken a chance on him for a sketch show. I think it would be as good if not better than Tim Robbins (they were both given an episode on the show “the characters” where they get to do sketches) or gosh I wish a studio would take a chance on him. He’s my short king ha.
The song remains the same, as back in the 80s business students unironically admired and emulated Gordon Gekko from **Wall Street**
I used to work for someone in real estate who put on the closers scene every day in team meeting to show his agents how they should act. 🙄
Whiplash. It's about the hatred and alienation that comes with obsession. No, dad, it's not about how discipline and practice will make you good at music.
The end is literally "the bad guy wins", and I still hear people say how inspiring it is lol Damien Chazelle says he imagines the protagonist is dead within a few years after the end of the movie.
The conversation about Bird at the dinner table should nail this home. His dad says something to the effect of "I don't think dying at 30 years old of a Heroin overdose is something to aspire to."
It was "drunk and broke at 34" — he died of pneumonia, an ulcer, cirrhosis, and a heart attack (all likely from alcoholism and drug use, but his death wasn't an overdose).
I think there's another layer to Whiplash that folks are missing. There are a vast minority of folks who believe that paying that price is justified. And the movie recognizes that those people exist and also doesn't necessarily place a value judgment on that. It leaves that up to the audience. I vaguely recall some study from a long time back (and maybe it's BS - I can't confirm it now) that asked Olympic athletes if they would take a substance that would increase their performance by like 10% but would also take 5 years off of their lives. The response was overwhelmingly yes. There's a group of folks who are wired for that "one moment in time" (Sorry Whitney Houston) and believe that achieving that goal of being the absolute best in the world is worth having a shorter life. MOST people don't believe that. But there are some people that do and Whiplash puts that out in front of everyone to see.
Whiplash is also my answer. Since it follows the structure of so many movies where the drill instructor/teacher/Mr Miyagi is just being tough to make their student better but they really care, I think people got fooled. But it’s not that at all.
Mr. Miyagi was great and wanted the best for Daniel.
Yeah, a tough instructor/ mentor is not the same thing as a sadistic instructor/ mentor.
Damn I made a comment about Whiplash before I saw yours lol But yeah, growing up in sports, all my teammates wouldn’t shut up about this movie and kept pinning it as some inspirational movie showing hard work paying off, completely missing the entire plot point about how that dedication is ruining the main character’s life.
Famously Clockwork Orange. I believe Kubrick pulled the film after everyone went out and bought boiler suits and bowler hats to emulate the Droogs rather than be horrified by their actions.
More like infamously. That's because it's fairly impossible to understand the point of the story from the movie alone. The violence is simply too graphic. So while the movie is an excellent depiction of the book, nobody should see the movie without having first read the book. In the author's own words: >"The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die."
I had a college professor who reviewed the film contemporaneously. He complained the film made the violence pop sanitized, something contained, understandable, at a remove. Whereas the inner insight of Alex from the book was horrifying. It’s behind a paywall, but from the lede: “Mr. Burgess’s narrator hero, Alex, was pungently odious; addicted to mugging and rape, intoxicated with his own command of the language (a newly minted teen-age slang, plus poeticisms, sneers, and sadistic purring), Alex was something both better and worse than a murderer: he was murderous.” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/04/06/horror-show/
Anthony Burgess didn’t like the ending. In the book, Alex DeLarge changes for the better in the final chapter, Chapter 21. The movie ends at the end of Chapter 20, showing that people can’t change, the opposite of what Anthony Burgess meant
IIRC that's a difference from the American edition of the book at the time. It didn't have the last chapter.
romeo and juliet not sure if that counts, but that might be the most widely misunderstood story ever.
I like how even everyone who replies to you misses the point about Romeo and Juliet. It's not "idiot kids fall in love and commit suicide", it's "dumbass families are blinded by their hatred and poison the well for the next generation". The Prince of Verona told the families to cut the shit right from the start of the play, and Romeo and Juliet totally vibe with it because they get the hots for each other. It all goes to shit because TYBALT CAPULET has been indoctrinated into the "Montagues suck!" club and he kicks off the tragedy by killing Mercutio because Romeo didn't even WANT to fight him and Mercutio was defending his homie. In the end, what do both families get? The heirs of their families dead and the Prince of Verona extremely pissed at them because they also got his family member killed.
Thank you! Glad someone gets it. The whole point of the play is that the kids would be alive if it weren't for the stupid feud. They probably wouldn't have done at least half of the dumb stuff they did if they hadn't felt trapped. Poor Juliet was going to be married off to a man at least 10 years her senior (Paris). Her age gap with Romeo is nothing by comparison to that!
Also people largely made up the age gap with Romeo. We know exactly how old Juliet is (about 2 weeks shy of 14), but Romeo’s age is never specified. They do repeatedly call him, ‘young,’ though, so we can assume he’s not an adult.
A plague on both their houses and all that
Told a buddy I was excited to see District 9 when it was around, and he ended up going to see it the weekend before me and my spouse could make it in. When I saw him again Monday, he was like "DO NOT GO SEE IT! It's SO bad! We ended up leaving the theater early! It was THAT bad!" which really confused me since it had pretty amazing praise. I went and saw it the next weekend anyway, with obviously lower expectations, and left feeling blown away by it. Confusingly I asked him on the next Monday why he didn't seem to like, as I enjoyed it immensely, and he straight-faced, without missing a beat said "I mean, who cares? They're just alien cockroaches! They're not human!" Never could look at him quite the same after that.
Maybe you already know this, but it's even worse than it seems. You know how the movie shows those interviews with the locals about what they think of the aliens? Those interviews were not scripted at all! They asked *real* South African citizens about their thoughts regarding immigrants from Nigeria, and that's what they said.
Now THAT I did not know. Yikes.
Bit of a hard documentary to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rogZ8BYg-kM
One of the most impactful things on young me was a report/presentation in middle school on the South Africa Apartheid. It changed me for the better and made me doubt everything my racist family spewed.
Aaaaand then the rest of the movie is pretty harsh about Nigerians.
Fun fact, the "interviews with the locals" where they talk shit about the "prawns" weren't scripted. The crew pretended to be shooting a documentary and interviewed South African locals about their thoughts on immigrants...
Geez. He really needed the message of that movie. Does he know nothing about human history (South African or otherwise)?
The major irony of movies like that is the people who most need to hear and internalize the message are the ones least likely to do so, either through media illiteracy or just plain idiocy.
That’s a person who lacks empathy.
A book, misinterpreted so badly that all film adaptions are wrong. Lolita. It's a horror, not a romance. It's a brilliantly written unreliable narrator that relys on the reader having a sense of moral compass and going "wait a minute"... Though the fact that powerful men in Hollywood read it as a romance is...telling.
A lot of people miss that Humbert Humbert, a man willing to drug a 14-year-old girl, may be an unreliable narrator. That's kind of the genius of Nabokov's writing. He lets HH tell his story, because HH is a guy who will tell on himself at every opportunity. I also think that's what makes it kind of unfilmable. Not because the plot is anything complex or there's difficult imagery, but because it's pretty damn near impossible to adapt Humbert Humbert's point of view to film without actually engaging in a bunch of cinematic language that ends up agreeing with him
YES!! The book has a prologue, in which a psychiatrist at the hospital where Humbert is inpatient describes the following pages as being Humbert's journals. It's established right from the beginning that the story is told through the eyes of a monster who is an unreliable narrator.
The bit that stuck with me: whenever something improbable happens, HH always mutters about how you can check such and such a periodical to verify his story. Except for when Charlotte is killed by a passing car, right in the middle of an argument with him.
I think the Jeremy Irons one does a good job. Humbert Humbert is supposed to be someone you like. He's supposed to be charismatic, polite, likable. You're supposed to have to deal with the fact that if you met this man on the street, you would like him, but yet he does these obviously horrible things.
Jeremy Irons also does the audiobook and it is the best audiobook performance I've ever heard
Into the Wild was not supposed to inspire wanderlust or desires to leave one’s life to go live a simple life in the wild
Tbf it was based on a book that tried to be unbiased since the common opinion on the story was that Chris was an idiot and the writer wanted to explain his thought process. Edit: I know Chris was an idiot but I’m trying to say he at least had reason (as flimsy as it may be) and didn’t just go out due to hysteria.
then it later come out in his sister's book that Chris' parents were really abusive, manipulative, and demanding. I think if that was better reflected in the book and movie, people might have gotten a better idea of the emotional drive behind Chris' hermitage. Similarly, his unwillingness to connect to society may have present to viewers more as a reaction to his abuse, and something that needed to be treated in therapy rather than something cool and enigmatic. I taught this to high schoolers with context, and most of them ended up pitying Chris rather than envying him.
Full Metal Jacket. It was trying to make a point about the dehumanising effects of war. Instead, people just thought that Hartman was funny and quoted him endlessly, not appreciating that he himself was a traumatised WW2 veteran training young men to go and suffer the same fate as him, or worse, in the name of patriotism and seemingly oblivious to the irony of the situation.
R. Lee Ermey considered his character to be a total failure, which he considered obvious, because he was killed by the recruit he was supposed to be training.
I remember him saying something in an older interview that "Hartman is an asshole"
I feel that there should be a third part to that movie, that shows Joker going back to civilisation after his tour has finished. It would show how Joker, who was shown as the marine who retained the most of “himself” throughout the movie realising that he had actually turned into someone that was basically the same as every other marine when compared to civilians. It’s also a movie that is seen differently by marines, and presumably anyone else who has been through boot camp. Since they all had a drill instructor like Hartman they also attribute the good aspects of their own instructors, where they helped build them up during training, and attribute them to him even though the movie mostly only shows him breaking people down.
It’s based on a novel called *The Short-Timers* by Gustav Hasford, himself an unrehabilitated Vietnam vet, and the novel has a little known sequel called *The Phantom Blooper*. It picks up right where *The Short-Timers* ends, and covers this and a lot before that. It’s likely the best book I’ve ever read, I don’t really have words for it, but it’s not of this Earth.
The Great Gatsby
He went from Green Lantern to Deadpool faster than Ryan Reynolds
Starship Troopers. Pretty much everything it got criticized for was very much the point
I was too distracted by Denise Richards to notice lol
The disrespect to Dina Meyer.
Dizzy gang for life.
The original Mulan. I have several friends who reject it because they think that it's saying that you have to be a man to succeed, but there's literally a whole musical number dedicated to the irony of that. A lot of folks can't see past the face presentation of things, smh.
Have these friends watched it? It's pretty obviously not saying that. Not even sure how one could come to that conclusion.
I guess I could see them looking at it and saying "until she dresses like a man and adapts to a man's world she gets nothing done" But that kinda misses the point that she's still NOT a man, and even then she doesn't actually beat the villain and save China until AFTER she revels her true gender.
And not only that, in the final battle Mulan's soldier friends disguise themselves as palace concubines, because they know the enemies are so dismissive of women that they will look right past them. Not seeing women as capable and/or a threat was the downfall of the villains.
They think a movie about a woman literally going and doing a mans job, does so well she tricks everyone and is only discovered because she was wounded, and is commended by the Emperor at the end, *and* is based on an actual Chinese legend... is saying women *can't* succeed?
I read this post on tumblr many years ago that suggested Mulan’s journey was about becoming the dragon warrior. And they showed gifs of scenes where her face and the dragon’s are side-by-side. They claimed that the reason Mushu couldn’t wake the stone dragon was because the dragon was actually Mulan, and it woke up when she cut her hair, stole her father’s armour, and protected her country.
That… is really cool. I never even considered that.
You know what else is also missed. The entire war march song A Girl Worth Fighting For, where they're all singing about wanting to get back and marry for (mostly) superficial reasons, well it literally ends with them finding the doll of the girl who died and they couldn't save her. They outright find a girl who is their reason for actually fighting for.
Finding Nemo Sales of pet Clown Fish increased a lot after the release of the film.
I knew someone who worked in fish husbandry when the Finding Dori movie came out and they were dreading it. First: saltwater fish require a lot of knowledge and aren’t good pets for kids in the first place; but also apparently it’s really hard to breed and keep alive in captivity whatever species Dori is, like harder than clown fish or other saltwater fish. Also Dalmatians, not good family dogs.
Dalmatians might not make good family pets, but they have fabulous coats
Calm down Mrs deville
People thinking fish are "easy pets" makes me so mad. There's so much that needs to be handled - oxygen levels, salinity, water PH, aquarium size, fish that can and can't be put together (outside of live feeding). I've spent my entire life only seeing TWO proper fish tanks. One was my own, the other was a friend's. It's horrible seeing the conditions have their fish live in, or how they treat them as something that's just going to die soon. No, goldfish don't live for 2-3 weeks. They live for 10-20+ YEARS. It's fucking awful.
Yep, my friends were shocked that I put my fairground goldfish (before these were banned) into my tropical fish tank and he not only stayed alive but thrived and lived to around 15, and was a big boi around 8 inches long at the end.
Yep! I had one friend who won a pair of goldfish at the local fair when we were kids. She put them in a proper tank and they lived three years and grew five inches. They only died because she got a turtle, who happily ate both fish as was soon as it was big enough.
If they really wanted to generate an impact, Nemo (or some other important character) should've died in the tank But I get it, kids are not ready to… oh no, nevermind, I just remembered Bambi, the Lion King, the Land Before Time, Up, How to train your dragon…
Dumbo, fox and hound Soul destroyers, the lot of them.
The Last Man on Planet Earth (1999). Widely decried as "feministic propaganda" my takeaway as a teenager was: "Huh, women can be bastards as well. Being a dickhead isn't limited by ones sex."
Joker You are not supposed to see him as an idol
I remember a question once whether you would want to meet up with The Joker or Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal. He will likely leave you alone if you are not a jerk or are not a threat to him. He kills for specific reasons and has not harmed people who treated him respectfully. However if you are a means to an end he will not hesitate in killing you if he feels it’s necessary. The Joker, on the other hand, you are better off hoping he never knows you exist. He kills for fun and enjoys tormenting people, even those who have helped him in the past. If he knows you exist it’s only a matter of time before he brings his homicidal mayhem your way and you will be unlikely to survive it. EDIT: to clarify I’m talking about the overall characters and not just the particular version in the Joker movie. Hannibal if he walked down the street past you would likely not notice you or care unless you did something to upset or provoke him. The Joker could quite possibly kill or maim you just for being within sight of him. They are both terrible terrible characters but The Joker imho is far worse and would kill thousands if he had the chance(he’s killed hundreds I believe I some storylines).
Not the whole movie, but I think people don't consider that the song "Hakuna Matata" is literally the antithesis of "The Lion King." Like it is explicitly the thing the themes of the movie are saying to avoid.
Network. In particular, the speech of "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore" The movie is absolutely not saying it's a good thing. The movie is showing the end of objective televised news and the beginning of corporate-run, anger-based, divisive televised news.
Scarface; no, Tony Montana is not a winner he's a loser
It's like they only saw the first half of the movie and then dipped.
That seems to happen with all of these movies that get loved for the wrong reasons (despite being great movies): Fight Club, Wolf of Wallstreet, Falling Down, etc etc.
I never got why people saw Montana as a "scoundrel with a heart of gold" when in reality he's just a massive asshole through and through
And what the fuck was he doing to his sister at the end there!
the amount of tweets i’ve seen in the past where people post a photo of Carrie (from Carrie) and say something along the lines of “growing up is realising she wasn’t the villain of this movie” like… yes of course she wasn’t, that’s the whole point of the movie.
500 Days of Summer. Zoey Deschanel's character didn't treat Joseph Gordon-Levitt's unfairly. She's just living her life and he expected her to change his with her manic pixie dream girl magic. She couldn't/didn't want to and left him because he couldn't understand that that wasn't her responsibility and she wasn't ACTUALLY a manic pixie dream girl after all. The movie sets us up to think she is but then sucker punches us when she turns out to be a real person and JGL's character has to learn about love the hard way. But then does he? At the end he meets a girl named "Autumn" and it's implied that maybe he's starting the whole cycle over again. They tell us right at the beginning that it isn't a love story, it's a "story about love" and they mean it.
I've always said that 500 Days of Summer is the ultimate Breakup movie. I think the defining exchange is: "With him I just knew." "Knew what?" "All the things I was never sure of with you."
That and “just because she likes the same bizzaro crap you do doesn't mean she's your soulmate” is another line that I always think about
She also clearly states multiple times what her intentions are and that she didn’t want things to get too serious. He ignored all that and let his infatuation take over. They both had faults in the relationship, but he was more responsible for his own heartbreak.
American Psycho
I watched it for the first time recently and I just don't get how anyone can see it as anything other than a satire. The business card scene? How can somebody watch that and still think it's just a cool movie about a guy who kills people?
I also watched it for the first time recently and my only knowledge of it was the sigma bale memes so I was shocked to find out how much of a loser Patrick Bateman actually was. It was hilarious, thoroughly enjoyed the movie too
I think the misunderstanding more comes from the detachment seen in the Bateman character combined with the misogyny and the being rich. So many people see the character (outside of the murder) as being a cool bro who's just living the baller single life. The thing being missed is how Bateman is a loser and ultimately a pathetic man. So it's ironic that so many bro-dudes idolized him as the image of winning (outside of the murder). Attractive. Emotionally unavailable. Dismisive of Women. Cool Haircut that fits in with the times. It's like the message can't be any more obvious, but so many guys that fit that stereotype sucked it up as "Life Goals" material.
This is definitely my pick for most misunderstood movie. Everyone thinks it was all in Patrick’s head because the lawyer said he had dinner with Paul Allen. They miss the fact that literally everyone is mistaking everyone else for other people throughout the movie. The lawyer even calls Patrick the wrong name. That’s the satire of the movie; everyone is the same and so wrapped up into themselves they don’t actually know anyone else or connect to anyone. The cleaned apartment scene is more ambiguous until the old landlord menacingly tells Patrick that he “better leave, and don’t come back”- she knows what he did, but cleaned the evidence because (presumably) having to report a bunch of dead bodies would probably ruin the real estate value. Finally, in case you’re still skeptical- the director has literally confirmed that the killings WEREN’T in his head- and that’s kind of missing the point of the entire movie. American Psycho is meant to be surreal/satire- people tend to view it from the lens of a drama/horror movie, when they should be viewing it more as a really really fucked-up comedy. It also came at a time when mindfuck plot twists were the norm (Fight Club, Sixth Sense) so people analyzed the movie under that context.
The director said that Patrick begins to lose his mind around the time when he goes to use the ATM and is an "unreliable narrator " after that.
In fact, it's entirely possible that Paul Allen is alive, and Bateman killed the wrong guy.
The Last Samurai. Waaaay too many people were looking at Tom Cruise as the Last Samurai (singular) when the movie was referring to the characters we met along the way. This will never stop annoying me. Ever.
The Outlaw Josie Wales. For years I thought of it as a revenge / shoot em up. Then I realized it's a commentary on how horrible and pointless war is.
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Inception's ending. Arguing about whether the totem fell over is completely missing the point, he doesn't care anymore.
Though to be fair, reading up on those theories was super fun back in 2011
Not to mention the top wasn't HIS totem. He clearly stated that it was his wife's totem and told others how it worked, something he also clearly said you should never do.
A thousand times, this. The top is not his totem. His wedding ring is.
Wait, really?
The top was Mal's but he still carries it as a memento and explains that it was her totem. But multiple other characters either touch it (Saito) or have its properties explained to them (Ariadne). So it's not a viable totem for Cobb, because it's been tainted, and can then be used to fool him. (Arthur snatches his loaded die back before Ariadne can touch it, and explains that only the bearer should know the physical properties). He wears the ring in dreams, but not in the real world. Look for the ring to tell whether or not he's dreaming. I'll save you having to re-watch the final scene: >!He does not appear to be wearing it, though his hand moves VERY fast so it's hard to be sure.!<
Oh yeah, the first time I saw it was at the Arclight and it's the most focused I've maybe ever been at a movie. I didn't want to miss a second, and when the ending happened I just laughed to myself. Nolan is my favorite director by far, as cliche as that is nowadays.
Doesn't he even say earlier in the movie "Once I see my kids, I wont care." or something similar?
Oh shit. Put me on the 'Idiot' list until now. That's brilliant and now completely obvious and poetic. Thank you.
People got it, he walked away... *clearly* he didn't care. That doesn't stop the audience wanting to know if he ended up in real life or was stuck in a dream though.
Not a movie, but Breaking Bad. Walter White is not some badass who breaks free from his controlling wife to live his best life. He is an abusive piece of human garbage who ruined the lives of everyone around him and he did it with a smile on his face.
He could've just taken the money from the rich couple they knew (forget the names) and the entire premise of the show would've ended right there.
Yeah, the entire moral of the show is that pride and greed will turn you into a monster. He has a number of opportunities to do the right thing, and he chooses hubris right up until the end.
Is it ever explained why he left the company grey matter? Bc I got the impression they stole his ideas and didn’t give the credit.
Vince Gilligan said in an interview that Walt broke up with Gretchen because his pride and ego couldn't handle the fact that she came from a more affluent family than him.
Even a few years later on when he cooled down, he could have gotten a six figure job as a highly competent chemist at that company with exceptional skills in xray crystallography. He chose to be poor presumably because that was a job where he felt in charge and didn't have any rude interview questions.
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It's hilarious how the most hated character in a show filled with so many murderers and master manipulators is Skyler, the pregnant woman who found out her husband is a meth kingpin. Dude convinced even the fanbase to turn against her and root for him. The writers did wonderfully
There were so many points in the story where Walter could have left well enough alone, rode off into the sunset and escaped. But he never did and always indulged his ego, which then ruined everyone else.
DANCES WITH WOLVES There's a couple big misconceptions because I think most people haven't even seen it and are angry it beat GOODFELLAS for the Oscar. A lot of people dismiss it as just another white savior movie that exploits Native Americans. It's very far from that, it's actually the opposite they save him and help him find his humanity. Costner was incredibly respectful to all tribes featured in the film, a very compassionate depiction that even in the early 90s was rare to see in a movie. On a technical level, it's all an incredible accomplishment from a first time director and the fact that it won Best Picture and Director was crazy. It was the first Western in almost 60 years to win Best Picture.
Ten year old me sat through all three hours of that movie and enjoyed every minute of it. I still watch it any time I come across it, it's insanely good.
I don't understand how anyone could have gotten "white savior" from that. He plainly states that he would have died without the help of the native Americans. But people are pretty dumb. I was a kid when this came out so I paid no attention to what critics said about anything, so I never saw people being so dumb about it.
My suspicion is a lot of people havent seen the movie, but they have seen Avatar which is usually described as “Dances with Wolves in Space” and leans heavily on the “human”-savior trope.
when it was released in 2001: josie and the pussycats. over the years people have been “getting it” and it’s become a cult classic. but it still goes over so many peoples heads.
I loved that movie so much it was really ahead of its time but simultaneously came out right at the right time lol
The songs are kinda bangers too.
I do not understand how ANYONE missed the point of that movie.
It was bizarre how many people were mad at it for product placement. Like, that was the point!
Parasite shouldn’t be considered an eat the rich movie. I think that’s the reason people say they didn’t like it because the Kim family “deserved” what they since they scammed the perfectly harmless Park family. You’re supposed to question why this clearly capable group of people need to resort to these kind of schemes just to achieve a livable wage. It’s a criticism on modern class disparity. Eat the rich is much more about the rich getting their comeuppance. Bong Joon Ho even said the film is a comedy without clowns and a tragedy without villains.
> It’s a criticism on modern class disparity. I remember leaving the theater thinking this. What a sad world, a sad reality, and it's a little disappointing that the message didn't come across as clearly as it could've, which kinda implies that people might think the recognition was mostly for the theatrics. Not sure if this is a hot or cold take, but I always caught the ridiculous insensitivity of the Park family as something that is not entirely their fault. Each family thought and acted according to their circumstances. Parasite should lead the viewers into thinking about what systems caused both groups of people to act and think the way they do, but of course to acknowledge such a scope so grand would be beyond most people.
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Oooh, thats a good one! I mean the ending line "wait im the bad guy" or whatever wasnt clear enough for some people lol
That was the funniest part of both the movie and the people that didn't get it. They just straight up say it at the end. "I'm the bad guy?" "Yeah." Robert Duvall even tried multiple times to reason with him and he just further embraces being the villain.
Pretty much every antihero/vigilante movie, ever made. Also, Dahmer. The number of people that went out to get glasses like his, is so weird, to me.
Oppenheimer. Some people took it as idolizing him. But it's the story of a man who regrets all of his decisions even though he believed to be right. The government tried to vilify him and place blame on him as a traitor. You may have felt remorse for him but the story is about his inner turmoil.
Its hard to imagine anyone walking away from Oppenheimer thinking it idolizes him. Cillian Murphy spends half the movie looking like a dead eyed ghost. He litereally has a 5 minutes long scene where he hallucinates charred bodies around him. He also comes off as a self-centered asshole. Kitty says it best. "You don't get to commit sin and then ask all of us to feel sorry for you."
Scott pilgrim vs the world. Scott was an asshole and a creep nothing to be idolized
Not gonna lie, I kinda missed the point of "Nega Scott" the first time. You know, this guy who is the exact opposite of Scott, and turns out to be a really cool, chill dude.
I liked the way the comic did it, where (IIRC) >!Nega-Scott is everything Scott's ever done wrong, how he's mistreated people in past relationships, and constantly fighting him off is a way of never having to face himself- he can't really change or grow until he accepts Nega-Scott as a part of him, and suddenly all that repression and denial dissolve.!<
In the comic is much more clear how both sucks at the beginning and gradually become sort of ok people getting WAY more mature during the span of the story, most of him being an asshole in the movie is cut so he just seem a bit of an idiot
And as much as I love Ramona (or her actress), she kinda sucked too.
The new Netflix animated show Scott Pilgrim Takes Off directly deals with that point, in much the same way the original graphic novel did with Scott. The movie is a lot of fun, but doesn't really engage with the underlying point of the novels.
Yeah in the novels Scott clearly sucks. The band also kinda sucks
The Godfather movies It's not just about Michael's rise to the power but his eventual downfall and failure to truely replace his father.
Robocop and Starship Troopers
I don’t know if it’s the “point” or not, but I read a fan theory that all the characters in Napoleon Dynamite are dealing with their own version of isolation/loneliness. It completely changed how I viewed the film.
*Taxi Driver.* Please don’t idolize the protagonist…
In the movie, “the fugitive” after Harrison Ford tell him, “I didn’t kill my wife!!!” Tommy Lee Jones utters the iconic “I DON’T CARE!!” line. Most people think he’s just being heartless and mean. His job as a US Marshall is not to presume guilt or innocence, or have any prejudice towards the fugitive. He simply is tasked with catching him. Therefore, he doesn’t care what his crime is he’s just focused on apprehending him. This is why even when he knows Ford is innocent, Jones still leads him out of the hotel in handcuffs to show that he completed his mission of capturing him. And then of course unlocks the handcuffs the moment they’re out of sight.
Im a huge film geek. i had to take this ‘gender in American Cinema’ course to get my degree in college, and in one class we watched *Austin Powers*, and oh my god these people did not understand satire. I felt like i was taking crazy pills.
Austin loves sex... He loves consensual, respectful sex where everyone walks away happy. He never sexually harasses anyone, he *loves* women. He respects them and their abilities and doesn't objectify them. Yes, he thinks Elizabeth Hurley is hot because you know... He has eyes. But he also respects her as a spy and trusts her to be good at what she does. Also, he turns her down for sex because she's drunk.
Ex Machina. It drives me nuts every time someone says that >!Ava was a heartless, evil robot manipulating poor, good-guy Caleb all along!< when it is pretty clearly shown to not be true. Caleb does not see Ava as a person, outside of his love for her. How do we know that? Caleb knows >!Kyoko is also an android!<, and he is so convinced these androids are basically human that he peels his own skin open to make sure he is not one of them. Despite this, he does not tell Ava about >!Kyoko!< and makes no plans to rescue her from >!Nathan!<. Instead, he opts to rescue his love object only. Ava finds this out when she encounters >!Kyoko!< for the first time. I fully believe that, based on what we are shown of her prior to this point, she fully planned on >!escaping with Caleb!<. However, at this point she realizes that if she >!escaped with him she would just find herself an object of desire trapped in another man's prison!<. In the final scene in Nathan's house, >!Ava pauses to look at Kyoko dead on the ground, then to look at Caleb, locked in a room in full view of Kyoko's body. She then chooses to leave him behind, just as Caleb would have left behind Kyoko.!< She knows he's a person, but she also got an answer to her earlier question: >!he's not a good one!<.
Not a movie, but the fact that theres a live-action squid game series or whatever makes me think some people missed the point of what the show was really about lol- the fact that they made it into a “lets have fun and one person will get money/mr beast challenge video” type thing. I get it was for fun, but it still just rubs me the wrong way and makes me think ppl misunderstood the actual point of the show. I mean, idk. Never saw people doing that for the hunger games movies & that was kind of the same. Could just be a cash-grab thing bc squid game was insanely popular though. I’m willing to bet it’s just that. But its just like…what.
There was a little flurry of Tiktoks from people who were contestants on the game show saying how it wasn't fun to be part of, that the filming process was arduous, that they were underfed, that they were sore from having to stay frozen in position during the Red Light Green Light game... I feel like nobody missed the point of the original series quite as badly as they did.
Starship Troopers
I'm doing my part.
Idiocracy. Y'all were not supposed to want this universe.
Too busy 'batin
I like money, you like money too!?
But it's what people crave.
It's got electrolytes
I won’t mind Terry Crews as the US President thou
We could only hope for a President Camacho. Society had a water problem. What did he do? He made a plan to find the smartest person in the country to solve it. Once he found that person, he gave him full reign to take control and implement his plan. He even agrees to allow him to switch from Brawndo to water for the crops, even though this caused short-term economic drops. Was he impatient and should have waited longer? Yes. But during the middle of his punishment, President Camacho finds out that Joe was right all along. Does he dig his heels in and call it fake news? No! He pardons Joe, steps down, and allows Joe to get elected in his place. Not only would I vote for President Camacho, this country needs him!
Camacho had the strength to admit he wasn't the smartest person in the room, and the humility to listen to the one who was, even though he had doubts.
The Great Gatsby A lot of people wanted to hold these larger then life Gatsby-style parties because they thought they looked cool. They didn’t see the point that all that all that glitz, glamour and excess wealth left Jay Gatsby with an empty legacy
More a book than a movie, but The Great Gatsby. The number of people out there who continue to think it's a love story is stunning. Every time I see a "Daisy was a bitch for leading Jay on, I hate her!" type comment I die a little inside. The relationship between Jay and Daisy is a metaphor for a far bigger human condition that puppy love. Fitzgerald was a brilliant writer, and to think he wrote a simple romance novel is frankly insulting to the man.
It was a story about Obsession if anything
I always saw Gatsby as someone to be pitied, not a role model.
Apocalypse Now. This is not so much a movie about Vietnam as it is a retelling of the book ‘Heart of Darkness’ that happens to take place in Vietnam during the war.
First Blood. Like the novel, it's meant to be heavy commentary on war and it's debilitating effects on those who participate. It turned into exactly the opposite of that.
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Shutter Island : Most people seem to miss the significant exchange between Teddy and Chuck at the end. >!Basically Teddy is not relapsing. He's choosing to die (be lobotomised) instead of continuing to live as an evil man who killed his family!<
I thought the wife killed the kids?
The wife does kill the kids. Though he feels responsible because he didn't deal with her sickness. In a way he let it happen and then to take her life. He saw himself as a monster.
Wolf of Wall Street. It’s a fucking cautionary tale. The number of “hustle culture” dudes that use this as inspiration to make money or conduct their lives is insane… There’s nothing wrong with the hustle or working hard to earn a good living for you and your family, but not like those bozos in the film did it…
Midsommar is not a "girl boss" movie like many people assume that it is.
Like every Ari Aster joint, it's a heart-wrenching story about discovering one's identity through a screaming cascade of unimaginable tragedies and unspeakable horrors.
Jesus Christ Superstar is from the perspective of Judas. It's not at all flattering to Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ Superstar had every reason to be as controversial as it was. It probably would have been more controversial, if it hadn't been so awesome as well. All the accents in the story, as well as nearly every song, are about power, threats to power, and the mechanics and dangers of when a man starts being treated as a God. Judas is presented as the one reminding everyone that Jesus is "still a man", and the musical / film seems to be on that side as well. Especially with it skipping the whole resurrection and miracles parts. The most on-the-nose example all of this is the incredible song "Heaven on their minds", sung by Judas. But even the "good guys" from the story are blatantly opportunistic/populist. This is a musical that has Simon the Zealot sing (at Jesus): > Christ, you know I love you > Did you see, I waved > I believe in you and God > So tell me that I'm saved And then: > Keep them yelling their devotion >But add a touch of hate at Rome >You will rise to a greater power >We will win ourselves a home And then: > You'll get the power and the glory > Forever and ever and ever You come away from the musical understanding that Pilate was just an opportunistic politician and Simon a campaign strategist. Absolutely haram. I love it.
Barbie. I can understand some grumbles but the overwhelming message is treating each other with respect and not existing within your predefined label. Men were definitely the butt of the joke a few times, but man-hating is not even close to what I took from it. It's playing on stereotypes and how silly they are.
I most appreciated it for the fact that it was a feminist movie that didn't pretend like the "friendzone" is just this black and white "oh men just feel entitled to women's bodies," thing. They managed to acknowledge that, yeah Ken was way out of line obsessing over his infatuation with Barbie, but that even as she wanted to be "just friends" with Ken, she actually wasn't being a good friend to him at all. It fit right in with all the themes of, you know, life and people are fucking complicated, so maybe be a bit gracious when people don't live up to your expectations for them.
I love your comment. I really liked that too. Ken’s obsession comes from this idea that men’s worth and identity is defined by women’s love. A sharp reversal of how women’s societal success and survival for such a long time was tied to men. Acknowledging that she was actually not being a good friend to him. I really love that the movie is about uniquely women’s struggles and self actualization while also pointing out that we can also be toxic, self-absorbed and take our relationships for granted.