Speaking of animated movies, I really dislike Frozen - the plot, the music, the quality of the animation. It perplexes me why it is so popular.
Grown ups 2. I’m embarrassed to say I paid money to see it.
@Consolation, the missing mothers isn’t a Disney thing. It’s the fairy tale thing - goes back hundreds of years.
@doschicos Preach!! I never got why it was so famous. Granted Let It Go is an OK song, but it’s nothing I’d lose sleep over or download on my phone.
Any movie based on comic book character with the exception of the first Superman series.
A Clockwork Orange.
Blech.
Boyhood. I kept waiting (and hoping) for it to end.
I loved Boyhood. I like that nothing really happens except he grows up to be a man. My son is the exact same age as the protagonist so there is that similarity that drew me in.
I wanted to love Boyhood. I drove to Nashville to see it with D & FSIL. We all liked it, but didn’t love it. I think I had seen so much press building it up that it didn’t live up to expectations.
I could not stand the movie “Ghost”.
Two others:
The Disney movie “Lilo and Stich”. The main character was bratty, the plot was odd and the recycled Elvis music - ick.
An “Officer and A Gentleman” - not romantic at all.
Arthur.
Aw gad yes, “Officer and a Gentlemen”–ick. Actually can’t think of a Richard Gere movie I like (certainly not Pretty Woman.)
Waterworld with Kevin Costner. Only time my wife and I walked out of a theater.
“Song of the South”
Cries and Whispers: It was one of my mother’s two or three favorite movies. (Along with “It’s A Wonderful Life,” by the way.) I have seen it in theaters at least four times, and a couple times on video. It’s not my favorite Bergman movie, but I like it a lot.
The Lion King: Completely a racist, fascist movie. The whole theme about how only a true-born, pure-blooded king could protect the animals from themselves and maintain balance with nature . . . ugh! And among the prominent villains are hyenas who spout Borscht-Belt humor (but with Hispanic accents) and use sharp business practices and technological innovation to make a buck by shoving aside the noble traditionalists. The film’s bad conscience pops up in a strange way: When Scar takes over, there’s a parade of goose-stepping hyenas and other shots that quote directly from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will about Hitler’s Nuremberg rally in 1934. But the opening scene where Simba is presented to all the animals owes a lot of its aesthetic to Riefenstahl, too. Really, it’s offensive.
And all those dead mothers . . . it’s not the world of fairy tales. There are plenty of fairy tales with mothers, or with two missing parents. It’s Disney (or was, I think that era ended a while ago). Disney’s live mothers were worse than the dead ones. Ursula in The Little Mermaid, anyone?
The good indication for me that the movie is not my kind of movie is the Oscar nomination. There are exceptions to this rule. Ones of my favorites that I have watched numerous time is “The blind side”, “Titanic”. I cannot watch any action movies and any very popular ones, like “Harry Potter” or “Lords of the Rings”, I fall asleep when they start chasing each other…I do not hate them, I simply can never finish watching them.
Whoa! That’s so strange that the Lion King directly references Leni Riefenstahl! I had no idea.
(I have to admit that I haven’t seen the Lion King. Seriously don’t know how I missed it).
I knew the Lion King was going to be trouble right from the opening scenes - where they showed a line of leaf cutter ants climbing up a tree limb. Wrong continent. Leaf cutters are South American ants.
Human Disney heroes and heroines frequently have no mother, but Disney animals or animal families sometimes do. Perdita, the mother dalmatian was there, so were Dumbo’s and Bambi’s mothers - until they weren’t. And it was Lady and the Tramp and not just “Tramp.”
This is why my choice for most hated movie is “Goya’s Ghosts,” made by the (formerly) great Milos Forman. Javier Bardem is awful in this. Natalie Portman is awful in this. Everything is awful in this.
The reason there are so many dead mothers (and murdered mothers; see Bambi) in Disney movies is that they are horror movies for tots.