• Wertheimer [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Many years ago I went to a great indie video rental place and asked for the worst movie they had. The clerk immediately took us to the children's section, gave us a disc (or maybe even a tape), and told us that if we promised to watch it and report back to him he'd rent it to us for free.

    That movie was Ringing Bell (Chirin no suzu), a 45-minute anime that spends maybe one-fifth of its runtime with its main character, a lamb, weeping. The lamb's mother is murdered (not eaten - throat slit) by a wolf and the lamb, Chirin, decides to travel to the mountains and kill the wolf . . . only to immediately decide to become the wolf's apprentice instead. It includes such wonderful lines as "Oh, oh, why do the weak have to die?" and "The world I live in is a hell, and death is always close by." Children's programming written by Nietzsche after a bender. We fucking loved it.

    Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_Bell

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQt8CqVPNC4

    Edited to add - to this day this is the only anime that I have ever seen.

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      to this day this is the only anime that I have ever seen

      :order-of-lenin: :gold-antifa:

      You dropped these, champ. :rosa-salute:

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The lack of pedophilia still puts it in the top 50% of anime

      • Wertheimer [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I went to Letterboxd to read reviews and there are some great ones there:

        Probably the most harshly transformative movie I've ever seen, and profoundly cyclical in a way that most movies can only hope to imitate. It's the children's story you never, ever want your child to see because the depictions of trauma and nature are dangerous to undeveloped psyches. It's the story we weren't told and the retcon of all the others. But you can see it now, it's okay. It is sad, but it is dense with value.

        https://letterboxd.com/xebeche/film/ringing-bell/

    • SaniFlush [any, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The movie is literally about the realization of "I've won, but at what cost?"

  • ButtBidet [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    These are very low hanging fruit. Sorry to pick such obvious ones:

    1. Parasite - it's not about a zombie epidemic
    2. Snowpiercer - literally zero snow boarding scenes
    3. Avatar - not about video game display pics
    4. The Godfather - very little about the holy sacrament of baptism
    5. On The Waterfront - not about surfing
    6. Scarface - no scars on AL Pacino
    7. There's Something About Mary - like most of the movie is about Mary

    Unrelated but I enjoyed these movies

    1. Time Cop
    2. Face Off
    3. Snakes on a Plane
    4. Sharknado
  • P1d40n3 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Star Wars: a Phantom Menace broke my heart as a kid. I was super hype, even bought the podracing tie-in videogame. That movie was pure trash, even young me could tell.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      It's a shame that the best cinematic depiction of the fall of a liberal democracy in to fascism objectively sucks ass as movies bc we could really use some propaganda right now.

      • Teekeeus [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Whatever you think of Lucas making revenge of the sith during the bush era was ballsy

  • StewartCopelandsDad [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    One of those fucking Hallmark movies, I forget which one. Feel-good white Christian defense of dominant social order. Absolutely irredeemable.

  • Gamer_time [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    7 years in Tibet, probably. Looking up the basic premise of the movie should tell you why.

    • RonJeremyCorbyn [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      saw recently. got a hoot that the film pretended that brad pitt was captured just because the brits were big bad meanies who just capture and detain anyone on their soil, and not because he was a famous nazi officer.

      (also, just totally, breathtakingly disingenuous -- the scene in which the chinese jut massacre the tibetans, viciously, only to be revealed to be just a bad dream of pitt's. wild.)

      • Asia_Set [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I recently found out about this movie, but I did not remember reading that Brad Pitt played the protagonist. This makes me wonder how many other actors of note have played both a Nazi character and a character directly opposed to Nazis. Not to mention that Pitt did the latter not only in Inglorious Basterds, but also in Fury!

  • communism_liker_69 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I saw When Harry Met Sally the other day and really hated it. I don't know if it's the worst movie I've ever seen but it's popular I guess and it was fucking garbage.

    Harry is an absolute misogynist piece of shit. He's not funny, just fucking sucks as a person so hard. His "men and women can't be friends" line is basically just a boomer justification for workplace sexism and harassment.

    fucking garbage movie about a serial harasser who thinks he's a comedian

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      It's very much a product of it's time when you could just be a misogynistic dickass and it was read straight as humor. The 90s sucked never romanticize them.

      • innocentlurker [he/him]
        cake
        ·
        2 years ago

        Definitely.

        I think the famous scene with Meg Ryan faking an orgasm was the real impetus of it's true popularity.

        I think Americans were (are) bombarded with sexualization in ads and movies but also forbidden to express it socially in schools or churches or at the grocery store. It is a violent puritanical tension that makes the subjects easy to control and dominate; the constant frission exploiting genuine instinct and emotion with the learned repression from dominant culture. Subjects fall over with just a nudge one way or the other as the need arises.

        That and Rob Reiner is Liberalism distilled.

  • Satanic_Mills [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Promising Young Woman.

    Genuinely offensive movie that suggests the worst thing about rape is that it derails professional careers, that saves all its anger and venom for the female characters, that thinks you can solve sexual violence by simply scolding men and ends with the main character martyring herself so the Police (!) can come in and arrest the rapist.

    • Prolefarian [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah honestly, I'm gonna go with Tim Burton's Willy Wonka for basically the same reasons.

    • Snackuleata [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah I'll agree with you. Came in expecting a bad acid trip. Ended up with a muted gray edgefest without substance.

      • SaniFlush [any, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        "What do you call a guy with cheese on his face? THE CHEESE FACE!!!"

    • BGDelirium [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I have no idea how such an abrasive and unfunny on- screen personality like Green had a run of movie roles for a few years in the late 90s/early aughts.

    • Weedian [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I think he went out of his way to make the worst movie ever just to insult the people who gave him money to make a feature length film. Did you get to the part where he licks Harland Williams’ compound fracture?

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Some I’ve seen relatively recently:

    Top Gun Maverick

    Fantastic Beasts, Secrets of Dumbledore

    Percy Jackson, The Lightning Thief

    Honorable mention to Malignant, except that Malignant is so bad that it’s actually amazing and I enjoyed every minute of it.

    Edit: Oh also the new Thor movie sucks dick, which is really disappointing cause I usually love everything Taika Waititi makes

    • RonJeremyCorbyn [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      concur w/ maverick. a film that textually promised to be a return to the kind of big-budget action movie making that they don't do anymore, a celebration of movie stars and authenticity, yetcan't help itself to be marred by contemporary over-determined plotting and structure, and for all the honestly pretty cool footage of the actual planes, just dog shit cgi.

      really captures none of the charm of the original.

  • LENINSGHOSTFACEKILLA [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I've seen plenty of shitty movies, but the worst movie I've ever seen that was actually, you know, trying, was Tenet. Absolutely fucking horrendous. HUGE amounts of cash blown on this fucking stinker, made by one of the biggest egos in hollywood, with a fucking nonsense plot, where the main character literally screams "I. AM. THE PROTAGONIST!"

    fuck Tenet

  • AFineWayToDie [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Independence Day: Resurgence probably isn't even the worst movie I've seen, but I was pissed as hell during and after, because at the very least I expected a loud, clumsy, jingoistic romp that I could somehow let myself enjoy, ie. the first one. Instead, I felt like my intelligence was being actively insulted over the full duration, and it was filled with minor references to the first with zero wider analysis of what made it enjoyable.

    ID4 is a dumb, oafish, bad movie, but it's likable in the same way that a child's crayon scribbles are, and switching your brain off to the point where you can enjoy it isn't a HUGE chore. ID4:R felt like your company hired a professional artist to paint a depiction of the "Aristocrats" joke, hung it up in your office, and raided your pension fund to do so. Like, "fuck you" on every level.

    The premise was really cool, too. So they had to fuck THAT up because major studios are incapable of doing nice things.

    • SaniFlush [any, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      "What if we just did the same movie again but bigger? Also Brent Spiner's character survived even though he looked PRETTY dead."

      • AFineWayToDie [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The worst thing is how much I wanted to like it, based on the concept. And then I watch it and it's like, "srsly, what did you expect?"