When people's film tastes worry you...

Kinda sounds like an isolated things. Yes, reinforce your doors.

I always get weirded out when somebody's favorite movie is something really hard to watch like "Kids." A real red flag are the legions who give that "honor" to American History X. Lot of those all over the place.

Boondock Saints.

"Boondock" was okay but it attracts a lot of thug-wannabe types who seem to think the movie exists in a vaccuum free of influence and who like it to the exclusion of other, similar, better movies.

Also troubling, though I might be alone in thinking that's the worst movie I've ever fucking seen.

Didn't understand the hype, but didn't find it terrible.

Ha.  Glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about Boondock Saints.  If someone tells me they like that movie, I wind up having a really hard time ever respecting their opinion on film.

On a date a guy showed me Boondock Saints because it was one of his favourite movies. It was our last date.

Mildly amusing. Won't shit on anything with Billy Connolly.

I'm more worried about Darkmite's neighbor BTK. Has this guy ever asked you to go camping?

If anyone not only has seen, not only owns, but is completely unashamed to have visible on their shelf any cinema by Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer, finish your drink quickly and make an excuse to move on.

The only exception would be if the person is an Alyson Hannigan fan, in which case Date Movie is allowed, but they'd better also have some deep cuts on that shelf like bootlegs of Free Spirit or some shit.

A full collection of Porky's movies is a pretty serious red flag, too.

More to the point, which is more about actively being worried about someone's tastes rather than just looking at their shit and going "Uh, okay, I'm not letting you pick the film on movie night"...

I would look askance if their collection, or their list of favorite movies, is violent stuff to the exclusion of anything else. If there isn't even a comedy in there, or a great relatively nonviolent but still far-from-boring drama like say Dog Day Afternoon, I would recommend letting other people know where you are when you're going over to their house. It's one thing to be an action fan but you've still got to have something in there that doesn't have ass-kicking or gorehounding in it. I mean, we've all been in that guy's apartment: no DVDs that aren't extreme (extra points if he owns stuff like Bumfights), no books that aren't horror (with a preponderance of Jack Ketchum titles), no music that isn't death metal, and if you're lucky he maybe has a few graphic novels and they're all fucking Walking Dead. And he's got a Cannibal Corpse poster hanging over his bed.

I always wonder about the white dude who has just wall to wall Asian action films and out-there anime. Is there an identity crisis going on here, gaijin?

It genuinely amazes me the number of girls I meet who count TRANSFORMERS as one of their all-time favourites.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gabe T 

I always wonder about the white dude who has just wall to wall Asian action films and out-there anime. Is there an identity crisis going on here, gaijin?

Yeah, self-styled "otaku" are just as annoying as "bros" or whatever they're calling themselves now. Don't get me wrong, I'm a bit of a Miike fanatic, but, really, it's Miike. Can you blame me?

I was initially worried when my girlfriend made me watch Drop Dead Fred with her because it was special to her from her childhood. Not worried for my safety just worried about our future watching movies together.

It was okay.

Not even Phoebe Cates could make me sit through that. And I sat through Princess Cariboo for her... I want my 90 minutes back.

For me it's the guy who doesn't own Tarantino movies, but seemingly owns every single bad Tarantino knock-off from the '90's and isn't ashamed to admit it.

Always creeps, always.

I am the one who creeps people out with my taste in movies.

Whether I'm trying to argue that Ricky-Oh is one of the better comedies of the last decades, or they walk in on me watching Japanese movies about girls that get raped and poisoned by the Yakuza only to change into skinless mangina demons and exact revenge with various methods including mangina suffocation, I now know to stick to the classics. 

Still WAYYYYY less creepy than the guy who talks about Boondock Saints like it's the second coming.

Bonus points if he says 'I'm Irish so I love it!"

We have a big shortage of Irish people here in Greece so I've been spared. Though I've only watched about 80% of The Boondock Saints once, drunk out of my mind and falling in and out of sleep, so I'm not qualified to pass judgement. I only remember a bunch of gunfights, Willem Dafoe being super-gay and hating the guts of some bearded guy.

I watched Overnight, the documentary that follows the idiot who wrote & directed Boondock Saints.  It really put me off watching the movie.

I find girls with  DVD collections consisting almost entirely of romcoms slightly offputting.  I'm sure as much as girls probably redflag guys with horror/action collections.

Not movies, but games... one of the most awkward moments back when I was a student was going to a buddy's house where he was playing Perfect Dark on his N64 against bots.  He made all the bots girls & he was crossbow bolting all of them all giddy-like.  I edged my way to the door.

Oh man, Boondock Saints.  Yeah, that's a doozy.  I have had discussions with quite sane people I know who point out that there's some brains to the way things are shot (like Dafoe reconstructing the firefight) and  pretty much the same overall sentiments expressed in some Seagal movies or Death Wish 3 or whatever.  And they're right.  But for some reason it's harder to take those movies seriously. Saints really gives you the sense that they mean it, somehow, and they really brought out of the woodwork a whole lot of proto-Travis Bickles to pad a knuckleheaded fanbase with that one.  It's amazing.

Anyway: I'm not one to say that movies and games create killers or "desensitise" or what have you (in fact I'll vehemently argue the opposite), but hardcore gorehounds really worry me some times.  You'll see guys whose favorite gore flicks are some Romero, some Fulci, obscure Expy  stuff like Cannibal Holocaust,  torture porn, the usual suspects.  Then up the list you find Faces of Death (fake though it is), Saving Private Ryan,  that Executions documentary (intended to be anti death penalty activism).

I do want to suddenly make the authorities aware of this persons tastes when I see that stuff.

Quote:

Originally Posted by LaurenOrtega 

Still WAYYYYY less creepy than the guy who talks about Boondock Saints like it's the second coming.

 

Bonus points if he says 'I'm Irish so I love it!"

That's the same, "Honest, working-class Irish" lunkheadedness that creates this:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/27-racist-and-homophobic-reactions-to-black-hockey

If someone's got a lot of Nazi-torture-camp flicks (Ilsa and its many ripoffs), plus stuff like Men Behind the Sun, and that person isn't an armchair World War II historian -- i.e., you know he's got this stuff because he gets off on watching re-enacted real-life atrocities, and he doesn't have mitigating stuff like, say, the Capra Why We Fight series -- that could be a red flag. Also a surfeit of Nazi-related stuff in general.

How about all Disney, all the time? With a calendar marking off vault release dates? That calendar hanging on the wall next to a Mickey varisty jacket?

And no children.

Ha. Disney. Or the whole infantilism  a lot of manga/animation fans seem to be consumed by.

Comc by Kate Beaton. Easier to read it here:

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/01/20/kate-beaton-nails-manchild-mannerisms-in-the-year-2063/

One of my best friends is someone whose film suggestions I immediately toss. The guy's a prince - I mean, he's really this amazingly nice guy, great to talk to, good to hang out with. But he has terrible, terrible taste in movies. His basic mantra seems to be "If it requires thought, I don't want to watch it." He can't finish or watch a lot of films if they're "too dark."  Now, by itself, I can get that. But he turned off THE FOUNTAIN because it was "too dark" and "too sad."

He's otherwise a great dude - genuinely one of the best people I know. But once he said to me that MISS CONGENIALITY was "pretty good," I knew I could ignore all and any movie recommendations coming from him.

Urghh yeah.

I'm from Boston and I couldn't be more embarrassed.  I stupidly tried to defend this city on ESPN.com after all of this, but it was to no avail.

It really gives us a bad name.  I promise you it's not that bad here, but of course we're gonna get these type of people in every city.

*Sigh*

I lived in Boston for a super-brief while, and I'd agree with this.

But man those big stupid penis-heads are really awful.

Don't beat yourself up too much. They are sports fans after all. Renowned the world over, regardless of ethnicity or sport as being about on par with horsefly larvae in terms of morality.

I wasn't really pointing fingers at the good people of Boston - the incident just dovetailed nicely with the "Oirish" bro-culture so fetishized by the Boondick Saints.

Quote:

Originally Posted by stelios 

Don't beat yourself up too much. They are sports fans after all. Renowned the world over, regardless of ethnicity or sport as being about on par with horsefly larvae in terms of morality.

Hey! Don't make me call you something I would normally reserve for a Georgetown fan.

I have to say, nothing enrages me more (filmwise) than folks who categorically dismiss black-and-white. And now I've got this kid at work who can't deal with film grain.

I too remember the Boondock wave that hit, like a wall of funk.  My best friend's brother was all into it and he introduced me to it.  I thought he was joking.

I used to know an honestly sweet guy who was super intelligent and generally a good friend. But it's like he couldn't stop obsessing over his childhood and seemingly didn't own anything but cartoons. Not only that if you tried to persuade him to watch anything else he'd basically shut down, like anything that wasn't in this really narrow spectrum was going to be some ultra-violent, depressing mess for him.

Boondock Saints is lucky to have Dafoe, who seems to realize how shit the film is and just says "Fuck it — I'll have a ball for myself anyway." Aside from him, I basically just blinked slowly at the screen and waited for it all to be over.

I know of at least two women who love the film, and it's not because they're into Sean Patrick Flanery or whatever, either. I do not know why.

For a while I hated the movie even more because I'd be trying to talk up The Boondocks and people would be like "Haven't seen it, but have you seen Boondock Saints?"

Quote:

Originally Posted by MichaelM 

One of my best friends is someone whose film suggestions I immediately toss. The guy's a prince - I mean, he's really this amazingly nice guy, great to talk to, good to hang out with. But he has terrible, terrible taste in movies. His basic mantra seems to be "If it requires thought, I don't want to watch it." He can't finish or watch a lot of films if they're "too dark."  Now, by itself, I can get that. But he turned off THE FOUNTAIN because it was "too dark" and "too sad."

 

He's otherwise a great dude - genuinely one of the best people I know. But once he said to me that MISS CONGENIALITY was "pretty good," I knew I could ignore all and any movie recommendations coming from him.

I never know what to do with the people like this who are super nice and really into movies, but end up being interested in the weirdest, most indistinguishable middlebrow stuff.

In college, there was a tech-head who lived down the hall who was thrilled to know someone else (me) had moved in and loved movies. Turns out, he had downloaded a MASSIVE library of them from off the internet, which gave me a little pause, because I don't particularly endorse that, but he was a nice guy, and open to my suggestions.

But the stuff he was breaking the law to attain was just... peculiar. Hope Floats, Home Fries, Speed 2, just endless collections of completely random studio movies with nothing in common. He tried his absolute hardest to get me to sit down and watch The Exorcist prequel with him, going on and on about how "incredible" the sound design was, when he hadn't even seen the previous Exorcist movies. Just bizarre.

Honestly, the hate for Boondock Saints gets as overblown as the love for it does. It's a fun enough movie as an over-the-top Tarantino rip-off with Dafoe chewing up every single scene he's in. It isn't great, but it's also not the blight on humanity a lot of folks want to make it out to be.

No it really is a pretty awful film.

It's an action movie that doesn't understand how action works, it's a comedy that's utterly tone-deaf, and it's main "theme" is handled with all the wit and sophistication of a drunken bar patron. Not to mention the adolescent sexism, the rampant homophobia, or the chunkheaded macho attitude of the whole deal.

That film is practically a warning signal whenever it pops up on somebody's "favorites" list.

I hate to say it: but Forrest Gump. It's reactionary undertone that bugs me. Great cast, well made, but plebian as fuck

Quote:

Originally Posted by MichaelM 

One of my best friends is someone whose film suggestions I immediately toss. The guy's a prince - I mean, he's really this amazingly nice guy, great to talk to, good to hang out with. But he has terrible, terrible taste in movies. His basic mantra seems to be "If it requires thought, I don't want to watch it." He can't finish or watch a lot of films if they're "too dark."  Now, by itself, I can get that. But he turned off THE FOUNTAIN because it was "too dark" and "too sad."

 

He's otherwise a great dude - genuinely one of the best people I know. But once he said to me that MISS CONGENIALITY was "pretty good," I knew I could ignore all and any movie recommendations coming from him.

Yeah this, I got a couple friends like this, I bring over something like Fargo which isn't even challenging and me and my one buddy like it a lot, my other buddy who's not a bad guy at all but is kinda simple minded proclaims "this movie fuckin' sucked" because he didn't understand that you could mix a comedy and a thriller and have it work. the next week me and my one buddy brought over No Country for Old Men cuz neither of them had seen it but I knew that the one friend would like it, the same friend who hated Fargo said no to watching it and made us sit through 2 1/2 hours of Tom and Jerry cartoons, not even the originals but the shitty DTV ones. I guess some people are a lost cause, I have another friend who said The Pacifier was "pretty sweet". I need new friends.

Regarding cartoons: *I* own a bunch. Some are nostalgic, although most of them also still hold up (I tend not to spend money on shit, even if I liked it as a kid). But I would also say my collection does have balance; I've got some anime, some action and horrormovies, a few comedies, and some moodier stuff like Schindler's List and Pan's Labyrinth.

I'm probably in the clear, right? As far as other people go, well, I get worried every time my mother laughs her head off at the latest awful romantic comedy (my father confirms that they usually are). But then I remember she's generally more of a "watches movies solely for enjoyment", which is perfectly OK. And she's well aware of the trifling nature of most of these movies.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lightning Slim 

 

 

That's the same, "Honest, working-class Irish" lunkheadedness that creates this:

 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/27-racist-and-homophobic-reactions-to-black-hockey

  As a hockey fan I was disappointed to read that. I solved the problem of prejudice years ago: anybody can be an asshole. The two worst human beings I've ever met where white straight and Catholic* just like me.

  I get why The Boondock Saints is a cult movie. Its weird, violent and has off beat characters. However it isn't really a good movie. If somebody wants to use some kind of pop culture to be down with their Irishness, I suggest Thin Lizzy Live and Dangerous.

*I'm the lapsed kind.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chaz 

 

 

  As a hockey fan I was disappointed to read that. I solved the problem of prejudice years ago: anybody can be an asshole. The two worst human beings I've ever met where white straight and Catholic* just like me.

 

  I get why The Boondock Saints is a cult movie. Its weird, violent and has off beat characters. However it isn't really a good movie. If somebody wants to use some kind of pop culture to use to be down with their Irishness, I suggest Thin Lizzy Live and Dangerous.

 

*I'm the lapsed kind.

I want to marry that bolded quote, Chaz.

Thanks Chris.