Movies that Aged Poorly for you

[Syaoran Li]

Fight Club.

If you're a teenager who needs some motivational speech and will embrace the "consumerism is bad" message, it hits the spot.
Now, I'm not blaming Palahniuk, he's a fine writer and I do enjoy his books, but Fight Club, at least nowadays doesn't impress me anymore.

I still think Fight Club is a great movie but it's the kind of movie that only could've been made in the late 90's when the economy was doing great, the Cold War was over and The War on Terror hadn't yet begun, and the consumer culture that began in the 1950's finally reached its absolute zenith. Everyone thought Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" paper was becoming absolute gospel truth and that the future would be optimistic but quiet and bland.

V for Vendetta made me say "maybe the bad guy had a point considering what's going on in the UK at the moment"

Another movie I still love but has definitely aged poorly.

V For Vendetta is to the early-mid 2000's what Fight Club is for the late 90's

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

While Spaceballs is still kinda charming, Men in Tights is the most awkward movie I think I've ever seen. I was groaning pretty much the entire time I last watched it, the acting is so bad, and the jokes are even worse. The only thing good about it is the title.

What I don't like about Spaceballs is at its core, it's made with contempt for what it's making fun of. Contempt was never an element in Blazing Saddles, History of the World Part 1, or Young Frankenstein; the opposite was the case. When Blazing Saddles needed to look like a Western, it did. Young Frankenstein was in Black & White because the original was. Spaceball sets are very expensive peak SNL sets; just good enough for sketches but cheap-looking compared to the original.

While Star Wars was a tight script with quick pacing, Spaceballs has a meandering quality to it so that we can get from one comedy set piece to the next. The Alien Diner scene is the most egregious as the plot has to stop dead in its tracks just to make Alien jokes. Even Tatooine desert scenes are slow for world-building purposes and to mitigate the coincidence of Luke buying the droids.

The actors do that annoying one-upmanship that happens in Fembusters which means that actors are not playing the characters they are supposed to be satirizing, especially John Candy. Barf is a terrible Chewbacca parody, but he's an extreme example of what every actor does in this movie. Every scene with Candy and Pullman is them trying to be the comedy relief when Pullman should be the straight man at a minimum.

Then the jokes themselves are Nickelodeon in nature like jamming the satellite dish or combing the desert or Rick Moranis is short. These jokes aren't nearly as well-crafted as Abby Normal, "It's good to be the King," or "Stand back or the nigger gets it!" Those jokes actually propel the story, often reverses expectations, or have build-up to the punchline. Spaceballs jokes are the first draft versions of better jokes.

Finally, Yogurt himself directly tells the audience Mel Brooks's contempt for the subject matter. TBF, it works better now than then since Disney Wars is far more guilty of shoddy merchandizing, but this movie was made in the late 80s, so the joke applies to the original Star Wars toy runs which as RLM pointed out is just a byproduct of the movies. Yes, Lucas profited immensely from toy sales, but it's not nearly the same as Joel Schmacher making Batman movies to sell merch.* It's also a strange way to use the Mel Brooks's character. Either he's the lead like in High Anxiety or he's a goofy, supporting character like in Blazing Saddles or even Men in Tights.

That's why I would rank Men in Tights higher than Spaceballs. Men in Tights just whiffs a lot. Spaceballs is his worst movie because he has no interest in getting his parody right.

*And I know because I've got that Two-Face cup from McDonald's to prove it. High quality cup seeing as how it's lasted me twenty-five years.

 

[2021Murder]

Wasn't Antz one of those rip-off movies from where Dreamworks would rush some pile out before the bigger Disney movie of the same concept?

That was the rumor and common belief? Except the plots are entirely different. Disney's is a knock off of 7 samurai while DreamWorks is a woody allen film. It's like saying Jacob the liar and inglorious bastards are a RIP-off of one another because they both deal with lying jews in ww2

IIRC, there was an episode of Half in the Bag where Jay was talking about Chasing Amy and how it evolved from a cutting-edge look at sexuality to being really quaint and dated by today's standards. That's kind of how I feel about most Kevin Smith movies.

Though I'll always love Clerks: The Animated Series, and I'll defend that till the day I die.

Kevin Smith's first 3 films are pretty amazing if you're A. A teenager, B. You haven't started using forums/social media.

Chasing Amy really was his high point, he could have gone down as a GOAT director if he died in 9/11.

Mel Brooks:. Once you're old enough that your parents let you watch good comedies then hes shit. But for those prepubescent 6 year olds Mel Brooks is hilarious. By the time you start getting erections you realize how shitty his comedy is.

But that should be obvious, he's a classic borscht belt comedy writer. His films and his tv series Get Smart are 100% a very 60s-era series of jokes.

You really age into these directors. Brooks>Smith>Whedon

If you're watching any of that crap past 30 you're irredeemable.

Fight Club like most of the authors work is late 90s as shit. I think it gets way more hate though because people dont like the idea of white men hanging out together.

Also for all the criticism of fight club and how "actually it's a satire". Fincher's productions all play out exactly like Project Mayhem. Even the guys that get people their coffee are subjected to days of torture and humiliation. Brad Pitt basically does a David Fincher impression for the entire film and the author of the book is still in the club Project Mayhem is based on. So yeah, so much so "satire"

And this wasnt even unknown at the time, and was a big reason critics shit on the film. Fincher was just the shithead that made "The Game" and Aliens 3 and then he basically made a movie where Brad Pitt acts exactly like him and the 2nd half of the movie is basically just a "best of" of the shit he would do on set except instead of making a film they're blowing up buildings.

You can even check out mind hunters behind the scenes hes still going full Durden.

 

[ditto]

I don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but I'm amazed it wasn't on the first page - The Matrix.

As a kid I thought it was the second coming of Christ in film form. Re-watching it 10 years later left me kind of meh.

+1 The Matrix trilogy, probably because that whole style has been done to death in every action movie ever since.

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but the first Avengers film.

On the flip side, the first Iron Man movie is still pretty good.

 

[Foltest]

I saw the first Matrix again and I still think it holds up pretty well.
For the sequals, there is no saving. They are shit but Reload was fun to watch at least.

 

[Mnutu]

What I don't like about Spaceballs is at its core, it's made with contempt for what it's making fun of. Contempt was never an element in Blazing Saddles, History of the World Part 1, or Young Frankenstein; the opposite was the case. When Blazing Saddles needed to look like a Western, it did. Young Frankenstein was in Black & White because the original was. Spaceball sets are very expensive peak SNL sets; just good enough for sketches but cheap-looking compared to the original.

While Star Wars was a tight script with quick pacing, Spaceballs has a meandering quality to it so that we can get from one comedy set piece to the next. The Alien Diner scene is the most egregious as the plot has to stop dead in its tracks just to make Alien jokes. Even Tatooine desert scenes are slow for world-building purposes and to mitigate the coincidence of Luke buying the droids.

The actors do that annoying one-upmanship that happens in Fembusters which means that actors are not playing the characters they are supposed to be satirizing, especially John Candy. Barf is a terrible Chewbacca parody, but he's an extreme example of what every actor does in this movie. Every scene with Candy and Pullman is them trying to be the comedy relief when Pullman should be the straight man at a minimum.

Then the jokes themselves are Nickelodeon in nature like jamming the satellite dish or combing the desert or Rick Moranis is short. These jokes aren't nearly as well-crafted as Abby Normal, "It's good to be the King," or "Stand back or the nigger gets it!" Those jokes actually propel the story, often reverses expectations, or have build-up to the punchline. Spaceballs jokes are the first draft versions of better jokes.

Finally, Yogurt himself directly tells the audience Mel Brooks's contempt for the subject matter. TBF, it works better now than then since Disney Wars is far more guilty of shoddy merchandizing, but this movie was made in the late 80s, so the joke applies to the original Star Wars toy runs which as RLM pointed out is just a byproduct of the movies. Yes, Lucas profited immensely from toy sales, but it's not nearly the same as Joel Schmacher making Batman movies to sell merch.* It's also a strange way to use the Mel Brooks's character. Either he's the lead like in High Anxiety or he's a goofy, supporting character like in Blazing Saddles or even Men in Tights.

That's why I would rank Men in Tights higher than Spaceballs. Men in Tights just whiffs a lot. Spaceballs is his worst movie because he has no interest in getting his parody right.

*And I know because I've got that Two-Face cup from McDonald's to prove it. High quality cup seeing as how it's lasted me twenty-five years.

Mel Brooks admitted he absolutely loved Star Wars. Men in Tights and Space Balls are just the weaker of his movies. We’re talking about the guy who signed off on Blazing Samurai.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

Mel Brooks admitted he absolutely loved Star Wars. Men in Tights and Space Balls are just the weaker of his movies. We’re talking about the guy who signed off on Blazing Samurai.

I do not believe Mel Brooks on that.

 

[Vic Viper T301]

Not a movie but speaking of Spaceballs, they made a TV series out of it in 2008 and it is one of the worst things I have seen in my entire life.

I came into this thread thinking of Fight Club, I think it's just OK now but it was one of my favorite movies as a teenager. Very time and place kind of movie for sure.

 

[Michael Jacks0n]

Not a movie but speaking of Spaceballs, they made a TV series out of it in 2008 and it is one of the worst things I have seen in my entire life.

It must have been pretty damn shitty, because I didn't even know about this Spaceballs show until just now.

 

[Fat Tub of Lard]

I remember really liking Tom and Jerry: The Movie as a kid. It wasn't until I watched it after seeing the Nostalgia Critic review of it (yeah, I know) that I realized how utterly retarded it was.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

It must have been pretty damn shitty, because I didn't even know about this Spaceballs show until just now.

Yeah, it was an animated series that was even more forgettable and bad.

 

[UtopiaGuy]

I'll go out on a limb and say E.T. It's not quite as good as I was always told, and when I finally got around to seeing it, I was kind of disappointed. I guess this movie is a classic case of "you had to be there." Then it's awesome. But seeing it as a grownup years after it was released left me feeling kind of "meh."

 

[Jason Wynn]

A lot of the movies I liked in high school haven’t held up for me. To be specific, I loved both Interview With a Vampire and Queen of the Damned back in the day. Went back to rewatch them not too long ago, IWAV is still okay in a kind of guilty pleasure way, but QOTD is just awful and I have no idea what drew me into it in the first place

 

[Arthur Morgan]

I used to think Idiocracy was funny as a teen, now it just seems stupid. Especially the eugenics shit, just makes me think of Moviebob.

And don't know if it counts, but Family Guy: The Stewie Griffin Story. I used to like FG but man does it not hold up. Especially the cutaway gags, they're just annoying now.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

I thought Top Gun was sooooo intense and awesome and that Maverick was dreamy. I mean, whatever, Tom Cruise is gorgeous no matter how crazy he gets, but Top Gun is pretty hilariously terrible now. Still worth a rewatch, but not as a serious emotional film.

Top Gun is impossible to get into for me for two reasons: 1) the callsigns are clearly what Hollywood scriptwriters thought they should be, not what they'd actually be and 2) I've seen gay porn that's less homoerotic. (The soundtrack is OTT as fuck, too, but it's so iconic it basically horseshoes around and becomes good again.)

V for Vendetta made me say "maybe the bad guy had a point considering what's going on in the UK at the moment"

V for Vendetta never did it for me because I read the comic first. Even the "good" Moore adaptations are utterly ruined by being familiar with the source material.

For my part, a movie that aged badly? Saving Private Ryan. Yes, the Omaha Beach sequence is very good, blah di blah di blah, but what about the other 93% of the film? It's just That WW2 Movie, a formula that had been beaten to death back when Disco ruled the airwaves. I'm sure a good part of this is me; everything even remotely connected to the Second World War has been worn to absolute rags, to the point where there's nothing you can do with it that hasn't already been done a million times before. The only exception to this rule is Dunkirk, which gets around it by skipping the war part of the war.

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

Fight Club.

If you're a teenager who needs some motivational speech and will embrace the "consumerism is bad" message, it hits the spot.
Now, I'm not blaming Palahniuk, he's a fine writer and I do enjoy his books, but Fight Club, at least nowadays doesn't impress me anymore.

I still think Fight Club is a great movie but it's the kind of movie that only could've been made in the late 90's when the economy was doing great, the Cold War was over and The War on Terror hadn't yet begun, and the consumer culture that began in the 1950's finally reached its absolute zenith. Everyone thought Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" paper was becoming absolute gospel truth and that the future would be optimistic but quiet and bland.

I dunno about this.

Fight Club is obviously 90's af (not that there's anything wrong with that ) and it definitely wouldn't get made today for a ton of reasons. None of those reasons speak well of the eternal dumpster fire of endless trash mass entertainment has become.

I think it's more relevant than it was in 1999, now that we live in a kind of techno-dystopia where people are a lot more atomized and alienated from each other and what passes for modern culture has been completely cannibalized by consoomption and poz.

There's a lot more going on in that movie than just edgy critique of consumerism, it's more about the emptiness and ennui of modern (fake and gay) socio-economic forces and the enervating, emasculating experience of the Calhoun's cubicle rat lifestyle, and trying to find (real, but also maybe kinda gay) meaning and community from taking your shirt off and beating on Jared Leto.

The things Fight Club satirizes haven't gone away, they've gone up to 11. Everything is a lot faker and gayer and more prissy and hostile to masculinity than it was in 1999.

Narrator: I can't get married, I'm a 30 year old boy.

SpongeBob Narrator: Several Years Later...

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

I dunno about this.

Fight Club is obviously 90's af (not that there's anything wrong with that ) and it definitely wouldn't get made today for a ton of reasons. None of those reasons speak well of the eternal dumpster fire of endless trash mass entertainment has become.

I think it's more relevant than it was in 1999, now that we live in a kind of techno-dystopia where people are a lot more atomized and alienated from each other and what passes for modern culture has been completely cannibalized by consoomption and poz.

There's a lot more going on in that movie than just edgy critique of consumerism, it's more about the emptiness and ennui of modern (fake and gay) socio-economic forces and the enervating, emasculating experience of the Calhoun's cubicle rat lifestyle, and trying to find (real, but also maybe kinda gay) meaning and community from taking your shirt off and beating on Jared Leto.

The things Fight Club satirizes haven't gone away, they've gone up to 11. Everything is a lot faker and gayer and more prissy and hostile to masculinity than it was in 1999.

Narrator: I can't get married, I'm a 30 year old boy.

SpongeBob Narrator: Several Years Later...

Ver archivo adjunto 1916575

Not too long ago I watched Fight Club after having read the book in high school in the 2010s, and what stuck out to me was that the movie's message of masculinity being drowned in a sea of consumerism and society actively stamping out overtly manly traits was more potent now than it was in the 90s. There's a line where Tyler Durden mocks the Narrator for memorizing the names of specific Ikea furniture, saying no self-respecting man would ever commit those kinds of things to memory. When you look at everything now, and especially at the photo you posted, that line's still relevant with how much more shit modern men will memorize that they have no reason to. Then of course there's the central reason for the fight clubs, that it's the only times these men can feel like actual men and not be caged by society's standards. Considering that things as simple as men having sexual feelings for women is considered toxic masculinity in this day and age (not even exaggerating here, this was brought up in several college classes I went to), there's a far stronger divide between what is traditionally masculine and what society deems as acceptable now than there was in 1999.

Fight Club tackles a shitload of issues that only got more comically pronounced after it came out, and as someone who experienced it long after it was released I think it's still relevant to modern society.

 

[Pokemonquistador2]

Not too long ago I watched Fight Club after having read the book in high school in the 2010s, and what stuck out to me was that the movie's message of masculinity being drowned in a sea of consumerism and society actively stamping out overtly manly traits was more potent now than it was in the 90s. There's a line where Tyler Durden mocks the Narrator for memorizing the names of specific Ikea furniture, saying no self-respecting man would ever commit those kinds of things to memory. When you look at everything now, and especially at the photo you posted, that line's still relevant with how much more shit modern men will memorize that they have no reason to. Then of course there's the central reason for the fight clubs, that it's the only times these men can feel like actual men and not be caged by society's standards. Considering that things as simple as men having sexual feelings for women is considered toxic masculinity in this day and age (not even exaggerating here, this was brought up in several college classes I went to), there's a far stronger divide between what is traditionally masculine and what society deems as acceptable now than there was in 1999.

Fight Club tackles a shitload of issues that only got more comically pronounced after it came out, and as someone who experienced it long after it was released I think it's still relevant to modern society.

New generations that are being educated now are going to be so fucked. They'll be lucky if they know what penises and vaginas are even for, much less which gender is supposed to have them. They'll be so sexually dysfunctional that the only people who will reproduce in the future will be goatherders that were imported into the US from parts of the world so poor, they had to watch piles of burning cowchips instead of TVs.

@UtopiaGuy
I'll go out on a limb and say E.T. It's not quite as good as I was always told, and when I finally got around to seeing it, I was kind of disappointed. I guess this movie is a classic case of "you had to be there." Then it's awesome. But seeing it as a grownup years after it was released left me feeling kind of "meh."

E.T. was basically Spielberg working out his issues over his parent's divorce. I suppose if you were a kid whose parents were going through a breakup, it might have resonated with you more. I thought it was okay as a kid, but now watching it, I wonder how an alien race managed to invent space travel and telekenesis while at the same time being unable to grasp things like "walking" and "wearing clothes".

 

[Dysnomia]

Burnt Offerings. I used to love this movie but I watched it again a few days ago and something just didn't click. I like the concept. But it's bogged down by all the 70s cinematic style that's just too dramatic or annoying. Some scenes just take way too long or seen unnecessary. It's almost two hours long and a lot of it could have been cut to make it flow better.

I do like that they were daring enough to kill off the whole family. Even the kid. But I feel like the ending was a tad bland because you only hear Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart. I wanted to see them meet "Mother". A happy evil family reunion!.

The movie has a great cast and a cool idea behind it. I liked it as a kid. But now I don't think I can sit through t again for another couple of years. Poor Bette Davis. Relegated to something like this in her later years. Although she was entertaining. I feel like either she or Hollywood missed the boat casting her in major films as the wacky old lady. She's actually very good at it.

 

[Face Of A Ghost]

Early 2000 trending movies were some straight up garbage.

Rob Shneider movies and shitty comedies (hot chicks deuce bigalow all that fucking crap)
All the garbage parodies like Scary Movie Date Movie
Shitty super hero movies before RDJ and Iron man saved it.

God i don't miss these days.