Not very good films that you like

[BritishHobo]

I'm not talking about 'so bad it's good' here, or cult films or anything like that. Not something that's a total mess and you find fascinating. Just films that were widely regarded to be pretty mediocre, like a bland, two-star comedy, but that you unironically enjoy.

I'm watching Table 19 at the moment. I wanted to watch it for ages, because I really like the set-up of it. I like the idea of a film being set on the periphery of someone else's big day, these characters who are just irrelevant to all the life-affirming romance that's going on. I was put off a bit by the fact that it got all-out mediocre reviews, but I'm quite enjoying it. It's just a bit of a simple, sentimental thing with some little emotional twists that are clearly manipulative, but I can just go with. And even though it tries a little too hard at times to make the characters quirky, I find the interactions between them all really pleasant and likeable. I absolutely see why everyone saw it as mediocre; it's very much not that great. But I can't help but warm to it.

WHAT ARE YOURS

[St_Eddie]

Eli Roth's Knock Knock.  I find it to be a tense and thoroughly engaging watch.  Everyone else seems to loathe it. *shrugs*

[zomgmouse]

I remember having an adolescent affinity to the film Starter for Ten which was by all means a standard British romcom but something about it tickled me.

[Famous Mortimer]

Elizabethtown

Always loved it, and was rather annoyed when I read reviews of it which said how crappy it was.

[Gregory Torso]

Eli Roth's Knock Knock.  I find it to be a tense and thoroughly engaging watch.  Everyone else seems to loathe it. *shrugs*

I thought Knock Knock was hilarious. Thoroughly enjoyed it. By no means a good film, though.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's Choke.

[Small Man Big Horse]

The film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's Choke.

I watched that about a month ago and thought it was okay too. Nothing amazing but Sam Rockwell's always good value.

[Carpool Dragon]

Anything with Christian Bale before Batman made him boring - Reign of Fire, Equilibrium, Shaft, Swing Kids, all gold.

Eight Below, which features the best dog acting I've ever seen. The dogs are more engaging than the human stars (hard to believe that huskies can out-act Paul Walker and Jason Biggs, but it's true!).

[Mr. Etiquette]

Does Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace qualify?

Not only the best of the prequels for me, but a really fun movie in its own right, and very much maligned.
For a start it's a lot more competently directed than the other two, and there's a real fairytale innocence to it, very strong production design and I just find it's brimming with imagination. Especially in light of these new Disney films, I think that's very refreshing.
Yes, it gets a lot of flack, but Jar Jar aside, I don't really believe any of it is particularly deserved to be honest. Nostalgia might play a part (I saw it at the cinema aged 11), bit I still thoroughly enjoy it to this day - even the politics make it more interesting for me. There's a kind of dream-like feel to the proceedings which makes it feel tonally unlike any of the other films. Hard to describe.
I'd say it's my 4th favourite in the saga, behind the original three.

Unfairly underrated. But probably a not very good film, clearly by most people's standards.

[popcorn]

Girl, Interrupted. It's very bland but I like the experience of being locked up in a big house with Winona Ryder. That sounds glib but it's honestly true. Odd.

[spamwangler]

Darrenofski's Noah. all of his late stage output really, - its like watching a small dog try and grasp a ball significantly bigger than him, and in failing to do so, manages to leap over the grand canyon

[Sebastian Cobb]

Darrenofski's Noah. all of his late stage output really, - its like watching a small dog try and grasp a ball significantly bigger than him, and in failing to do so, manages to leap over the grand canyon

Everything after Pi was downhill IMO.

I liked Requiem for a Dream when I was a teenager and a silly student but I doubt I could stomach it now. If not only for the fact the Clint 'PWEI' Mansell soundtrack was appropriated for all sorts of advertising guff like Sky Sports to the point it was ubiquitous.

[Gulftastic]

The Resident Evil films. Daft rubbish, but I love them.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Does the Fifth Element count or is too culty?

[spamwangler]

Everything after Pi was downhill IMO.

i know that youre right, - but i watched noah and tree of life back to back the other day, and i had a hell of a time - pi is a proper film, but everything else is a high quality garbage roller-coaster that i can connect with so much more for some reason, - garbage films for garbage times

[Dr Rock]

Does the Fifth Element count or is too culty?

I think it's widely liked a bit. I like it apart from the bits I don't like. Talking about Die Hard, I quite liked Hudson Hawk, which seems like it came out before he was Die Hard, but it wasn't, it was after.

[SavageHedgehog]

The Resident Evil films. Daft rubbish, but I love them.

I watched these last year, and enjoyed them for the most part, especially the fourth and fifth. The Final Chapter was a bit pants because of the awful shakeycam (a rather belated and dated introduction to the series to boot), but it did have offer some enjoyably silly resolutions to long-running plot threads.

[thecuriousorange]

Only God can judge me.

[SavageHedgehog]

On a Video Game tip, the trailers for the new Tomb Raider are reminding me that I quite enjoyed the old ones. The first is a ridiculous piece of crap, where one character says that you can't go back and change the past however much you want to, immediately followed by a scene where the character goes back in time and changes the past. That it even has time travel at all says a lot about what kind of movie it is, and it's fun. The second I actually found to be a pretty solid Sunday afternoon time-waster romp, in terms of entertainment about on par or not noticeably below a mid-range Bond Movie.

There are a couple of other Videogame movies I've got a soft spot for, but they are more in the "mess I find fascinating" camp then the remit of this thread.

[Dr Rock]

Once again. This Is The End is a great comedy. The consensus is that it's not very good (IMDb 6.6), but that consensus is very wrong.

[Sebastian Cobb]

82% on Rotten Tomatoes though.

[Dr Rock]

82% on Rotten Tomatoes though.

Oh that is good news.

Also Showgirls. 4.7/10 on IMDb, 19% Rotten Tomatoes. Idiots.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'm inclined to agree with RT on that one.

You can get a little plugin that makes RT scores appear on imdb. It's useful because imdb's crowdsourced scores aren't to be trusted, in fact their top 100 films list is a good argument for why critics are a necessary evil.

[Bazooka]

Emmanuelle in Space

[Dr Rock]

You can get a little plugin that makes RT scores appear on imdb. It's useful because imdb's crowdsourced scores aren't to be trusted, in fact their top 100 films list is a good argument for why critics are a necessary evil.

It's currently ALL GOING ON over at IMDb. They have changed the format supposedly so it works better on tablets and phones, but after getting rid of the message boards last year, you can now no longer order reviews by anything other than 'helpfulness.' Not by 'hated it' or 'loved it'  - it also means if you write a review it will be at the end of hundreds or thousands of other reviews which have already been scored highly for helpfulness, and will never be taken over because nobody is going to scroll back to the three-thousandth review. The consensus seems to be that it is turning from a fairly reliable system to one that exists mostly to promote the buying of said movie off Amazon. IMDbers are furious, and leaving or threatening to leave.

https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/update-to-user-reviews?topic-reply-list%5Bsettings%5D%5Bfilter_by%5D=all

[magval]

I love Mortal Kombat, but I reckon most people think it's shit. I especially love the soundtrack (score and metal/techno stuff) and the general design sense of it.

I also love Batman Forever, but I've a minor caveat in that I don't think it's a not-very-good film at all. I think it's bloody excellent.

[greenman]

Event Horizon, knowing that its going to turn into a standard space slasher film by the end doesn't kill my enjoyment of a far better first half plus some really great sets and late era model SFX.

The Coens Ladykillers remake is I think still worth it for Hanks performance if not much else.

[Spiteface]

I love Mortal Kombat, but I reckon most people think it's shit. I especially love the soundtrack (score and metal/techno stuff) and the general design sense of it.

MK is basically Enter the Dragon with monsters. A deeply flawed film, that I will not hear a word against.

I've made no secret of this, but I fucking love the Saw films. At worst they're still better than most modern horror fare and John "Jigsaw" Kramer is far more compelling than any of the so-called horror icons like Jason or Freddy, even though in later films he basically becomes Pinhead, in that he shows up in like one flashback scene to be awesome and then fucks off again (the latest one pulls this as well, in a way that caught me off-guard for a while until the film actually explains what's happening and when)

[Sebastian Cobb]

It's currently ALL GOING ON over at IMDb. They have changed the format supposedly so it works better on tablets and phones, but after getting rid of the message boards last year, you can now no longer order reviews by anything other than 'helpfulness.' Not by 'hated it' or 'loved it'  - it also means if you write a review it will be at the end of hundreds or thousands of other reviews which have already been scored highly for helpfulness, and will never be taken over because nobody is going to scroll back to the three-thousandth review. The consensus seems to be that it is turning from a fairly reliable system to one that exists mostly to promote the buying of said movie off Amazon. IMDbers are furious, and leaving or threatening to leave.

https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/update-to-user-reviews?topic-reply-list%5Bsettings%5D%5Bfilter_by%5D=all

That amazon shit is pointless because it plugs into amazon us. I run everything through justwatch to check where I can stream it in the uk.

[notjosh]

I remember having an adolescent affinity to the film Starter for Ten which was by all means a standard British romcom but something about it tickled me.

I don't think that's a bad film at all. A bit silly, but fairly charming. Rebecca Hall is wonderful in it.

On a similar note, I think I might genuinely like Love Actually, despite being extremely aware of its many horrendous flaws. I think it's partly that, in an increasingly cynical and ironic culture, I respect things that have the courage to be utterly and ridiculously uncynical and sincere. About Time is still utter dogshit though.

While we're talking rom-coms I might as well mention a film that I in no way whatsoever consider to be bad - rather one of the greatest films ever made - You've Got Mail, which I think is generally regarded as mediocre and often used as a byword for 'sappy unconvincing rom-com'. It's not though. it's a brilliant, witty film about how people reconcile their carefully cultivated online personas with their much more flawed and complicated real-world personalities, especially in the context of a relationship. It was also very ahead of the curve in depicting the internet as part of ordinary life rather than some weird scary subculture ruled by hackers.

And it's one of the most realistic films about capitalism ever made, in that it avoids just making capitalism and big corporations the big baddy, but is both quite sad and quite pragmatic about it. Like how Kathleen is able to see the closing of her shop in the context of inevitable social change and her own feelings.

My store is closing this week. I own a store, did I ever tell you that? It's a lovely store, and in a week it will be something really depressing, like a Baby Gap. Soon, it'll just be a memory. In fact, someone, some foolish person, will probably think it's a tribute to this city, the way it keeps changing on you, the way you can never count on it, or something. But the truth is... I'm heartbroken. I feel as if a part of me has died, and my mother has died all over again, and no one can ever make it right.

Then there's the brilliant scene where she walks into Fox books for the first time and sees a world that has already moved on from her and her approach to business ("always personal"), but has lost something along the way (the assistant can't tell a customer who wrote the Shoe books, but she can). And later we find that Joe has hired her former employee George to run the children's department and now won't hire anyone "unless they have a PHD in children's literature". I think the film is both very smart in the way it depicts capitalism as surviving by adapting and absorbing, and very poignant in the way it accepts this change while also mourning what has passed.

It's beautifully written as well, with loads of memorable dialogue, and absolutely magical chemistry between Hanks and Ryan - probably the best onscreen romantic pairing since Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. 10/10, would watch again.