Disrespecting a "classic"

[viranimus]

So many things,

Star Wars (any of them outside of KOTOR series)
Firefly
Arrested development
Seinfeld/Curb your Enthusiasm
Family guy both pre and post cancellation, but post sooooo much more.

Citizen Kane
Psycho
99% of every other example of pre 1990 cinema (not that its bad... the cinematography and such just puts me to sleep.

Every single Steven King book I ever read outside of Deloris Clairborne.
Shakespeare. Not that his works are bad, just they have been so redone over the years that it renders any attempt to read the actual writings as unimiaginably tedious and painful

The Doors greatest hits album. (actually their entire discography, only like 3 marginably tolerable songs.

I could literally go on and on, but I figure thats more than enough gas to warrant raising a flame shield.

 

[Daeggreth]

-SNIP-

It's James fucking Joyce. 90%* of the population, including myself, won't appreciate anything he's written.

I thought The Grapes of Wrath was a pretty overrated book. It had literally zero character development and the way it was presented was dull: the joads went here, the joads did that. Zzzzzzzzz...
Not to mention the incomprehensible language.

'The Grapes of Wrath' had infinitely more to do with it's setting and circumstance than with the Joads as characters. I greatly enjoyed it but I can see how it could be considered dull, particularly if you prefer a more character driven story. As far as having incomprehensible language... well let me reference the above author above for examples of truly unintelligible prose.

OT: I think it's pretty obvious what sort of classics I find to be overrated, to quote Nerexor: "ecause pretentiousness." Most things I can see the appeal of regardless of whether I personally enjoyed them. For example I too found LOTR to be overly dry and tedious but I if you have the patience for it... well it's definitely worth it.

One of the few so called classics that I can't stand is 'Atlas Shrugged' simply because it makes me so goddam angry.

*to pull a random percentage out of my ass

 

[Jfswift]

I never much cared for, "The Yearling" written by Marjorie Rawling. I had little interest in the setting and the characters were very unlike able. Additionally the book was too much like real life and just depressing as hell. Between Jody losing his friend, his pet and his freedom due to responsibility I just couldn't enjoy it. If I read at all it's to travel somewhere far away and different from my own life.

I also didn't care for "great expectations". I blame that on, again uninteresting characters like Pip and a story that wasn't very interesting to me. I just didn't like the writing style and setting. It was dreary and boring to me.

 

[JagermanXcell]

This one really bothers me...

My friends and I have different opinions on The Amazing Spiderman. I hated it and I had one of my friends back me up on it, the rest, ugh, liked it and say its better than all 3 of Raimi's films. Thats where I snapped. I will admit Spiderman 1 was cheesy but it worked, Spiderman 3 was bad no doubt about that, but Spiderman 2, HOW DARE THEY EVEN. That movie was such a near perfect classic, everything a superhero movie and comic adaptation of spiderman should be, well structured character arcs, great villian, on par with The Dark Knight (Yah, I said it). But they keep referring to all 3 in general. Its like they won't admit how great 2 is.

Then again they are my friends, friends who like the Transformers films yet say they're bad story and character wise. I still have faith in them, for now...

 

[keideki]

Every single Charles Dickens book that has been forced on me. I get the idea that they are supposed to be classics but I just can't seem to get into them at all. On the other hand I have loved books like Catcher in the Rye and The Count of Monte Cristo.

 

[Hemlet]

Trying to read one of Gertrude Stein's works (Q.E.D) introduced me to the concept that something can be a classic without necessarily being good. Gertrude Stein tackled issues and concepts that few other authors did in her time period. Her writing on the other hand is dull, dry, and at times downright distracting to read as she will go for long periods of time without using any grammatical markings (such as commas, periods, quotation marks, etc).

 

[uchytjes]

To me, The Great Gatsby is pretty much a giant brick of shit. Why? Because it is pretty much the only book that I have actually had to take a break from reading it. Not because of tiredness or shock, but because of how brain-rottingly booooring it was. It was so boring that I pretty much just skimmed the book and did the work required. I gleaned absolutely NOTHING from it.

 

[WanderingFool]

I don't hate it but I showed Blade Runner to a few people and they disliked it.

I'm still in shock.

Firstly, love Blade Runner.

But, I could guess the reason they disliked it. They probably thought it was going to be a more action-oriented movie, and were upset that a good deal of the movie is not action.

I showed a friend the movie and that was his response.

 

[CPunchMaster]

I've got a History of Film class, and we watched "The General." I hated it. My friend hated it too, and was told to be "more humble" by our professor because of it. Yeesh. It reuses the same jokes like fifteen times, and I know intertitles were necessary back then... But "Man with a Movie Camera" spits in the face of that.

I shouldn't talk too much about that class, though. I might explode. I mean, what kind of teacher talks through the entire film whilst you're trying to watch it?

 

[o_O]

I never really got LOTR books either. I had this one superbook that has all three books combined into a doorstopper I could kill rats with (and it was a freaking softback) that I never finished. Mind you, I got into Return of the King to this one part where I think Gimli and Legolas are taking days traveling through some field or some shit, then just... stopped. And I never do that with books. I can't remember much of anything specifically about the books either (everything I remember is either from pop culture propagation or just a general summary of the story; no details).

That said, the overarching story/summary is pretty sweet though. Magic/evil ring/epic battles/world in strife/hobbits/elves/dwarves/balrog/etc. A pity it couldn't be more engaging in literary form.

...Strangely, I liked and finished the Hobbit. Go figure.

 

[ShogunGino]

I don't hate it but I showed Blade Runner to a few people and they disliked it.

I'm still in shock.

Firstly, love Blade Runner.

But, I could guess the reason they disliked it. They probably thought it was going to be a more action-oriented movie, and were upset that a good deal of the movie is not action.

I showed a friend the movie and that was his response.

I admit, that was my first response, as well. But revisiting it, I think the movie has too thin a plot for its runtime, poorly set up villains, bad chemistry between Harrison Ford and Sean Young, and overall, just too much obvious symbolism that I don't think ever really amounts to much.

 

[Mr. Omega]

Imma just add another voice saying that Catcher in the Rye was a load of crap. Nothing to say that hasn't been said before. The story itself might have been enjoyable if the main character wasn't so unlikable. I get that he was supposed to be unlikable, but one should at least be able to put up going through the journey through his perspective.

 

[AlbinoAaron]

Anything Shakespeare; that is all.

 

[Bravo 21]

Well this has happened to me twice, that I can think of off the top of my head. The first was where I read "Three Sisters" for an English class last year. By the end, I hated the book, the author, the characters, the class, the teacher, myself and just about everything else. We did that book to death, brought it back through pacts with dark powers, and repeated. For several months. Taking up a new book after that was probably the best moment I had in that course.

Then there was 2001: A Space Odyssey. I had read, and loved the book, and decided that I should check out the movie. It failed to live up to my expectations, but I watched to the end, hoping that it would improve. Then again, maybe if I re-watch it I'll be able to appreciate it better. I was pretty young back then.

Then again, I have always preferred the books to the films/shows, Lord of the Rings, A Song of Fire and Ice, etc. Of course that was back when I had time to just sit and read for several hours at a time.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I don't hate it but I showed Blade Runner to a few people and they disliked it.

I'm still in shock.

I watched the Director's Cut of Blade Runner. I didn't care for it. The complete lack of narration (at least I don't recall any) made it difficult to follow the plot from moment to moment and the whole film appears to simply waddle from scene to scene until, eventually, you get a famous soliloquy and the credits roll. I later read the book and was equally unimpressed.

There are things about that movie that were cool and interesting but as a whole I simply didn't care for it. In much the same way watching Citizen Kane falls flat. Things that made it great are no longer particularly interesting or notable and thus with a perspective born from watching movies made upon decades more experience in the craft the only interesting things about Citizen Kane are academic. This is how things are - I can recognize craft and skill and ingenuity in something old but it takes a rare masterwork to actually enthrall me.

When it comes to video games, for example, people generally panned Alpha Protocol - an interesting reaction considering it was mechanically remarkably similar to a game beloved by the same crowd - Deus Ex. Couple that with a system of choice that works remarkably well for the setting and I found a winner. But that's because my experience with a game a decade old prepared me for the awkward interface such that it wasn't really a burden leaving me free to enjoy the things the game did well. Others without such a perspective are unlikely to find much to love as those things that are good are bound to an archaic system of interfaces and control mechanisms.

Another common example is Doom. That game is coming up on it's 20th birthday and it rates as one of my favorite games of all time. If someone just started playing games in the last decade or so, there would be little enjoyment contained in that spartan download. It would exist as a curiosity at best, a piece of history. And it would (and indeed probably has) spawned a thread along the lines of "What's so great about Doom?". The things that made that game great where done better and those things were done better still. Just consider a simple chart of lineage to three modern games: Portal, Battlefield and Call of Duty

(Portal): Wolfenstein 3D -> Doom -> Duke Nukem 3D -> Quake -> Half-Life -> Portal
(Battlefield): Wolfenstein 3d -> Doom -> Duke Nukem 3D -> Quake -> Team Fortress -> Tribes -> Counter Strike -> Battlefield
(Call of Duty): Wolfenstein 3d -> Doom -> Duke Nukem 3D -> Quake -> Unreal Tournament -> Counter Strike -> Halo -> Call of Duty

Any neat thing Doom did has been bested. Technically? Deeper color depth, "lighting" (pallet swapping), higher resolution, multiplayer, the ability to have walls that intersect at something other than 90 degree angles, stairs and ramps, etc. From a gameplay perspective you have weapons that shoot varying kinds of projectiles from the hitscan bullet weapons to area of effect weapons like the BFG 9000 (itself a notable early example of the infinity +1 weapon trope), enemies that were truly different and that attacked at completely different vertical orientations. Levels themselves could be far more complex once freed from the tyranny of flat floors and square walls. But even that was easily bested by Duke with better technology all around, and new methods of inteface. And duke was easily bested by Doom in many technical arenas in spite of being a throwback in others. And anything duke or doom did (save for humor designed to titillate adolescents) was easily bested by Half-Life (though you could throw an intermediary game of Quake 2 in there if you wanted a more complete list. Still, half-life is well remembered and commonly cited where Quake 2 is not save for fun multiplayer things).

The same is true of anything old. It is worth experiencing many old but notable things in any media that interests you because the past is what informs the present. It's useful as an academic exercise. One likely won't derive a lot of pleasure from reading Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy but I'd challenge you to point to a modern and western depiction of hell that was not informed by at least one of those works. With video games, the time of true relevance is brief - a few years at most before someone else iterates and improves upon anything that was notable. With books and movies you tend to get more time. Some themes are universal.

And not all conflict is obvious or external (notably pointed at Our Town comments by OP).

 

[OrokuSaki]

I hate comics written by Stan Lee. They have a mediocre plot and the pages are COVERED in unnecessary dialogue. Cyclops will shout "I'm firing my optic blast, everyone look out!" Every time he fires the optic blast. Spider-Man will kick a jewel thief and loudly exclaim, "Man, that jewel thief sure deserves a good kick to the face."

Every single inch of the page is covered in dialogue and more than half is implied by the picture that it's obscuring.

 

[Marter]

I've got a History of Film class, and we watched "The General." I hated it. My friend hated it too, and was told to be "more humble" by our professor because of it. Yeesh. It reuses the same jokes like fifteen times, and I know intertitles were necessary back then... But "Man with a Movie Camera" spits in the face of that.

I shouldn't talk too much about that class, though. I might explode. I mean, what kind of teacher talks through the entire film whilst you're trying to watch it?

Agreed on The General. Sherlock Jr. was way more enjoyable!

That said ... yeah, I can't come up with a single nice thing to say about the self-indulgent ickiness that is Man with a Movie Camera. It works as a demo reel for editing techniques ... but nothing else.

 

[Something Amyss]

Our Town was pretty awful, and I only finished it due to class requirements.

Same with Catcher in the Rye and the Great Gatsby. The last of those, I never finished.

Hate Tolkien, but I gave his works a try. Twice, because people insisted. I think "Epic" is just shorthand for "needs editing."

Can't think of more off the top of my head, but I know I have movie examples.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I'm not going to spoiler tag comments on a book that is 80 years old.

I liked the idea behind it. I love dystopian stories, and to see one where the people living in that society are happy with their lives (if only because of the conditioning they were forced to undergo) was refreshing. Then you meet the protagonist, who you presume is going to be the one to buck the system and give us our conflict in the story. But no! He ends up going to a Native American reservation on a vacation, and meets a kid who is actually European, but raised in that lifestyle. It ends up being so incredibly racist, and unapologetically so.

Racism is justified in this case - those not born in the system are truly different on a developmental level except by chance. Those not raised in the system have utterly alien outlooks on things that are detrimental to said system.

I understand that the book was written in 1932. There are some instances of racism that I don't bat an eye at because of the time it was written. (For instance, the fact that he referred to black people as Negroes.) But this was just too much for me. They end up calling the kid (who really isn't a kid because he's probably 18 or so) The Savage. He portrays the people living on these reservations as backwards and twisted and evil. I would understand it if it was only for characterization purposes, but it goes beyond that for me at least.

The guy was a savage - having lived outside the control of the system, outside of society itself in general. He has no respect for the protocol, no understanding of the control mechanisms, and no regard for the perceived sanctity of the system itself. In every sense the guy is a savage.

Note that being a savage doesn't mean he's bad - the book is told from the perspective of one born inside the system and thus the estimation is correct. But in his savagery there was also something important the recognition of how gross a violation of the human condition the system represents.

That and the protagonist turns out to not be the protagonist at all. There is a rumor going on about him that something went wrong during his incubation which caused him to be short and odd. (There's no such thing as pregnancy anymore, only test tube babies.) So, he just plans to bring The Savage/John back to London to show off so that he can be hot shit. All his life, he has been rejecting the conditioning forced on him and the practices of the new society, and now he suddenly wants to fit in only to get back at his boss for scolding him? Really?

This is because the narrator of the tale is a part of the system and his rejection of it is as shallow as any metaphysical (especially of the dandy type) rebellion. He can speak of revolt but in the end he to is conditioned in spite of his best efforts to reject it. What he longs I'd say is acceptance, and since that is absent because of his physical condition (in part) you get a half-hearted rebellion. In short, the same behavior seen through the years in young beatniks, hippies, punks, and hipsters.

In the end, nothing changes. The protagonist and his best friend, who agrees with him but always fit in better due to his appearance and outward behaviors, are shipped off to some island where all the other people who have rejected conditioning go to. (Or at least, that's what was happening when I stopped reading it. I haven't been able to bring myself to read the last chapter.)

He's shipped to the Falklands if memory serves (it's been more than a decade since I read it). Moreover, that is generally a feature of the dystopian work - that in spite of heroic efforts by a determined few, there are some control mechanisms that simply cannot be undone. The same is true in 1984 or The Country of Last Things. The only ray of hope in Farenheit 451 comes as a result of a nuclear holocaust and that's assuming humanity (much less the people who have memorized books) survive.

The whole bit about the reservation and John are what get me the most. It is totally unnecessary to prove the point of the novel. It does provide a counterpoint to the dystopian society of the novel, but the reader's life is already the counterpoint.

It provides a counterpoint in the context of the story itself. It is necessary to demonstrate the existence of people outside the system.

Their society is so dramatically different from our - during 1932 and today. They are taught to be promiscuous, but giggle at the terms mother and father and blush at the thought of pregnancy.

You are taught to be promiscous by media of all sorts and there are plenty of words similar to mother and father that will get a giggle from a crowd ("penis", for example).

They are given drugs by the government to get high on when they are feeling down in order to keep everyone perfectly happy.

No parallel to the existence of a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry in the world or that 1 in 5 Americans takes a prescription psychoactive drug?

They are raised in facilities by age groups and classes and given conditioning during their sleep to teach them that they love their life as whatever group they are.

From the age of five to 18 in the US a child spends more than 20% of their life in school - an amount only bested by sleep. They are separated by age and are indoctrinated to a wide number of beliefs including (notably) that the American way of life (and all that implies) is correct along with an attempt at instilling a general unquestioning respect for authority.

Obviously, this is nothing like our life.

It's actually just a greater extreme of what life is now. That's the part that makes the book scary I'd say - the grim warning found in it's pages. The control mechanisms are insidious because nothing is a terribly far step from what we do now. Or back in the 30's.

I don't know whether the author was trying to show that neither the life of a person on a reservation (or at least, what he imagines their life to be) nor the life of this new society are good - that a middle ground must be achieved.

The question the work seems to ask (to me) is how do you value humanity against peace and order. The savages have their humanity and all the problems that brings. Those in the system have peace and order at the cost of their humanity. It doesn't really seem to me that the book makes an argument directly for either side but the narrator at least seems to favor the idea that humanity, with all it's flaws, is better than a system of perfect order.

Just think of John, who riots and raves and claws at the bars that restrain him with every fiber of his being. Humanity personified and placed in a perfect prison is unhappy. He rejects it. And when he finally relents, he dies. If you consider John as an avatar for the nebulous concept of humanity, I'd say you have a fairly strong condemnation of the systems of order.