Your Most Controversial Film Opinions?

You might be interested in my review where I looked at how the main ideas inform the actual structure of the film itself. I'm actually quite proud of my Last Year at Marienbad and Jeanne Dielman reviews. Both are pinnacle cinema to me, so very different in expressing different Ideas yet being able to express them through the medium of film. They're both conceptual films - the concepts drive the structure of their expression.

Cabaret should have won best picture over The Godfather. It's a superior piece of film making.

Too many classic,critically acclaimed movies have graphic, consequence-free sexual violence, committed by characters we're supposed to empathize with.

Just my two cents.

This is a bit silly. If we're asking what we "can" do, then we have a choice. We can "do it" or something else, or we can refrain from doing it. And this returns us to the problem of justification. If our question is not purely appetitive (e.g., I don't just "like" the taste of cigarettes, but I am also aware that they are carcinogenic and I recognize that I have a duty to be healthy for people who depend on me), then ethics comes back into the picture. Power does not get us off the hook from ethics, but immediately returns us to ethical problems.

The eerie simplicity of The Happening (2008) makes it a superior one in the suicide-horror genre.

what would be the worst example, or one of the worst?

I was re-watching Three Days Of The Condor and thinking, "Am I supposed to like Robert Redford after he threatens Faye Dunaway with a gun, ties her to a toilet, and then ultimately ends up having sex with her?"

Off the top of my head...


Once Upon a Time in America
Gone with the Wind
King and I
High Plains Drifter
Dr. No (to some extent)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (again, to some extent)



This isn't even touching on the classic virile heroes domesticating shrewish women through threats of violence, and kidnapping. There's so many 'women falling in love with their kidnappers' it's a trope.

The worst example is Once Upon a Time in America.

Yeah, I don't think I disagree with what you're saying.
Just I guess illustrates the point with some examples.
Portrayal of women was very different for sure. I think Anatomy of Murder is a great film, but its treatment of the alleged rape victim - focusing on her 'behaviour' etc - is incongruous with today's society and quite uncomfortable.
I suppose until now it's been thought that it can be recognised that this was a different era with a different perspective on various matters.

No one has ever portrayed a 'false personality' in a movie better than Christian Bale in American Psycho. I recently watched it again, and I'm blown away by Bale's ability to convey to the audience that despite talking so much, his character isn't actually saying anything at all.


The movie has its flaws, but his performance isn't one of them.

Despite its inherent racism, I think Gone With the Wind is a great movie.

Mike Leigh's TV movies are better than his movie movies.

I think "Nuts in May" is one of his best.

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I would agree with this.

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The whole thing about Picard keeping people at more of an arm's length is that he has a clear distinction between the professional and the personal. Picard would absolutely loath a Gen Z starship full of late teens and early 20-somethings today. In the whole Picard vs Kirk debate, I'm 100-percent on board with Picard, but I'm an 80's/90's kid, so I cut my teeth on The Next Generation.

Also Picard is a student of history, so he patterns himself off of leaders of the past, Shakespeare characters, and Horatio Nelson. He's more cerebral, philosophical, and a diplomat first until he's pushed too far and then he's absolutely brutal. The thing is, while Kirk's character, at least in the series, is more fun, Picard is a fully developed and interesting character, and also reflected some of the politics of the time too of the late 80s and early 90s as the show started to move away from the more progressive revolutionary left leaning ideology of the Original Series.

I can't think of the specific episodes names, but a few stand out to mind...

Measure of a Man - where data is on trial
The one that's an allegory for witch hunts and terrorism with Jean Simmons as guest star
and the episode where Picard refuses to order Worf to betray his values and ethics and donate blood to a Cardassian to save his life and potentially avert war... Oh and Chain of Command Part II ... that was all great stuff that really elevated TNG to the next level and beyond the Original Series.

Sure, but this is who he was as a captain. That's the character. And it is played as a distinct trait (if not flaw). Very early in the show Picard has a bit of a freakout when he finds a kid on the bridge and is embarrassed when he learns that it is the child of his late friend and ship's doctor. He turns to a subordinate and asks for help (as a buffer) in dealing such matters. I think we're supposed to see this as a sort of rock in his shoe. In the final episode, when he finally joins the crew for a card game and says "I should have done this years ago," he finally finds more balance (gets the rock out of his shoe). He didn't need to as walled-off as he was for as long as he was. His crew established that they were competent and trustworthy and they were inviting him in for years. In the final episode, he accepts that invitation. There's a loneliness in Picard and a loneliness in command. We see the same thing in Kirk, usually with lines directed to Spock and McCoy in private. Kirk was also a bit lonely and command weighed on him as well, but he made use of trusted friends who were high ranking officers to keep his balance.
So would Kirk. Kirk had a breezy smile for everyone, but if you were derelict in your duty, he would get official and hard as nails in a heartbeat.

The most annoying scene in STD was when Pike temporarily took over the ship and the youngsters were having a bit or a preliminary temper-tantrum and he had to gently handle them like a substitute teacher in a 2nd grade class. "Look, I know I am not your regular teacher and I know you really didn't like your last teacher, but we need to make some macaroni art projects, and I hope to earn your trust that you can rely on me and have fun in expressing yourselves."
I side with Kirk, but without Patrick Steward in the role as Picard, I am not sure that TNG really makes it as a show. Stewart nailed it. The rest of the cast was of middling quality (and that's putting it nicely), with the exception of Data.
He is supposed to be the next step in human evolution. Kirk was humanity struggling not to destroy, working to find empathy over fear and build with trust and hope. Kirk is about getting it up. Picard is about keeping it up. Picard's world is where the victory has been achieved (humanity has grown up, and they will prove it through literal trials that start with the pilot episode).

We have a very hard time imagining what a more "evolved" human would actually be, so we tend to think that such a person must vaguely be more cerebral and patient rather than emotive. Spock represented the Enlightenment ideal of Reason (with a capital "R"). Humans might aspire to be something more like Vulcans is the message of TOS (Spock got most of the fan mail). That stated, TOS cautioned that we would not want to give up to much in the exchange for that evolution (we would not want to lose our heart, our intuition, our emotional connections, our spontaneity). Spock learns from his human companions as much as he challenges them with the standard of pure logic.

It's no surprise then that our more perfected man (i.e., Picard) has a tendency to be a bit beige, reserved, and only allowed to let the lion out of the cage when he has massive provocation. Stewart makes it work, however, because he is Shakespearean actor and can elevate stuffiness into dignity. The English perfected the image of dignified public stuffiness (stiff upper lip, stay calm and carry on) and Stewart was an Englishman with the chops to make his lines sound Shakespearean (as that was his training). It worked. I think that the most important thing Steward provided the show was a solid center. Not the most excited or exciting character, a but a noble center which had a reality other aspects of the show lacked.

I don't think that's fair. Shatner brings quite a bit to his role. He his charismatic, sensual, privately uncertain, publicly confident, sensitive, but willing to risk everything in a critical moment. There is a lot happening with the character. That's not to say that he's "better." Kirk is written as a leading man of his time (e.g., swaggering, implausibly alluring to the opposite sex, fisticuffy), but Shatner humanizes the man. Is Stewart a better actor? Yes. Stewart can effectively do one man shows on the stage. Is Picard a better captain? I don't know. They both have character shields and they reflect the politics of their time.

I like Kirk better than Picard, but I will say this. I can see TOS more easily succeeding with another actor in the role of Kirk than TNG succeeding with another actor in the role of Picard--but this is likely a function of the relative softness of actors who surrounded Stewart. If yet another mid-tier soap-opera-type actor were cast as the captain (i.e., the pool they were apparently drawing from to collect the rest of the cast members), I think TNG would have been cringe AF and left an impression as more of a Battlestar Galactica or Buck Rogers type series.

People who complain about the length of The Brutalist aren't true lovers of cinema.

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HEI guys.

Meantime hits hard.

Controversial opinion: you can be a true lover of cinema and still acknowledge when overlength hurts a film.