re: Critically Acclaimed Movies That You Hate

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To anyone who said Forest Gump or The Godfather I or II, what the hell?

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I love Godfather I - it might be my favorite movie ever... but I dislike both Gump and Godfather II

Gump I dislike because the writer rewards Gump for blindly stumbling through history while punishing the more human and more intelligent people around him with disease, disability, and death. At its essence the lesson it teaches is success in life is about luck (and intelligence leads to suffering)

Godfather II I dislike for several reasons.
1) it was made in a way that abandoned its intellectual honesty. In response to the criticism associated with the first Godfather they turned Michael into a cartoonish character who was not a more realistic blend of good and evil... he was evil and was known to be evil by those around him (see the scene where Diane Keaton tells Michael she would rather abort his baby than bring it into the world). The first movie didn't feel the need to pander to critics by making the central characters into that kind of mess. In large part the central characters were more interesting and less distant to the viewer because they were rounded human beings that you could more easily understand and less easily emotionally distance yourself from.
2) It is just not a cohesive movie. It is only truly tied together by the viewer's knowledge of the first film and implied interest in both a simultaneous back-story and follow-up on the first movie
3) the cinematography in the "modern" Michael story deteriorated to the point of the absurd. The den of the Godfather and the death scene on the boat were pretty near invisible in the midst of darkness. Why did I hate that in particular so much? Because I loved the rich and vibrant mixture of color and light with shadow in the first movie and purely in an effort to show artistic creativity they went in a different direction in the second movie (and I viewed the overbearing use of darkness=evil imagery as a continuation of the first problem I wrote about above)