Great masterpieces... that suck!

[SturmDolch]

I actually liked a lot of things mentioned in this thread. Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye, 1984... Of course, I didn't have to read them in school so maybe that shaped my opinion on them.

I got sick of Shakespeare in school, too, but he is an influential playwright. I disagree with the extent to which we studied him (or, in fact any work), but one of his plays should be looked at during your career as a student.

A few years ago, I would have said Reservoir Dogs, but I went back and watched it again. It was actually very good.

I'm not sure what to say. Things that are considered popular, or masterpieces are considered such for a reason. Even if I might not like them, they must have something to be appealing.

 

[jaketaz]

James Joyce wasn't a genius, he was just trolling everybody.

Ayn Rand was an autistic ***** who should've had her brains knocked out at birth.

BioShock is overrated, pretentious garbage that abuses lens flare and blur more than every shitty artist on deviantART put together.

Pink Floyd only had three good albums.

H.P. Lovecraft just needed to stop doing so many drugs writing, period.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was impressive when I was in third grade--but that was a very long time ago. It takes a lot more than purple prose and elf cities to impress me now.

I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's dick for Anne Frank or her diary. Yeah, the Holocaust happened, thirteen million people died just because Hitler was prejudiced against them, I get it, can I put this loathsome piece of trash down now? Just because she died in a concentration camp doesn't mean Anne Frank was any less vapid, annoying, or worthless than the millions of teenage girls keeping diaries today.

Oh, and fuck Led Zeppelin, too. Robert Plant cannot fucking sing, period.

Deus ex
That game simply sucks.
No matter how good story or choices you make,if the gameplay sucks the game too sucks.

This.

One eyed bastard mother of god, THIS. I agree a 100% with this, although I would like to add that The Beatles are overrated, and while I won't say they suck, Pink Floyd have received a bit mor praise than I feel they deserve.

Well lots of famous things receive more praise than they deserve, sure. But you gotta watch out when you go calling millions of people "vapid, annoying, or worthless" - so you really think that millions of girls with diaries are worthless? Was your mother worthless when she kept a diary? Your other female relatives? Of course not. Yeah people go through retarded phases, but there are plenty of people out there that are more important than either of us that would look at your comment and say "wow, what a vapid, annoying, malcontent impotently raging on an inconsequential internet forum".

So who would you give as an example of someone that CAN sing? Because according to the accepted definition, that is, a person that can project their voice in a series of pitches in order to convey musical language to the listener, he CAN sing. So... like... I guess I just don't understand what you're getting at. I suppose you think he's not as good as Mariah Carey or something? I mean, you might not like their music, but both of them have perfect pitch, huge vocal ranges, and pretty serious projecting power. I dunno. If you're gonna make these wild statements you're gonna get called out to explain yourself sometimes.

 

[Jonluw]

How does the games cannot be art sentence apply to this, at all? If you think that, alright, thats fine.

Simple. Gamers said that Ebert's opinion was null and void because he was unfamiliar with the medium, and therefore resorted to talking out of his arse.

Yes, you're perfectly within your rights to defend an art form that you love. I'm getting an increasingly evident sense of elitism here.

And how is that a bad thing? Élitism means that the best count more than the cattle. That's not an ideology, that's a fact.

Yes, elitism is good is your opinion; and you're entitled to it. However, smart people are going to give you shit for it.

Edit: "Elitism: Because some people are just better than others Deutschland über alles and all that"
/humor

 

[Daedalus1942]

There are plenty of works that are considered to be "masterpieces" or "classics", be they: Book, Film, Painting, Album, Game... whatever.

So what are some of these so called "masterpieces" that you personally don't care much for.
And when I ask this, I'm not looking for a recent, popular thing like Avatar or Harry Potter, I'm looking for older things, like Citizen Kane or Catcher in the Rye

Which brings me to my point, I hated Catcher in they Rye. I found Holden to be too whiny and annoying.
I also loathed Henry David Thoreau's Walden, largely for the same reasons. It's basically Thoreau's journal that he kept while being a hermit, and all he ever does is whine too.
Incidently, I had to read both of these in High School, so perhaps the bitterness I felt while analyzing them has influenced my opinions, but I also had to read The Grapes of Wrath and I heartily enjoyed that.

What pisses me off is they're finally remaking Dune.
Now I love Dune and hope sincerely that it's good. What worries me is when it comes out people will be like "It's okay, but the plot completely ripped off Avatar"...
I swear if I hear anyone say those words, they will die by my own two hands
Also, I have to say my pick would be the 1973 film Soylent Green.
Most of the plot has nothing to do with the actual food and it just follows Ty Thorn (Charlton Heston's character) through his everyday life, then there's a revelation about the food people are eating and then the film literally ends. Nothing is resolved, it is beyond retarded and I'll never understand why it became a "classic".
A remake could be good, I don't know. There's a good story somewhere in it but frankly I don't see it.
-Tabs<3-

 

[Yellowbeard]

*Vomiting noise*
Seriously, Nightwish is just below My Chemical Romance and Justin Bieber in my book. I'll prefer Pink Floyd, AC-DC, Metalica, Black Sabbath, In Flames (etc) before that. They should at least try to make each song sound different even if they are the f'ing same. It's a lazy Nickelback rip-off (and Nickelback isn't a good band to begging with.)

But taste in ... pretty much anything isn't debatable, right?

I second your vomiting noise.

 

[skitzo van]

Romeo and Juliet. I'm just mostly pissed people regard it as a "supposed to read story" when it originated as a play. Its also quite sad half of the text had to be translated to make sense in this time.

Actually, my aunt works as a literature professor in a high school and she says Romeo and Juliet is widely regarded as the most boring book written by Shakespeare. (Both by students and teachers alike)

I didn't know it was possible to make something so widely regarded as boring from a story over two waring families. There has to be some sort of award for this.

 

[p3t3r]

Snip

Whatever you say, but as someone who has played it with the camera, using it would make a lot of your problems nonexistent. Playing without it would be something like playing Half-Life 2 with just the pistol. Sure the pistol works fine, but going off of it alone would cause some problems that shouldn't be there.

The difference there is that the only thing limiting my abilities is myself and I can stop at any time. Can't exactly do that with Bioshock.

You can if you start using the camera...

The camera can throw itself into a functional trash compacter where it belongs. In most games where I choose to limit myself for extra challenge I can easily decide that it's too hard and immediately go full power without any effort. Bioshock, no, I have to use the godamn camera to stand a chance which is incredibly difficult to use properly, since it immediately results in death when every enemy and their dog attacks when it's used. Why have a character jump through a bunch of arbitrry hoops in order to stand a chance later, that's horrible game design. It'd be like if in an RPG I had to let an enemy drain at least half my health before I attack or else I won't gain any experience from it.

i beat bioshock on normal without using the camera and was swimming in ammo and money by the end of the game. my only problem with bioshock is that i got easier as the game went on because you got so much ammo and money

 

[jboking]

I'm not a fan of TF2 due to all the hard countering, at least until the new weapons came out, which I'm still bitter about since I'm not allowed to use them without getting incredibly lucky or buying them which is a bigger rip off the MW2 map packs.

No idea what you mean by hard countering. However, in TF2 if you earn achievements for a specific class, you get new weapons for that class. Pretty simple.

bioshock, I know it has great atmosphere, but how does that excuse absolutely horrid and broken gameplay? I played through that game twice to make sure I just wasn't missing something, but just never saw it. I'm not a fan of TF2 due to all the hard countering, at least until the new weapons came out, which I'm still bitter about since I'm not allowed to use them without getting incredibly lucky or buying them which is a bigger rip off the MW2 map packs.

Out of curiosity, how was the gameplay broken for you? I also thought Bioshock had a few issues, but gameplay was never one of them for me.

1. Plasmids were all useless, except of course where they were abitralily made essential. They do virtually no damage, do not distract enemies (you'd think being on fire would cause someone to stop shooting at their enemies but no), yet require huge sums of eve to use.

2. Hit detection is awful. How many crossbow bolts can phase through an enemy's head failing to do any damage? answer, a lot.

3. Enemies have more health than an M1 tank, and that's not the big daddies I'm talking about, which mixes very poorly with my next issue.

4. I rarely had any ammo, and when I did it didn't last due to the reason above. I find more ammo in silent hill games. This wouldn't be so bad though if I could just get the plasmid that allows you to pull limitless amounts of ammo from your ass that magically disintigrates upon the users death that all the enemies get. You ever have to beat an elite bouncer to death? I did.

5. hacking is both difficult and often impossible and useless. Wow, ammo's now two dollars cheaper. That was worth the three health packs I went through due to being electricuted from getting unwinable boards. I wish my electric plasmid could do that much damage. Why didn't I hack this thing to give me stuff for free anyway?

6. And the level design, while attractive, wasn't exactly clear, causing me to get turned around often. And this is coming from a guy who had little trouble with the water temple in OoT.

Were we playing the same game? Hacking is the easiest thing in the game to do. I mostly hacked security cameras and turrets, but still. Also, electrocuting enemies standing in puddles of water was an easy way to get rid of people. Of course you had to upgrade your plasmids in order for them to be super strong. I never had major issues with the guns or hit detection and the splicers are stupidly easy to dispatch.

I think your problem was not taking the time to learn how to effectively use plasmids and instead tried to play it like a straight typical FPS. It's no wonder you hated it.

OP: I hated Catcher in the rye, Cats, and Romeo & Juliet.

 

[Lieju]

Mona Lisa, the most over-hyped painting in existence.
I've seen it, it's okay, but not anything special.

 

[DazBurger]

LOTR part 1... I liked the Hobbit.. But.. Erhm... No...

 

[jaketaz]

SNIP

I believe the band name is Nightwish, and the song name is Amaranth. Please fix it, it makes your argument look very hypocritical - since you've clearly never listened to them before - so can't say they based their music on the DSotM album.

Who cares what their name is? I was talking about how their music goes, not what their name is, and I got that from listening to the song, not reading the title of it. And I clearly HAVE listened to them before, because I described technically what happened in the music, and the song is posted right there on the thread. What about this makes you assume I've never listened to them? And I absolutely did not "say they based their music on the DSotM album" - I guaranteed that they were influenced by it. Not because they copied it note-for-note because OBVIOUSLY that's not true, but because, like every other musician that hasn't been living under a rock for their entire adult lives, at some point they heard the music and were influenced in some way by it. The fact that there's keyboard ALONE proves that - hardly any popular rock music before Pink Floyd featured keyboards, and if they use any advanced recording techniques at all then they're also likely influenced. Pink Floyd pioneered many new recording techniques that I don't care enough to go into, just look it up on stupid Wikipedia if you don't believe me.

Seriously, who cares if Amaranth is the song name or the band name, I wasn't even talking about that. And since you can't think of any good counter-arguments you have to pick on a stupid error like that.

 

[Ponce Master-General]

2001: A Space Odyssey. Seriously, what the fuck is this shit (the following might contain quotes from Confused Matthew)?!? That "movie" isn't even a movie, it's an anti-movie, because apart from the Hal segment, the film is without any story, plot or characters, which are the most basic and crucial elements to every film. I don't give a flying shit if it's considered to be one of the most thought provoking films ever, because every single explanation about this film is just pulling shit out its ass.

But that's just one of the reasons this movie can suck my ass, but I don't feel like listing more.

 

[Top35]

Which brings me to my point, I hated Catcher in they Rye. I found Holden to be too whiny and annoying.

I agree with this 100%. I had to read this "classic" when I was in high school and found it be an overly long ***** session.

 

[4173]

Ethan Frome.

I suppose there may be something redeeming in a few of the themes (social proscription on divorce/adultery, end result of the toboggan ride), but I think the actual writing was terrible.

 

[SextusMaximus]

SNIP

I believe the band name is Nightwish, and the song name is Amaranth. Please fix it, it makes your argument look very hypocritical - since you've clearly never listened to them before - so can't say they based their music on the DSotM album.

Who cares what their name is? I was talking about how their music goes, not what their name is, and I got that from listening to the song, not reading the title of it. And I clearly HAVE listened to them before, because I described technically what happened in the music, and the song is posted right there on the thread. What about this makes you assume I've never listened to them? And I absolutely did not "say they based their music on the DSotM album" - I guaranteed that they were influenced by it. Not because they copied it note-for-note because OBVIOUSLY that's not true, but because, like every other musician that hasn't been living under a rock for their entire adult lives, at some point they heard the music and were influenced in some way by it. The fact that there's keyboard ALONE proves that - hardly any popular rock music before Pink Floyd featured keyboards, and if they use any advanced recording techniques at all then they're also likely influenced. Pink Floyd pioneered many new recording techniques that I don't care enough to go into, just look it up on stupid Wikipedia if you don't believe me.

Seriously, who cares if Amaranth is the song name or the band name, I wasn't even talking about that. And since you can't think of any good counter-arguments you have to pick on a stupid error like that.

I agreed with the point you were making; I just thought that the name mistake made you look like a total hypocrite. Stop getting your pants in a twist and calm yourself... Feel free to apologise to me at any point as well

EDIT: Oh, and I meant influenced - I was writing in a rush

 

[Wildcard5]

I know it has been stated several times before but "Romeo and Juliet". The main characters know eachother for what? About 3 days, and Shakesphere expects us to believe they end up dying for eachother out of true love. Yeah right... I did truely like the character Mercutio though as he was neither a Capulet nor Montague making him somewhat neutral in the pointless feud. He is also one of the characters who I believe sees events as they are; somewhat silly and only temporary.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" was great though. I enjoyed the scene wherein the acting troupe performs "Pyramus and Thisbe" as I always felt it to be spoofing the very idea of a star crossed lovers drama situation.