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1 month ago
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"Weird to think that sh*t was just played off as funny in the mid-2000s, and we all just went along with it."
Recently, Reddit user mnightshamalama2 asked in r/moviecritic, "What movies from the 2000s have already aged poorly?" Well, I'm thinking pretty much all of them, but here are the ones people truly cannot bring themselves to appreciate anymore.
1. "40 Days and 40 Nights. A woman wins a bet with his friends that her ex-boyfriend can't go through the titular amount of days without sex by raping him. She collects the winnings and struts off into the night. Meanwhile, the male rape victim ends up begging for his new girlfriend's forgiveness for 'cheating on her.'"
Miramax Films/Universal Pictures /United International Pictures
2. "The Blindside is probably the worst example of white saviorness in Hollywood. What a mess."
Warner Bros. Pictures
"My (white) principal in an urban school district thought it was a great idea to reward his students (who were 85% Black) by playing this movie. You can imagine what I was thinking as an employee at the time. Like, what message are we sending to our students? 'Hey, you too can get noticed by a rich white family and get out of the ghetto'???"
3. "In the vein of The Blind Side, Radio."
Sony Pictures Releasing
"God, I remember the trailer showing Ed Harris saying, 'All this time we thought we were teaching Radio, but he was teaching us!' Shudder. How he said that glurge without barfing, I'll never know."
"Yeah, most of those 'intellectual disability inspiration porn' movies are awful garbage. Radio, in particular, adds race to it. ... There *are* definitely good portrayals of intellectual disability by non-intellectually disabled people, i.e., Gilbert Grape and Forrest Gump, arguably. But they're rare to come by, and most of them are sooo over the top to the point of becoming complete caricatures."
4. "Frankly, I'm a little horrified that I ever found Anger Management even slightly amusing. Sexist, anti-LGBTQ, and treats sexual assault like a joke. That film is fucking disgusting."
Sony Pictures Releasing
5. "Super Size Me, when it was revealed that Spurlock had a raging alcohol addiction during filming."
Samuel Goldwyn / courtesy Everett Collection
"They have done many studies since and couldn't produce the same results. He also massively overate and stopped exercising to try to get a more significant result. Nearly all of his issues are better explained by alcohol use and withdrawal."
6. "You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Adam Sandler plays an Israeli counterterrorism agent who fakes his own death and moves to New York City to become a hairdresser. He saves a struggling salon by banging old women in the storage closet until experiencing erectile dysfunction due to falling in love with the salon's owner, a Palestinian woman."
Sony Pictures Releasing
7. "Freedom Writers. The only thing stopping these ghettoized students from academic excellence was a well-meaning white woman telling them to believe in themselves."
Paramount Pictures
"Now that I have been a high school teacher for ten years, it's so hard to watch. So much of it is sooooo cringe."
"She has the most well-behaved class of "bad kids" from the get-go. She has a horrible work-life balance that no one should strive to emulate. The fact that she gets to stay with the same kids throughout high school goes against her mission. What a terrible movie."
8. "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry — it is just tons of 'making fun of gay people' jokes."
Universal Pictures
9. "Captain Phillips, after it was revealed that he actually never followed any precautions and was actually warned about the pirates and brushed them off. Besides also being a total dickhead, he wasn't the one that left the boat and risked his life."
Sony Pictures Releasing
10. "Speaking of Tom Hanks, it was revealed that Catch Me If You Can was largely bullshit. Frank Abagnale Jr. basically made up his entire story when he wrote the book, and Hollywood bought that shit up for a movie deal. Frank was in prison for most of the time that the events of the movie supposedly took place."
DreamWorks Pictures
11. "Definitely Hop. Now you might think to yourself, 'How could an Easter movie about the Easter Bunny taking back Easter age poorly?' The bunny originally didn't want to be in charge of Easter, but the baby chick did want to be in charge of Easter. HOWEVER, the head bunny that was then in charge of Easter said he would NEVER put a baby chick in charge of Easter. The movie then goes on to say that the baby chicks are 'overrunning' the Easter holiday and it's the bunnies' job to 'take back' Easter from the baby chicks."
Rhythm & Hues/Universal Pictures / courtesy Everett Collection
"The end of the movie shows the bunnies back in charge of Easter, and the baby chicks are used as workhorses to do manual labor for the bunnies. The bunnies have British accents and the baby chicks have Latino accents. The implied British characters literally enslave the implied Latino characters, and that's the GOOD ending of the movie. It's still a mediocre Easter movie, but it might raise some eyebrows now."
12. "Shallow Hal."
20th Century Fox
"The thing that pisses me off about Shallow Hal is that with some tweaks, it could actually be a fun comedy about looking past looks, but instead, it goes out of its way to be the most juvenile, anti-trans film possible."
13. "Get Him to the Greek, unfortunately. Jonah Hill, P Diddy, and Russell Brand. All shitty for unique reasons. Also, Jonah Hill's character gets sexually assaulted in one scene, and it's played as a joke. Yikes."
Universal Pictures
14. "I used to teach on a Rez. One time, as a reward, I let the kids in my mentoring period pick out an approved movie from the library. They picked Windtalkers, which I had never seen. I was like, work. Nic Cage, Christian Slater, AND Adam Beech? Hell yes. That movie was straight white savior trash. The whole thing was about how hard it was for the white soldiers to maybe have to kill their windtalker interpreters if it looked like they might get caught. Such shit."
MGM Distribution Co.
15. "Avatar — we were wowed by the visual effects so much that the generic story with its white savior narrative didn't get the criticism it deserved."
20th Century Fox./Courtesy Everett Collection
"Avatar was SO CLOSE to being as brilliant a satire as it was an artistic achievement…but it went for the white savior narrative instead. If the script followed what happened IRL to colonized societies after the tree fell—the dislocation, loss, violence, and generational trauma — and given the Na'vi a character arc showing how they came to terms with that, it would have been a masterwork. But it couldn't even meet the very low standards of Dances With Wolves (where the tribes are shown to exercise their own agency at the end of the film)."
"The sequel makes it so much worse. In the first film, they are just a generic amalgam of native peoples, with aspects of cultures from all over the world, but you're telling me the Na'vi who live near/in the water just so happened to develop a culture almost exactly like that of Pacific Island nations? They developed the same face tattoos, use the same mannerisms, speak with the same accents, and have the same hair? They are just Māori from Wish but blue. It felt really off, like they were really using their entire culture as a prop. Was very weird to me."
16. "Waiting. I loved it in college. Now I don't think I can watch it again. I think a lot of the humor will just seem dull and cringey (maybe besides Luis Guzman), but especially the entire bit about Ryan Reynolds being a child predator and having to restrain himself from having sex with a girl under 18 until her birthday in a few weeks…pretty ew. Weird to think that shit was just played off as funny in the mid-2000s, and we all just went along with it."
Lions Gate Films
"Ryan Reynolds plays a sex offender who's an aging townie that's obsessed with fucking minors. They simply refer to it as being a 'pervert.'
They play a 'game' at the restaurant where the guys all show each other their balls in creative ways, and if you get tricked into looking, they get to kick you for being gay.
Most of the movies mentioned in this thread were bad when they were released, while Waiting was edgy, and we realized soon after that the uneasy feeling by most of its 'edgy' humor was actually because most of those themes and topics were pretty fucked up.
What's most fucked up is how ACCURATE a depiction it is of working in a corporate family restaurant. Right down to all the fucked up stuff I mentioned. This wasn't some writer expressing their inner fucked up thoughts and humor in a fictional story. No. ... The culture of working in those restaurants is extremely accurately depicted. I don't work in restaurants anymore, so I hope it's not like that anymore."
17. "What Women Want."
Paramount Pictures/Icon Entertainment International
"Isn't that the movie Mel Gibson drops a hairdryer in the bathtub, and instead of dying, he hears women's inner monologues? YIKES."
"I have never seen it, but let me guess—he starts out as a sexist womanizer, then the hairdryer thing happens, leading to a series of comedic moments, but somehow ends up turning him into the Perfect Romantic Partner Guy and winning back his ex."
"Not his ex, his new coworker. But you're spot on."
18. "Love Actually. ... Anyone defending this movie should be ashamed. The way they dressed Emma Thompson as a frumpy frump and then had her stay with her trash, cheating, Snapey husband is the only reason you need to throw this film in the garbage — but you can also choose one of the other 739 problematic things in this movie."
Universal Pictures
"Nearly every storyline is problematic, and I don't find anything in it to be 'feel good.' I can't even bring myself to hate watch it."
"Andrew Lincoln being a creeper, the 'fat girl,' the guy horning on the woman who doesn't speak English...so many issues."
19. "I don’t know how Crash was ever okay."
Lions Gate Films
"Corniest shit I've ever seen. It's like if a middle-schooler decided to make a movie about race relations and missed literally everything that makes it nuanced."
"It felt like an attempt to make a movie on a serious subject using the overused film features at the time of ensemble casts and spoof movies that would try to intertwine way too many plots. Like they tried to take the square peg of Love Actually and jam it through the round hole of racism. It didn’t work. I also can't think of a movie where I was more surprised when it ended. The credits just started rolling."
20. "I always get flack for saying this, but Van Wilder is basically unwatchable to me now. That scene where he jerks off his dog and fills donuts with its semen, then feeds them to Tara Reid's boyfriend's frat…what a fun prank, right? There's plenty more to say about the movie and the constant 'the woman is the prize' theme, but the dog cum scene alone just makes me never want to put it on again."
Artisan Entertainment
21. And finally..."The Fat Albert movie — for obvious reasons." (aka, Bill Cosby.)
20th Century Fox
What 2000s movie do you think aged poorly? Let us know in the comments!
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
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