For me the first thing that comes to mind is Tales from Earthsea. I don’t think it’s excellent or anything and has plenty of problems but people act like it killed their dog. While it has its problems that have been covered extensively, I think it has a beautiful atmosphere and art.
IMO it would have been better received if it wasn’t advertised as an Earthsea adaptation and was just its own thing.
To be fair, sometimes we get lucky enough to get stuff made by Autistic artists for us Autistic people and it doesn’t do well in the general audience, but we absolutely love it. Our tastes in some things are just a little different. Absurdist comedy, or left-field mysteries… and the emotional writing or acting might feel completely off for normal people, but we won’t notice it. We like normal people stuff too, but I got a special place in my heart for stuff that was clearly made by another Autistic person.
I definitely struggle to enjoy a lot of mainstream movies / TV. Never really considered there’d be stuff made by autistic people, for autistic people, but it makes complete sense. Do you have any examples?
I don’t think anything officially calls itself as such. But all the zany parody comedies are good examples. Stuff like blazing saddles, hot shots, airplane… normal people like them ok, but they play especially well to us. Pretty much anything with leslie nielson as lead. Mr. Bean/rowan atkinson stuff tends to follow that same trend. Probably the most openly Autistic tv show would be rick and morty. Most people can’t get past how annoying the characters are, I didn’t even know they were annoying… lol.
Most older stuff like this came out before these people knew what Autism even was, or considered they might have/be it. But now it’s more likely to be an open secret, or occasionally even widely known in some cases. For music, saVant is an autistic artist that in my experience is not well liked by normal people, but is some of my favourite music.
As with most other stuff, personal taste is still more important than the line between Autistic/non-autistic, but there are strong correlations. Especially if the artist didn’t know they were Autistic. They might have inadvertantly done things in a way that feels more comfortable to us, and it didn’t bother their editor enough for them to recommend changing it. Or they may have been given more freedom and as a result just naturally gravitated towards stuff that is more important to us, and away from things that would be more important to a general audience.
Here’s the flipside of this phenomenon:
The Little Mermaid (2023)
Absolutely awful, atrocious, lazy cinema. It had a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. When they do the whole under the sea scene, none of the sounds align with anything happening on screen. The plot was garbo. They’ve got a whole song dedicated to the cruelty of eating fish as if fish never eat any fish, and then that’s still not as bad as the fucking “scuttlebutt” song.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills regarding The Fifth Element for this exact same phenomena. I watched it for the first time a few years back and it…just isn’t good? But people absolutely rave about it. I don’t know if I’m missing something or if people are just too blinded by nostalgia glasses. But the CGI doesn’t hold up, I found all the characters annoying, and the plot felt really basic and random. Someone’s probably mailing me anthrax now just for saying this.
That’s how I feel about 2001 a space Odyssey. I’m sure it was amazing for it’s time, but it’s so dry and boring. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to torture themselves watching it. I know tons of people love it, I just don’t get it.
Yup I watched this for the first time recently as well, it’s in the top 50 films ever made yet I don’t know a single person that actually thinks it’s a good film.
Yeah, I can see how watching The Fifth Element now compared to 1997 would be a pretty bad experience. At the time a lot of the concepts in the film were new and edgy to the wider audience, but now that we’ve got the internet we see way more obscene stuff on the daily.
It’s kind of like how the Rocky Horror Picture Show was a musical about being deathly afraid of satanist transvestites in 1973, but nowadays it plays off as more of a parody.
It was pretty uniformly popular in France, but elsewhere it did rather split opinion. Critics were not kind to it then either, but considering it was originally a teenage pet project of Besson’s but later got concept art from Mézières and Moebius explains a lot.
Counterpoint, nobody watched it for the CGI. The characters only seem annoying now because they were over the top then and moved the goal posts for that over the course of a generation of being repeatedly aired on broadcast television and cable. The plot seems basic now because so many sci-fi movies afterwards we’re influenced in some way by it. The 5th Element is a fun bombastic sci-fi romp and you’re taking it way to seriously to enjoy it the way everyone that does enjoy it will do. But, you do you. I’m not telling you you’re wrong. Sometimes entertainment endeavors fail us, sometimes we fail to enjoy entertainment on its terms because of our predispositions.
Wait, really? I thought it was pretty universally hated. I wonder if critics gave it good scores for fear of being lumped in with the idiots who were pissed with Ariel being played by a black woman.
The 94% is an “audience score”. The only way I can rationalize it is they used a bot network, but I’ve got no proof. Maybe just a bunch of parents who took their kids rated it highly? 10,000 of them.
Ever considered you weren’t the target demographic?
I bet tons of little kids loved the movie. It became like a frozen to them.
The number of times I’ve watched a highly rated movie only to find it’s not good. cough oppenheimer cough
Agree with you on that. Many of the “oscar bait” movies are not that great for just watching. For instance, “the Revenant” was not a great picture in my opinion.
What probably elevates them is watching for all the minutiae in the acting and really focussing on the actors instead of the greater picture. However, I think great moments have to be earned through screemwriting. A great example is “the Wire”. Lives caught short, loves truly lost, and a realisation you are just part of a greater machine. These are all earned moments of pure emotion that films often do not get because of their tight focus. I do not mean to encourage film makers to lengthen their movies, please for the love of god, your movies are lengthy enough.
Reviews after the 2010s or so get increasingly more untrustworthy, because studios realized that box office returns rely on these ratings now. So now paid reviews and bot ratings become much more important for a newly released movie.
Another prime example: the newer avatar has a higher rating than the first.
That’s why i like to depend on reddit for reviews because you can see different opinions of people and see how many agree with them , look at the down votes which bots and shills do tend to get etc. granted it may not be dependable soon the way bots are growing and i’m hoping lemmy will be big enough by then as its a lot more hard for bots to get in here and continue to exist than on reddit due to the filling an application and better moderation etc.
I really enjoyed Oppenheimer and I’d say it’s highly rated because it is good and lots of people enjoyed it, however nothing can please everyone and there’s nothing wrong with that. You not enjoying the popular thing doesn’t make it bad.
I liked the new Ghostbusters film, because it leans heavily on lore. I think it got review bombed for being woke
How in the fuck was THAT “woke”?! Are we talking about Afterlife or the Frozen thing?
I had two co-workers who spend most of the day talking about trans people and woke this and that argue about a movie being woke or not for like an hour.
If they are incapable of seeing the beauty that is right in front of them, then pity them.
Social media algorithms & enshittification really are destroying everything online, with their “engagement statistics” that predate upon hate & fear to drive continual profits. Trash talk sells, e.g. on X or Reddit, hence people use it, and then spread it to other platforms.