It takes a brainy sounding premise, squishes any subtlety and complexity out of it, and hacks at the story until it hits the right emotional beats at the right moments.
I love smartdumb movies.Ī dumbsmart movie - this, The King’s Speech, Shakespeare In Love - does the opposite. The movies might be idiotic, but it’s grandmaster-level idiocy. A smartdumb movie - say, Dumb and Dumber - harnesses the creator’s skill, intelligence, wit and creativity to make something gloriously infantile and crass. Actually I find ‘middlebrow’ a bit of a snooty term, so I propose a word that better captures what I hate about them: dumbsmart. On a macro level, I’m starting to really hate middlebrow movies.
So although I am going to take a royal dump on the movie, probably the more important bit for my mental health is figuring out why it upsets me so badly. Because it’s not an awful film - I’ve seen way worse and I mostly found them boring or occasionally entertaining. But as more and more reasons kept popping into my head, it occurred to me I should probably think some more about exactly why I have so much bad feeling towards this movie. I was just going to do a brain-dump about all the reasons The Imitation Game is bad movie. Chunky Comic Reader 7 years ago Why did The Imitation Game bug me so much?