Critically Acclaimed Movies That You Do Not Really Need to Watch

Dogtooth, posted by IAN SIMMONS

Sometimes critically acclaimed movies are just terrible movies, movies with terrible messages, or movies with no clear reasons to exist. Here are some examples.

1)   Funny Games, directed by Michael Haneke.

This movie is depressing all the way until the end, where it eventually makes you hate both the director and the actors. The antagonists are omnipotent and completely evil. They speak to you, the viewer, directly through the camera, and you end up wishing you could kill them all yourself. To summarize, the movie explores how awful things can get when people are taken hostage, and then it makes it even worse. It violates your sense of security in the world and makes you wish you hadn’t spent your last paycheck on food and rent, because obviously what you need are handguns hidden in every room of the house.

2)   Antichrist, directed by Lars von Trier.

Wildly “artistic,” this movie is nothing more but a long series of slow motion, pretentious images that may or may not be related to anything in the movie, or even anything in general. The sex is grossly not sexy, especially in slow motion. Everything is dark, scary, sad and sometimes even boring. You leave having learned nothing except that Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg make an unsightly couple, and that when French actresses have British accents it makes everything more confusing than it needs to be.

3)   Melancholia, also by Lars von Trier (I see a trend here…).

Another wildly meaningless movie full of fantastical imagery, beautiful scenery and many upset characters whose pasts are shady and whose purpose in the movie is largely unknowable. There is entirely too much Wagner in the soundtrack, and you do not walk away feeling like the experience was worth the 136 minutes you just wasted. Without any of the special effects this is just a movie about a sad bride and a really stupid groom.

4)   Dogtooth, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

This movie hovers somewhere between insane and hilarious. Nothing about the plot makes any sense. There are children who are taught the wrong names for things, a pseudo girlfriend, some light, gratuitous incest and a lot of blood. It is all very enigmatic and strange, but it is also completely fascinating, in a terrible way. If you do have to watch this movie, you will destroy large numbers of neurons trying to uncover any meaning in the dialogue, but you will unexplainably sit through the whole thing anyway, because this particular kind nonsense is seriously addictive.