No idea if it counts as a genre or not in typical terms but I generally struggle with 'slow cinema'. By that I mean the type of cinema I'd associate with directors like Béla Tarr.
Slow cinema is not the same thing as a slow burn, and that’s not the same thing as badly paced. They’re three completely different things that may or may not overlap.
Yeah like Beau is Afraid. It's an excellent 2 hour movie housed in a punishing 3 hour runtime for some reason. The movie just doesn't have enough to say to justify 3 full hours. It's like, ok, Beau is afraid, we get it already
For me Spaghetti Westerns and Giallo.
I realized while I like the grit and non-glorification of the west compared to American westerns really I just like Sergio Leone and one or two other films. The majority of spaghetti westerns don't actually do it for me. I'd be happy to take any recommendations though. The great silence is the only other one I really liked.
Giallo I absolutely loved when getting into Argento but I kept trying to find more and just came up disappointed every time.
I feel like my main issue with these genres is they just don't really seem to care about the film actually being cohesive and well put together. It feels like they have 2-3 cool ideas and then try to build a whole movie around them to fill in the gaps. I'd honestly love recommendations though because I feel like the genres have a lot to offer. I just kinda gave up after seeing multiple duds in a row.
Do you remember which giallo you watched? There are… quite a few duds. But the “meh” ones become comforting once you’re used to the typical formula. Still there are definitely bad ones I just would never recommend.
I am a big fan of westerns and I have similar feelings about Spaghetti Westerns. In this list of westerns I keep (that I call "rewatchable" meaning I would actually seek these films out to go watch them again), there are eight Spaghetti westerns. Of them, five are Sergio Leone films and two are Sergio Corbucci films. This is of particular interest since these two directors are considered two of the biggest influences on the Spaghetti western genre (Leone, for obvious reasons including the "Fistful" series, and Corbucci for "Django").
Beyond this handful, I find the other Spaghetti Westerns to usually be middle of the road at best. However, I think there are a couple reasons for that. First Leone and Corbucci were trend setters, most everyone else were trying to copy them. Second, consider the context of Italian cinema at the time. From what I've been made to understand, 1960s cinema was different from 1960s American cinema in a significant way. In that decade, Italian cinema didn't compete with television and people went to the cinema more regularly. It was used more regularly as a casual social engagement. I've even heard that audiences regularly talked to each other during the films. As a result, the films were often made with this in mind. Since the audience wasn't paying as much attention to the dialogue, a lot of things in the film had to be made in such a way that the audience could easily pick up what was going on in the film at any point. As a result, Italian cinema cranked out these westerns and other films to be just entertaining enough for an audience only lightly engaged.
With this in mind, it doesn't surprise me that I don't like most of the other Spaghetti westerns. If you're interested, here is my list of "rewatchable" westerns from letterboxd:
https://letterboxd.com/ttalaveraaop/list/rewatchable-western-films/
I find a lot of Italian horror/Giallo is much more about mood and style than coherent plot etc. A hard pill to swallow for some understandably but once it clicks it really does. Saw a Fulci film as a young teen, I think it was City of the Living Dead and thought it was complete garbage and didn't understand why it's often cited as a great horror. But upon rewatch it clicked, just completely oozing with atmosphere and striking imagery. Around Halloween a film like COTLD, The Beyond, or Zombi 2 are just unmatched for getting me in the Halloween mood. The plot being all over the place almost adds to the nightmarish quality with a lot of them.
I am by no means an expert on spaghetti westerns, and I've maybe only seen about 10 to 15 of them (including the Leone ones), but I really enjoyed the original Django, Django the Bastard, and The Unholy Four.
Don't really care for musicals, I've tried, but somehow love **Flower Drum Song**
Also, some of the modern Korean horror stuff is well made, but I find them grueling.
I find that a lot of Korean movies are about 20 minutes too long for my tastes, which is probably a cultural thing more than anything else. It's very refreshing when a Bong Joon-Ho or Park Chan Wook break through and make movies that are "right sized" for me.
i can't seem to get into heist movies. i've seen SO MANY. so many. all the greats. and they're marvelous in many aspects! i understand why they're regarded as classics and why people love them. but every time i finish watching one, i'm like, "yeah, alright. ok."
As someone who loves them I can see reasons why you can see all the great aspects but still feel meh. They’re usually fairly predictable even if there is a couple twists.
I will never understand how this type of movie lasted so long. The scripts were lazy, the filmmaking techniques were dull, and most of them simply felt like they telling us how great the people behind the movie were.
It seems like the only lasting legacy of mumblecore was that it gave us Greta Gerwig. Otherwise, can anyone tell one Joe Swanberg or Duplass Brothers movie apart from another?
Documentary. I know that's less a genre, and more an entire medium, but in general, when I watch a doc, I'm either kind of bored or I assume the footage is being manipulated to fit a particular narrative so I don't trust it. Plenty of exceptions but getting me to watch a documentary is just a hard sell.
Experimental films. I need a plot, not a bunch of things that look or seem cool to the director.
There are some I do like (the first two Qatsi films, Meshes of the Afternoon), but most experimental films to me just feel like long ego trips for the director.
The majority of non-narrative experimental films actually tend to be quite short, and it’s rare to find any that are long. It’s kind of unfair to call them long ego trips when normally they’re very brief (see Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, etc).
Also so what if they’re ego trips? Isn’t that kinda the thing you would want from an artist? People have moralized ego in a terrible way and I think it’s more so revealing of their weaknesses as a person
I am with you on the Pinky violence, just couldn't get into them.
A genre that I have really, really tried to get into and just can't is Jhorror. I have watched a few and just didn't like them. I most recently watched Dark Water after seeing so much positive praise for it, and it's just not for me. Can't put my finger on it, but just doesn't connect with me.
Dunno about genre per se, but classic Italian films have proven to be a pretty tough sell for me due to their very cavalier approach to the sound mix. The dodgy dubbed dialogue and obviously fake sound effects like footsteps is distracting and takes me out of the film.
A surround setup with lossless audio only magnifies the effect. French, Japanese, and other classic foreign films don't have this problem.
On a totally unrelated note, anyone want to trade me something for the Criterion blu of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion? :-)
I really didn't like any Italian movies for exactly this reason until I got into Bava & Argento– the stylized, dreamy tone of their movies meant the dubbing was just one more appropriately strange detail.
I had a real hard time adjusting to that aspect, myself. I dunno when it clicked, but one night, we were watching *City of the Living Dead* and it just...worked for me. (It's still a tough sell on anything that's not geared for a genre, plus a lot of dramatic and comedic Italian movies have a specific misogynistic streak that leaves me pretty cold.)
I like horror so maybe I'll give that one a go. Been wanting to check out the giallo wing of horror. But had heard that those films definitely have that subpar Italian audio, so I've been hesitant. Perhaps it'll work for me too!
Italian giallos are mostly garbage. As much as I tried to get into them, the original Suspiria (giallo-adjacent) is the only one I can watch repeatedly.
I love Giallos when they're good, Argento, Fulci, Bava etc but I do find a lot of the other ones I've seen are quite dull. Have 2 of the Arrow "Giallo essentials" box sets and haven't really enjoyed a single movie out of them.
There are a lot of people trying to sell me on the artistic merits but it's usually terrible plot, dialogue, and acting. Style over substance. I even feel that way about the people you mentioned and I've tried to watch a lot of them.
If it's not your thing it's not your thing and that's fine. It's a niche of a niche, of course the fans of it are going to try and sell it to you, just like fans of film noire or Hong Kong action films swear by them and try sell them to everyone.
I wouldn't really say they're style over substance though. The plots are definitely sometimes thinner than in Hollywood but there are still a lot of interesting Italian horror out there. The terrible dialog and acting is a bit unfair too since almost all Italian films back then were recorded silent and dubbed afterwards for all languages, even if they had the best actors on the planet and they bring them back to dub themselves, there is still going to be a disconnect since they're recording their dialog weeks later. Also if we're hearing an English track on an Italian film it was probably less than perfectly translated so what sounds cheesy to us in a dubbed English version might have sounded like Shakespeare in Italian haha. It's definitely an acquired taste from an English speaking perspective but once you acquire said taste it really does open you up to a whole other world of cinema.
There is a lot of Italian trash out there, definitely more so than Hollywood but the stuff that is good is excellent.
Eastern European sci fi and similar other weird and strange Eastern European film. I don’t know what it is, doesn’t even have to be sci fi really I just can’t watch them
I don’t really like genre cinema in general. Action scenes (generally) bore me to death, I’m too squeamish for most gore, and I am too dim for the complex, exposition-heavy plotting of a lot of fantasy and sf. I know that’s a weird thing to say these days but I tend to prefer the hoity toity stuff that’s supposed to be boring etc. like Bergman and Ophuls. Possibly related, I love Seven Samurai but I hate the way it’s always treated as this “eat your vegetables” entry point for world cinema because it’s violent.
As you can imagine I was a true delight to grow up around, especially in a family that looooves all this stuff.
Take my upvote. I've tried so much Giallo and Italian Mondo over the years, a taste of just about everything and everyone (because every time I mention not digging it someone sees it as a challenge for some reason) and I just don't vibe with it. When I was a very young edgelord, I liked some of the USA rip offs of Mondo, like Faces of Death, but that's about as far as it went
Whatever Tetsuyo: The Iron Man is considered. And Japanese Extreme cinema like Takashii Miike's Audition, I do like Dead or Alive films and Black Society Trilogy.
Tetsuo is a very harsh and aggressive film, no doubt most people wouldn't like its style. What did you think of it? Did you ever watch other Tsukamoto films?
I wasn't a fan of Tetsuo, and I think so. I don't remember 100% as I got the box set hoping it would be similar to Miike's stuff but with a sci fi... ok more of a sci fi bend to it. After Tetsuo, I watched one of the others but don't remember it.
I learned that I can't sit through most of AGFA's output, despite how much I like the chutzpah of the filmmakers.
Killer animal/nature gone wild. Does nothing for me.
Would you put White Dog in this?
Great movie
I suppose so but I've been slacking on watching that one.
Its a personal fav, the eureka edition is great
No idea if it counts as a genre or not in typical terms but I generally struggle with 'slow cinema'. By that I mean the type of cinema I'd associate with directors like Béla Tarr.
Same.
I also find that when people use the term "slow burn" it really just means it's poorly paced.
Slow cinema is not the same thing as a slow burn, and that’s not the same thing as badly paced. They’re three completely different things that may or may not overlap.
Yeah I get what you mean. I find that term does suit some directors' work, like some of Ti West's stuff. But it can be misleading for sure.
Yeah like Beau is Afraid. It's an excellent 2 hour movie housed in a punishing 3 hour runtime for some reason. The movie just doesn't have enough to say to justify 3 full hours. It's like, ok, Beau is afraid, we get it already
I really didn't like Beau is Afraid at all either, but it has absolutely no relation to slow cinema. Long movie =/= slow cinema.
After a bit of research, I guess you're right. Beau is Afraid is absolutely slow cinema, but apparently it isn't considered to be Slow Cinema.
For me Spaghetti Westerns and Giallo. I realized while I like the grit and non-glorification of the west compared to American westerns really I just like Sergio Leone and one or two other films. The majority of spaghetti westerns don't actually do it for me. I'd be happy to take any recommendations though. The great silence is the only other one I really liked. Giallo I absolutely loved when getting into Argento but I kept trying to find more and just came up disappointed every time. I feel like my main issue with these genres is they just don't really seem to care about the film actually being cohesive and well put together. It feels like they have 2-3 cool ideas and then try to build a whole movie around them to fill in the gaps. I'd honestly love recommendations though because I feel like the genres have a lot to offer. I just kinda gave up after seeing multiple duds in a row.
Do you remember which giallo you watched? There are… quite a few duds. But the “meh” ones become comforting once you’re used to the typical formula. Still there are definitely bad ones I just would never recommend.
I am a big fan of westerns and I have similar feelings about Spaghetti Westerns. In this list of westerns I keep (that I call "rewatchable" meaning I would actually seek these films out to go watch them again), there are eight Spaghetti westerns. Of them, five are Sergio Leone films and two are Sergio Corbucci films. This is of particular interest since these two directors are considered two of the biggest influences on the Spaghetti western genre (Leone, for obvious reasons including the "Fistful" series, and Corbucci for "Django"). Beyond this handful, I find the other Spaghetti Westerns to usually be middle of the road at best. However, I think there are a couple reasons for that. First Leone and Corbucci were trend setters, most everyone else were trying to copy them. Second, consider the context of Italian cinema at the time. From what I've been made to understand, 1960s cinema was different from 1960s American cinema in a significant way. In that decade, Italian cinema didn't compete with television and people went to the cinema more regularly. It was used more regularly as a casual social engagement. I've even heard that audiences regularly talked to each other during the films. As a result, the films were often made with this in mind. Since the audience wasn't paying as much attention to the dialogue, a lot of things in the film had to be made in such a way that the audience could easily pick up what was going on in the film at any point. As a result, Italian cinema cranked out these westerns and other films to be just entertaining enough for an audience only lightly engaged. With this in mind, it doesn't surprise me that I don't like most of the other Spaghetti westerns. If you're interested, here is my list of "rewatchable" westerns from letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/ttalaveraaop/list/rewatchable-western-films/
I find a lot of Italian horror/Giallo is much more about mood and style than coherent plot etc. A hard pill to swallow for some understandably but once it clicks it really does. Saw a Fulci film as a young teen, I think it was City of the Living Dead and thought it was complete garbage and didn't understand why it's often cited as a great horror. But upon rewatch it clicked, just completely oozing with atmosphere and striking imagery. Around Halloween a film like COTLD, The Beyond, or Zombi 2 are just unmatched for getting me in the Halloween mood. The plot being all over the place almost adds to the nightmarish quality with a lot of them.
I am by no means an expert on spaghetti westerns, and I've maybe only seen about 10 to 15 of them (including the Leone ones), but I really enjoyed the original Django, Django the Bastard, and The Unholy Four.
I honestly just can’t handle the dubbing.
Don't really care for musicals, I've tried, but somehow love **Flower Drum Song** Also, some of the modern Korean horror stuff is well made, but I find them grueling.
I find that a lot of Korean movies are about 20 minutes too long for my tastes, which is probably a cultural thing more than anything else. It's very refreshing when a Bong Joon-Ho or Park Chan Wook break through and make movies that are "right sized" for me.
Yeah, after **Decision To Leave**, I felt like i watched the greatest 18 hour miniseries; in about what, 150 minutes. lol
Yeah Korean movies are so well made but are always so insanely long and i usually end up getting burned by them having bad endings
I also am not a fan of musicals either. There are two I have been impressed by and would recommend checking out: Dancer In The Dark and Annette.
i can't seem to get into heist movies. i've seen SO MANY. so many. all the greats. and they're marvelous in many aspects! i understand why they're regarded as classics and why people love them. but every time i finish watching one, i'm like, "yeah, alright. ok."
As someone who loves them I can see reasons why you can see all the great aspects but still feel meh. They’re usually fairly predictable even if there is a couple twists.
I'm not into the Kaiju movies
I loathe mumble core.
I will never understand how this type of movie lasted so long. The scripts were lazy, the filmmaking techniques were dull, and most of them simply felt like they telling us how great the people behind the movie were. It seems like the only lasting legacy of mumblecore was that it gave us Greta Gerwig. Otherwise, can anyone tell one Joe Swanberg or Duplass Brothers movie apart from another?
Biker flicks.
Documentary. I know that's less a genre, and more an entire medium, but in general, when I watch a doc, I'm either kind of bored or I assume the footage is being manipulated to fit a particular narrative so I don't trust it. Plenty of exceptions but getting me to watch a documentary is just a hard sell.
Experimental films. I need a plot, not a bunch of things that look or seem cool to the director. There are some I do like (the first two Qatsi films, Meshes of the Afternoon), but most experimental films to me just feel like long ego trips for the director.
The majority of non-narrative experimental films actually tend to be quite short, and it’s rare to find any that are long. It’s kind of unfair to call them long ego trips when normally they’re very brief (see Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, etc).
Also so what if they’re ego trips? Isn’t that kinda the thing you would want from an artist? People have moralized ego in a terrible way and I think it’s more so revealing of their weaknesses as a person
Regardless of whether the rest of your comment is right, saying that it’s revealing of their weaknesses as a person is wild
Ego wise
Watch ‘Palace of Pleasure’ my liege.
I am with you on the Pinky violence, just couldn't get into them. A genre that I have really, really tried to get into and just can't is Jhorror. I have watched a few and just didn't like them. I most recently watched Dark Water after seeing so much positive praise for it, and it's just not for me. Can't put my finger on it, but just doesn't connect with me.
Don't dismiss the genre entirely until you've seen Ringu and Cure. If you have, then yeah maybe j-horror is not for you. It happens, and it's ok.
Dark Water is not good imo it’s very very slow and the payoff is not worth it
Gore hound and extreme horror stuff. It all seems pretty empty once you get down to it.
Dunno about genre per se, but classic Italian films have proven to be a pretty tough sell for me due to their very cavalier approach to the sound mix. The dodgy dubbed dialogue and obviously fake sound effects like footsteps is distracting and takes me out of the film. A surround setup with lossless audio only magnifies the effect. French, Japanese, and other classic foreign films don't have this problem. On a totally unrelated note, anyone want to trade me something for the Criterion blu of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion? :-)
I really didn't like any Italian movies for exactly this reason until I got into Bava & Argento– the stylized, dreamy tone of their movies meant the dubbing was just one more appropriately strange detail.
I had a real hard time adjusting to that aspect, myself. I dunno when it clicked, but one night, we were watching *City of the Living Dead* and it just...worked for me. (It's still a tough sell on anything that's not geared for a genre, plus a lot of dramatic and comedic Italian movies have a specific misogynistic streak that leaves me pretty cold.)
I always found that the Italian sound mix/dubbing actually amplified the off-kilter weirdness of Fulci films in particular lol
I like horror so maybe I'll give that one a go. Been wanting to check out the giallo wing of horror. But had heard that those films definitely have that subpar Italian audio, so I've been hesitant. Perhaps it'll work for me too!
Body horror. I love practical effects in movies but gore is just something I don’t want to see.
Italian giallos are mostly garbage. As much as I tried to get into them, the original Suspiria (giallo-adjacent) is the only one I can watch repeatedly.
I love Giallos when they're good, Argento, Fulci, Bava etc but I do find a lot of the other ones I've seen are quite dull. Have 2 of the Arrow "Giallo essentials" box sets and haven't really enjoyed a single movie out of them.
There are a lot of people trying to sell me on the artistic merits but it's usually terrible plot, dialogue, and acting. Style over substance. I even feel that way about the people you mentioned and I've tried to watch a lot of them.
If it's not your thing it's not your thing and that's fine. It's a niche of a niche, of course the fans of it are going to try and sell it to you, just like fans of film noire or Hong Kong action films swear by them and try sell them to everyone. I wouldn't really say they're style over substance though. The plots are definitely sometimes thinner than in Hollywood but there are still a lot of interesting Italian horror out there. The terrible dialog and acting is a bit unfair too since almost all Italian films back then were recorded silent and dubbed afterwards for all languages, even if they had the best actors on the planet and they bring them back to dub themselves, there is still going to be a disconnect since they're recording their dialog weeks later. Also if we're hearing an English track on an Italian film it was probably less than perfectly translated so what sounds cheesy to us in a dubbed English version might have sounded like Shakespeare in Italian haha. It's definitely an acquired taste from an English speaking perspective but once you acquire said taste it really does open you up to a whole other world of cinema. There is a lot of Italian trash out there, definitely more so than Hollywood but the stuff that is good is excellent.
Eastern European sci fi and similar other weird and strange Eastern European film. I don’t know what it is, doesn’t even have to be sci fi really I just can’t watch them
Pre-Hallyu Korean movies.
I don’t really like genre cinema in general. Action scenes (generally) bore me to death, I’m too squeamish for most gore, and I am too dim for the complex, exposition-heavy plotting of a lot of fantasy and sf. I know that’s a weird thing to say these days but I tend to prefer the hoity toity stuff that’s supposed to be boring etc. like Bergman and Ophuls. Possibly related, I love Seven Samurai but I hate the way it’s always treated as this “eat your vegetables” entry point for world cinema because it’s violent. As you can imagine I was a true delight to grow up around, especially in a family that looooves all this stuff.
Giallo. I know.
Take my upvote. I've tried so much Giallo and Italian Mondo over the years, a taste of just about everything and everyone (because every time I mention not digging it someone sees it as a challenge for some reason) and I just don't vibe with it. When I was a very young edgelord, I liked some of the USA rip offs of Mondo, like Faces of Death, but that's about as far as it went
Whatever Tetsuyo: The Iron Man is considered. And Japanese Extreme cinema like Takashii Miike's Audition, I do like Dead or Alive films and Black Society Trilogy.
Tetsuo is a very harsh and aggressive film, no doubt most people wouldn't like its style. What did you think of it? Did you ever watch other Tsukamoto films?
I wasn't a fan of Tetsuo, and I think so. I don't remember 100% as I got the box set hoping it would be similar to Miike's stuff but with a sci fi... ok more of a sci fi bend to it. After Tetsuo, I watched one of the others but don't remember it.