Works where you were surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers

[Mordar]

Not seen Jersey Girl, but Mallrats was telling crap jokes about comics the movie that 80s/90s geeky kids only liked cause they were the exact same crap jokes they made with their friends.

Also dang looked up Jersey Girl on letterboxd out of interest, and wow, this sentence from one of the popular reviews:

I can't stand Kevin Smith, and even I think that's decidedly brutal.

(1) Know your audience;
(2) KS, the guy people love to hate. And I don't like him so much either.

Back when some friends and I did a podcast about sci-fi and fantasy (no, you haven't heard of it, I think it barely broke triple digits of listeners per episode) we had one episode where the topic was basically the same as this thread and I started out by saying that I didn't really see why people thought either Star Wars and Star Trek were that great (don't get me wrong, they're both entertaining enough, I've just never understood why they've reached the point of geek religions) and of course the reactions to that took up the rest of the episode. Though I suppose that doesn't really count, as I was well aware I was in the minority.

Yeah, you probably don't get why the Macintosh was such a big deal, or why 1939 Oldsmobiles are so important either. "Tesla? I didn't know that crappy electric car company was Serbian." Go mow my lawn, kid.

Solo had really bad press and an immense burden associated with being the Star Wars film that came out after The Last Jedi. The single group of people who were most likely to rush out to see it and then talk about it were also the people most eager to hate it as part of the backlash to TLJ. The film itself is decidedly fine, but it's not good enough and especially not tightly crafted enough to avoid being picked apart brutally by an audience motivated to do so.

Additionally, Solo was burdened by not being a commercial success, which was a first for the franchise, and among the very large number of people who didn't see it this became a self-fulfilling assessment. If it lost money, in an environment where TLJ made money, it must have been terrible. The reality was of course much more complicated, but rarely has a film been painted with such a giant 'hate me!' bullseye in the popular consciousness.

Agree Solo took heat for TLJ (probably deserved) and the acting classes rumors didn't help things. Frankly, if I got to cut 10 more minutes out of it (sprinkled across the film) I think I would have liked it a lot...instead of just thinking it was good.

- M