What grinds my gears

I have commented in previous posts, how among "armchair movie critics" and internet reviewers it seems to be an unwritten rule that if the majority of other people detest a particular movie (or franchise) then everyone must detest it, lest their credibility be tarnished. There are many, many examples of this. For instance, you absolutely must detest the Star Wars prequel trilogy (especially the first film), the second and third Matrix movies and, as a more minor example, the Battleship movie. If you don't, then you are strange and without any credibility. Personally I would add the Twilight saga to this list. Especially the first movie. It's, once again, one of those movie franchises that everybody must hate, because everybody else also hates them. It's not even allowed to say "it was ok." Even that's too much. I'm not saying that the Twilight movies are the best masterpieces ever made (after all, only an extremely small minority of all mov...

It seems to have been a trend during the last decade or so that every time they make a movie that's a remake or adaptation of a story, they always modernize it to happen in the modern world, even if the original story is set to happen many decades ago. It doesn't really matter if the original story is set to happen in the 1980's or the 1920's, the trend seems to be to always adapt it to happen in the 2000's. Sometimes this has no big impact in the story, so no bad consequences follow this modernization. However, oftentimes they have to bend over backwards in order to make the adaptation work. A very typical example is that 20+ years ago almost nobody had a cellphone, while nowadays it's rare for somebody to not have one. Thus if the story relies on people being stranded or otherwise cut from civilization or the authorities, the adaptation needs to go to extra lengths to try to explain why the cellphones aren't working or why they don't have them. And...