The Best Angry Comments from Our April Fools Day Overrated Movies List
Dear readers, consider yourself pranked. This past Friday was April Fools Day, and we’d be damned if we were going to be left out of the fun. We threw our hat into the prank ring with a completely absurd list of the “most overrated movies of all-time.” In compiling the list, we made sure to include as many beloved classics as possible and pushed the issue by including some of the weakest arguments for these classic films’ status as overrated duds that we could think of.
The results, just as we hoped, inspired a healthy amount of anger and rage in the comments section. To be fair, we didn’t do much to let on that we were, in fact, joking about the list. But if you were an especially observant reader, you may have picked up on the one huge clue we did include, which was the list itself.
Here’s the list again, in the order it was presented. See if you can spot anything that may have indicated that this was all a calculated April Fools prank:
- Avatar
- Pulp Fiction
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Inception
- Lord of the Rings
- Fargo
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- On the Waterfront
- LA Confidential
- Star Wars
Do you see it? Of course you do. Now you see it. But on Friday, plenty of people didn’t see it, and they let their displeasure with our list be known in the comments section. Here are some of our favorite angry comments.
This was one of the first angry comments that rolled in. A good sign, to be sure, but I wanted to make sure the ball kept rolling, so I decided to chime in with a reply…
We don’t usually make a habit of calling our readers idiots, even if they do toss the word out there first. But we had to make a sacrifice this time in the name of keeping the discussion going.
Well that’s just mean! This was in response to our statement that Star Wars hasn’t aged well, most likely. The part about the author having no idea what he’s talking about is fairly accurate though, most of the time anyway.
To further keep the discussion flowing, I enlisted the help of frequent TSJ contributor Evan Hoovler. He chimed in with this completely nonsensical position that these movies are all overrated because they’re all about white people. Well done, Hoovler.
Come on, Ty, erase the racism buddy. Non-white people have done plenty of significant things for the world. And for the record, here’s a picture of Evan Hoovler.
What a cracker. Let’s see what else people had to say.
No, YOU’RE the touchy douchebag! Just joking. See what I did there? Anyway, unfounded opinions are the very lifeblood of the internet, everyone knows that. Moving on…
WHOA! Now this…I take exception to. The least subtle April Fools joke ever? One site posted a story about Charlie Sheen dying in a skydiving accident. The name of the skydiving company was “Too High To Be True.” FunnyOrDie.com dedicated their entire front page to Rebecca Black. But we’re the ones who aren’t being subtle enough? That’s ridiculous.
Right, but see, at some point people migrated and…fuck it. Never mind.
For the record, I’ve never willfully used the word “bro” in my entire life.
![comment8 [2]](http://www.thesmokingjacket.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/comment8-2.jpg "comment8 [2]")
Really? The Lando Calrissian/Jar Jar Binks argument didn’t make sense? Get right out of town!
It’s “YOU’RE coming off unintelligent.” Boom, you’ve just been issued a ticket by the grammar police.
So there you have it, readers. If you picked up on the fact that this list was just an extremely SUBTLE April Fools prank, bravo to you, and thanks for not spilling the beans. For the rest of you who called us idiots and such, we’ll accept your apologies in the comments section below.
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“The Best Angry Comments from Our April Fools Day Overrated Movies List”
10:16 am on April 4th, 2011
Also, on the page for the original article, one of the “Related Posts!” was a list of April Fools jokes from other sites. That gave it away a bit.
10:23 am on April 4th, 2011
I will admit…I did not catch on to this. But, I’m also one to realize that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and found the article a bit hilarious. And I still stand by my comment to call The Hangover an overrated movie.
10:36 am on April 4th, 2011
@Jason – funny you mention that, because I TOTALLY stand by the fact that Avatar was overrated. We included that one just so we could kick things off in a semi-legitimate manner. I tried to make the arguments less and less convincing and reasonable from there.
10:51 am on April 4th, 2011
@abrown – I agree with your view on Avatar. And, yes, as the article went on your “arguments” started having more holes in them then your underwear…which is why I found it funny.
11:13 am on April 4th, 2011
NOTHING has more holes than my underwear.
10:14 am on April 15th, 2011
Nice AFD joke.
now that that’s all cleared up, I’d like to indicate my opinion that the Big Lebowski is for sure overrated. I thought it had a stupid ending, the character was a drinking and driving idiot who gives us IRL beardo’s a bad image. Movies that peter out at the end, especially having engaging segments or characters in the lead up are especially disappointing. Fuck Hollywood
7:01 am on May 6th, 2011
I think the angry comments to the april fools is far funnier
But on another note, I really think star wars is overrated
6:13 am on May 10th, 2011
American = not bright
11:34 am on October 3rd, 2011
I was kinda happy reading this review. Beside Fargo, I agreed w/ everything.
6:08 am on November 8th, 2011
Fell for it of course. Commenting here to say that Avatar really is an overrated piece of crap as are a few of the others… ah well, opinions opinions opinions…
7:24 am on January 7th, 2012
Pulp Fiction and Inception are still overrated.
3:59 am on January 14th, 2012
Haha. How about a post with a real list of overrated movies/actors now?
4:01 pm on April 26th, 2012
How was that an April Fools joke? It was totally right about Avatar, Pulp Fiction, and Star Wars V and VI (not IV obviously).
Avatar – self-explanatory – it was Disney’s Pocahontas with aliens and 3D effects. Nuff said. The only thing I liked about it is that a lot of nutty liberals were thrilled over the movie since it was basically the film equivalent of that “Captain Planet” cartoon – but they didn’t realize it was produced by News Corporation – the same company that owns Fox News – lmao.
Pulp Fiction – Entertaining movie, but overrated – there was no real plot or purpose to any of it – it was just a bunch of skits and funny one-liners thrown together. Reservoir Dogs and True Romance were both better.
Star Wars Episode V and VI – Both were good movies but not spectacular, especially compared to the original Star Wars. Especially number V (Empire Strikes Back) – with the long, drawn out scenes with Luke and Yoda, as well as the absurd scene inside the belly of the giant space worm – where Han and Leia walk out of the Falcon in their regular clothes in deep space (-300 degree temperatures) – not to mention the fact that it’s absurd for an alien to be able to live inside an asteroid with no atmosphere, even in a sci-fi film.
4:30 pm on April 26th, 2012
Others that should be on the list -
Chicago. The character just gets away with murder and is totally dis-likeable, but somehow the movie expects you to “root” for her – at the end you just end up feeling disgusted. Plus, it’s just boring, since more than half of the movie is just the song/dance segments.
No Country for Old Men – Basically just a slasher film where the killer wins, how this won an Oscar is beyond me. It’s portrayed as something deep and profound but it isn’t – the “deepest” it gets is that the killer essentially believes that society “made him that way” – and you can find that theme in any slasher flick under the sun – it’s just an excuse for people to see a guy kill people with a cattle gun to the forehead. Now I’m not a prude and going to write a movie off just because it contains violence, but this is violence just for entertainment’s sake, masquerading as “art”. It’d be like serving a Big Mac at a gourmet restaurant – I’m not completely anti-fast food, but I’m going to feel insulted if they try to pass off a greasy fast food burger as gourmet cuisine.
Silence of the Lambs (or any Hannibal Lecter film) – This is pretty much the same deal as above, not a horrible movie, but it’s violence just for the sake of violence masquerading as “art”. They don’t have a guy rip someone’s face off and wear it, or have him eat someone’s liver with fava beans and wine for “artistic merit” – they do that so that teens will point and yell “wow that’s so cool!”. If you took out all of the grotesque violence, no one would even watch it because the “slasher film” crowd is it’s main target audience anyway, so whatever good acting it may have had is wasted.
Watchmen – Confusing, overrated, and violent just for the hell of it. Movies which have violence just for violence sake should be immediately disqualified from an Oscar nomination – not because I’m morally against them (some of my favorite movies, like Reservoir Dogs, have lots of pointless violence), I’m just morally against entertainment violence being marketed as “art” when it’s there just to make the film more appealing to the lowest common denominator of film goers – the guys who don’t know the first thing about a good plot or acting, but rate a film’s “goodness factor” on the number of big explosions or “how cool the part was” when that guy’s head got ripped off. Aside from drawn out and pointless scenes of violence, the movie was just slow and convoluted, and almost impossible to make sense of unless you had read the comic books (and this is a fairly obscure comic book to boot – it’s not Batman).
Passion of the Christ – Unlike the hypocritical liberals who bashed this film for being “violent” (but love to hand Oscars to films like Silence of the Lambs or No Country for Old Men, where people’s faces are ripped off and they’re killed with cattles rod to the skills), my criticism isn’t of the violence or of the “anti-Semetism” (or the “anti-Hispanic-ism” in Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men, which portrayed Mexicans as psychopathic mafia hitmen who murder white people for money
) – no my criticism of this film is the fact that it felt like the last 3rd of a film. Basically it would be like taking the last segment of Braveheart (after he’s captured and about to be executed) and making that into a feature film. It relies on people being familiar enough with Jesus’ life to just fill in the gaps with their imagination, and therefore people who aren’t familiar with the Biblical stories won’t get much out of the film, other than the violence.
9:14 am on June 11th, 2012
Apart from Raiders and LOTR, I actually found this list pretty on-the-money.
Some of the movies listed were pretty good, but only if you compare them to a list of pictures that were really, really bad. And in my humble estimate, approximately 95% of what the American film industry puts out is just completely unwatchable dreck, and always has been.
This is why these films were named classics — simply that they were entire orders of magnitude better than the other 95% of crap, not because they were instant classics. That being said, the LOTR trinity is on such a huge scale that it absolutely dwarfs any other movie or franchise that dare to call themselves classics.
The reason is in all this, making good movies is exceptionally, spectacularly hard to do, and each one is actually a roll of the roulette wheel for an awful lot of folks, which begs the question: if so much is on the line for so many people, how can bad movies actually ever get to the stage of being seen by an audience? You would think that the powers that be would cut their losses on obvious stinkers and either can them mid-production or never start making them in the first place. Unfortunately that has never been the case, the theory being, if you make enough of them, you’re bound to hit the jackpot sooner or later.
Very sad.
6:15 pm on July 1st, 2012
It’s funny because Avatar actually belonged on this list.