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Films you see differently as an adult...

674 replies

LoveShitJokes · 19/11/2022 18:45

I presume this has been done before but fuck it, it's Saturday night and I'm bored. So I'll start...

Mrs Doubtfire. As a child I saw Miranda as a boring, stuck up cow. As an adult I see her as a successful, independent woman exasperated with her man child husband who gives me The Ultimate Ick. And then some. I'm gobsmacked she ever married him. Stuart was a capable, equal partner not the villain I once thought him to be. Anyone else?

OP posts:
CaptainMyCaptain · 20/11/2022 20:07

Vigneau · 20/11/2022 15:45

Seven Brides For Seven Brothers

Basically a horny cock-lodger finds a woman who is house proud. He shacks up with her then she finds out he has six brothers who are wasters. They go into town and spot six women who are going to get married, beat the grooms up, kidnap the women and prevent their families from finding them in the mountains. Cock-lodger gets the women pregnant then leaves her over winter to go hunting. Meanwhile the six brothers get the women pregnant and effectively arrange a forced marriage in the Spring. This is in America not ISIS.

Based on the Rape of the Sabine Women from Roman mythology. I don't know why anyone thought it was a suitable story for a film.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women

lindaha · 20/11/2022 20:10

Annie - I feel sorry for Mrs. Hannigan with all of those girls. I'd be a raging alcoholic too

so would you say the same about a teacher or youth worker these days working with tough kids all day that it's ok for them to turn up to work pissed?

Trees6 · 20/11/2022 20:11

Yes I never understood the dislike of the baroness in The Sound of Music. She was a single woman who was hoping to marry a single man 🤷‍♀️

BigMandsTattooPortfolio · 20/11/2022 20:15

‘Marnie’, the film by Alfred Hitchcock which I watched as a child, but now see what a wrongmo the character played by Sean Connery was.

ScribblingPixie · 20/11/2022 20:15

Christopher Plummer led her on.

AlbertaAnnie · 20/11/2022 20:17

Whalesong · 19/11/2022 23:07

I'm amazed nobody has mentioned Love Actually! Every single storyline is sexist and misogynistic. I can't watch it anymore.

I still love Pretty woman and Dirty Dancing but only because I was a romantic teenager when they came out and have loved them ever since. Rationally I see that they are incredibly problematic. Not sure I want to watch either again to be honest.

An Officer and a Gentleman: I don't agree actually. I think it's a very good, realistic depiction of what life is/was like for people in these communities. There's a difference between promoting a misogynistic message and exposing it.

Omg yes - I was just thinking about love actually today and how it hasn’t aged well at all! Definitely not a classic for me!

TheMarzipanDildo · 20/11/2022 20:21

Stopsnowing · 19/11/2022 20:42

Bend it Like Beckham. Saw it first as a teen and then when middle aged. Second time around my sympathies were with the parents.

Really?! The parents trying to stop their daughter playing football because men won’t like it, or the mother whose worried her daughter’s a lesbian and tries to make her wear push up bras? The mothers at least were massively unreasonable.

Chickenvoicesinmyhead · 20/11/2022 20:28

Savvet · 19/11/2022 20:19

Definitely Grease. Danny treats Sandy appallingly and the happy ending is that she changes everything about herself to please him. Oh and Rizzo sings a song about how the worst thing you can do is flirt with a man then not give him sex 🙄

Danny also changed himself to please Sandy. It was a two-way thing. The crux of the story I guess.

"The chicks'll cream for Grease Lightning" Never clocked this before (obviously!)

Holymackerelhead · 20/11/2022 20:31

Omg i saw the thread title and came here specifically to say mrs doubtfire. We put it on recently and OMG - WHAT A PRICK.

Robin Williams’ character in that film is fucking insufferable, the absolute worst type of person.

I don’t think it would get made nowadays. Right? 😬

lindaha · 20/11/2022 20:32

hat one but Desperate Housewives wasn't supposed to be seen as funny if you're referring to Orson?
Can't think who else you mean if so.
It was quite a serious plotline, his ex wife was collaborating with his mum to drug and rape him so she could get the grandchild she always wanted.
Wasn't depicted as funny in any way

actually the reveal of orson being raped was presented in a comical way and was never mentioned soon after like it was trivial. Bree said it in a If this was reverse it would have being very different.

Just watch it here and it's all played out in comical fashion.

PickyEaters · 20/11/2022 20:35

Trading Places. It used to be a Christmastime favourite but i only realised last year what a sexist unfunny pig the Eddie Murphy character is.

PickyEaters · 20/11/2022 20:36

... in fact a lot of the 80s "humour" has dated very badly.

Florenz · 20/11/2022 20:38

PickyEaters · 20/11/2022 20:35

Trading Places. It used to be a Christmastime favourite but i only realised last year what a sexist unfunny pig the Eddie Murphy character is.

Really? I saw Trading Places and the only bit I thought didn't hold up was Dan Aykroyd's blackface scene on the train.

Meredusoleil · 20/11/2022 20:38

PickyEaters · 20/11/2022 20:35

Trading Places. It used to be a Christmastime favourite but i only realised last year what a sexist unfunny pig the Eddie Murphy character is.

Omg! This was one of my favourite films growing up. Along with other Eddie Murphy films like Beverley Hills Cop and Coming to America. Also loved Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions and See no evil, hear no evil.

ItWorriesMeThisKindofThing · 20/11/2022 20:39

cakeorwine · 20/11/2022 19:28

Mary Poppins is a lovely film. It was interesting to see Saving Mr Banks and then seeing Mary Poppins again - to think about what the actual films is about. Definitely different perspective compared to being young.

He actually gets to spend time with his family instead of just thinking about work. Mary Poppins does indeed save Mr Banks.

Saving Mr Banks is very nicely done but so odd - it’s about the author disliking the adaptation of the book - but all the Mr Banks stuff they talk about is not in the book at all. He is barely mentioned, let alone saved.

anyway mine is Gregory’s Girl which I found so charming when I was a teenager. I was expecting to love rewatching but I just found the teachers so creepy.

PlainJaneSuperBrain99 · 20/11/2022 20:40

Annie. Middle aged billionaire bachelor who's never married is allowed to adopt an orphan girl with no questions asked.

lljkk · 20/11/2022 20:41

80s/90s films like basic instinct, fatal attraction, single white female, disclosure, the temp etc is that whenever they want to portray a "psycho" woman, they always portray her as being very sexual.

Except Misery, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and some others.

CaptainMyCaptain · 20/11/2022 20:41

I love Gregory's girl and have only ever seen it as an adult. It reminds me of being a teenager.

Chickenvoicesinmyhead · 20/11/2022 20:44

The Railway Children. Creepy sleazy doctor, waaay too interested in Roberta.

threatmatrix · 20/11/2022 20:45

FKATondelayo · 19/11/2022 22:42

I think these threads are fun but 1) no stories can be written about good moral people who do good moral things - they would be boring and 2) you're not supposed to watch films you enjoy as a kid when you're an adult.

Dirty Dancing - I think the reason 1980s girls loved it is that it's about a good nerdy academic girl who experiences sexual passion. Nerdy girls aren't supposed to be like that! We're supposed to read books and go out with bespectacled maths nerds - not want to grind with hunky dancers. When Baby's dad looks at her and realises she is just as sexual as her shallow sister, it's profound.

We are looking at it through a 2020s lens when young women are sexualised constantly but in the 1950s / 60s there was a different pressure - to be ornaments but to stay virgins and not have any desires of their own, to subjugate their own needs and to police the horny guys around them. Dirty Dancing and Grease are about young women who reject that. There are worse things I could do is about a woman who is told constantly that good girls don't want sex and it's down to her to ensure that never happens regardless of what the man does. Rizzo is saying why does having sex make her a less worthy woman than women who do everything but.

At last, I couldn’t have said it better.

teaandtoastwithmarmite · 20/11/2022 20:51

Grease, dirty dancing

BellePeppa · 20/11/2022 20:55

FKATondelayo · 20/11/2022 19:20

It is now illegal - or at least it will be from February 2023.

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Really? I didn’t know that. Today’s seventeen year olds are far too young but back then my aunt looked like a proper grown up woman (from the photos at least). I’ve a photo of my mum at eighteen and she looks early thirties as back then they all dressed the same as their mothers with the same short tight curled hairstyles.

I don’t know if it’s true but I read that Debbie Reynolds was just sixteen when she starred as the love interest in Singing in the Rain (I’m sure that’s a mistake, she seemed way older than sixteen).

BellePeppa · 20/11/2022 20:57

I’ve just Wikipedia’d and Debbie Reynolds was actually nineteen or twenty but Gene Kelly was around forty!

Emotionalsupportviper · 20/11/2022 20:58

SeptemberSon · 19/11/2022 19:13

Pretty Woman. Just.so.problematic.

In EVERY respect.

GlasgowGal82 · 20/11/2022 21:00

EineReiseDurchDieZeit · 19/11/2022 19:51

The bit that gets me now is her Dad having to give Penny an abortion. He literally broke the law for them and could have lost his medical licence.

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Baby's Dad didn't give Penny the abortion. He treated her she had a botched abortion that may have killed her probably saving her life.

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