Mr.Taumoeba

Stay (2005) has a 26% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Now, I can typically understand where people come from when they dislike something I love, but in this case I feel like critics wrote it off because they simply did not get it, or just didn't care enough to even ATTEMPT to get it.

I've seen people note frustration that "it was all a dream" and therefor "none of it mattered" which is the most closed minded flippant bs istg 😭

Like, I get that the whole "it was all a dream" thing is often used in lazy writing in a way that serves no purpose to the plot or themes, but with Stay in particular, that could not be further from the truth. Everything has reason and is laid out so expertly that the ending reveal is the whole point and, indeed, what elevates the movie from "good but weird" to "genuine masterpiece".

It's a movie that trusts and respects its audience. Trust that the viewer will use even a few braincells to look beyond the surface imagery for deeper meaning, and respect in the way it doesn't hold ur hand NOR does it go the overly pretentious route of total abstraction.

Again, typically with poorly rated movies, I can find some way to relate to the nay sayers. This is not one of those times. I'm so confused.... I have to wonder if it has to do with the year it came out?

The 90s-2000s were rife with dark mind-fuck movies and, while Stay is absolutely stand out, you could conceivably lump it together with films like Butterfly Effect and The Jacket which came out just 1-2 years prior. Oversaturated the market for a movie like this I suppose?

Maybe the critics simply got bored of this format and were primed to write off any film that felt similar? And in the age of the internet, once those critic reviews come in, it takes a lot more than it otherwise would for general audiences to subscribe.

I imagine seeing such low critic ratings would lead to less people being willing to watch Stay the first place, even less so with an open mind.

And it not being socially acceptable to talk about your own childhood is super alienating. Sometimes people want to know why, and any answer you can give them is going to be off putting.

One of them said something like, "it doesn't bother me that [Friend] was in residential mental health treatment, I just wish they wouldn't talk about it ALL the time".

The other replied, "Well, that was all of last year for them. So when they say 'when I was in treatment,' it's like when you say 'last year'."

From chapter 3 of our social media fic

in which we explore the ramifications of that court scene. Made some art for this one, though it's purposefully not much

– https://searchmysite.net/ Search engine for the indie web, personal websites, digital gardens. You can also find them in websites like Neocities, Indieweb, Blogarama, and write.as. There is also a big list of personal websites.

– https://search.marginalia.nu/ Search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and promotes websites that aren’t usually at the top of the list.

– https://www.worldcat.org/ Search engine for items in libraries (books, but also maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, etc.)

– https://scholar.google.com/ Search engine for scientific papers, reviews, etc. It’s still google, but a lot better than the normal search engine counterpart.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines A list of search engines sorted by subject, area, and more. If you’re searching on a specific area, it might be worth checking if there is one focused on that area.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines A list of academic databases and search engines.