Monday, July 21, 2008
Darryl Sutter has too much control over my emotions
I've been in the basement for days now, just despondent (dejected? depressed? disconsolate? doleful? downcast? etc.) over the signing of Andre Roy, particularly since I can't find confirmation that (like Jamie Lundmark) it's a two-way deal, which it had bloody well better be.
So taking a cue from John MacKinnon (btw, is there anything more obnoxious than telling other people how to spend their leisure time?), I thought I'd do something different.
McMegan at The Atlantic has been doing "Summer Games" as a bit of a diversion, and I liked one of her topics. Bad movies! Five categories:
Note that I don't watch a ton of movies, and that my definition of regard/acclaim has more to do with the popular consensus rather than the critical one. My list:
1) Any number of 30-60 year old movies qualify here. There are all sorts of great old movies that I love, but how many times have I watched a famous old movie for the first time and thought, "This is in the pantheon? Seriously?" Since I saw it recently, I'll go with Some Like It Hot here, which is on Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies but which I thought was both duller and dumber than at least half the new releases I see.
2) Most of my top candidates here are by directors who are a little too admired... I'll go with Saving Private Ryan, which I basically enjoyed (and had some cool-looking scenes) but was in no way interesting enough to hit 94% on the Tomatometer and isn't one of Spielberg's best all-around, IMO. Note: I have resisted seeing The Departed because I have heard too many people describe it as if it should run away with this category. Also note: #3 below probably deserves my vote here, but I didn't want to double up.
3) No Country For Old Men. This had a few good moments, and I don't have an issue with the ending, but I just didn't like it that much. The violence was too gratuitous, and I didn't think the theme was that interesting.
4) Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Actually, renting a Will Ferrell movie and being unable to laugh was better described as devastating than disappointing.
5) Tough one, mainly because I'm fairly vigilant about avoiding movies that look like garbage (e.g. haven't seen anything with Robin Williams in it for years), or that don't suit my tastes (e.g. most horror movies, "action comedies"). Also the very worst movies arouse only indifference, not hate, as they aren't really aspiring to be anything. And finally, my memory is pretty weak for experiences that are both bad and distant.
So I think my nominee here is American Dreamz, which I saw about a year ago and fails as badly as a movie can. It's supposed to be a satire of American Idol etc., but its caricatures are basically straight impersonations, and it absolutely hates what it's satirizing, which is about the worst mistake a satire can make. Just a horrible flick.
Take a run yourself at any or all of these in the comments. Some time this summer we'll do this with good movies, which is more up my alley -- I am a glass half-full kinda guy, after all.
So taking a cue from John MacKinnon (btw, is there anything more obnoxious than telling other people how to spend their leisure time?), I thought I'd do something different.
McMegan at The Atlantic has been doing "Summer Games" as a bit of a diversion, and I liked one of her topics. Bad movies! Five categories:
- Worst well-regarded film
- Most overhyped film (note that this is slightly different from above; the first measures the absolute badness level, while the second measures the delta between reputation and actual quality)
- Worst film to win a best picture Oscar
- Most disappointing film (ie should have been good but wasn't--Godfather III, Phantom Menace, the latest Indiana Jones atrocity)
- Worst movie, full stop. (Must have been a major motion picture release--no direct-to-video, or film festival torture tactics, please)
Note that I don't watch a ton of movies, and that my definition of regard/acclaim has more to do with the popular consensus rather than the critical one. My list:
1) Any number of 30-60 year old movies qualify here. There are all sorts of great old movies that I love, but how many times have I watched a famous old movie for the first time and thought, "This is in the pantheon? Seriously?" Since I saw it recently, I'll go with Some Like It Hot here, which is on Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies but which I thought was both duller and dumber than at least half the new releases I see.
2) Most of my top candidates here are by directors who are a little too admired... I'll go with Saving Private Ryan, which I basically enjoyed (and had some cool-looking scenes) but was in no way interesting enough to hit 94% on the Tomatometer and isn't one of Spielberg's best all-around, IMO. Note: I have resisted seeing The Departed because I have heard too many people describe it as if it should run away with this category. Also note: #3 below probably deserves my vote here, but I didn't want to double up.
3) No Country For Old Men. This had a few good moments, and I don't have an issue with the ending, but I just didn't like it that much. The violence was too gratuitous, and I didn't think the theme was that interesting.
4) Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Actually, renting a Will Ferrell movie and being unable to laugh was better described as devastating than disappointing.
5) Tough one, mainly because I'm fairly vigilant about avoiding movies that look like garbage (e.g. haven't seen anything with Robin Williams in it for years), or that don't suit my tastes (e.g. most horror movies, "action comedies"). Also the very worst movies arouse only indifference, not hate, as they aren't really aspiring to be anything. And finally, my memory is pretty weak for experiences that are both bad and distant.
So I think my nominee here is American Dreamz, which I saw about a year ago and fails as badly as a movie can. It's supposed to be a satire of American Idol etc., but its caricatures are basically straight impersonations, and it absolutely hates what it's satirizing, which is about the worst mistake a satire can make. Just a horrible flick.
Take a run yourself at any or all of these in the comments. Some time this summer we'll do this with good movies, which is more up my alley -- I am a glass half-full kinda guy, after all.
Labels: Summer Games
# posted by Matt @ 12:52 pm 
Comments:
Worst film? Three Words: Master of Disguise. Honorable mention to almost anything by David Lynch (written and directed).
I dont think the Roy signing is a two-way deal BTW.
Jeez, I'm not good at this negativity thing either.
Still, I guess one of the movies I hated the most was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I spent four dollars to see this movie seven years ago, and I'm still pissed off.
I'm not much of a cinemaphile, either, so it's less likely to be about whole movies than specific bits, in some cases. Also, the tendencies of my childhood will probably shine through here, given that mine is still somewhat recent.
1) Despite my parents' best efforts, I haven't seen many "classic" films to really be able to make a statement here. However, I did find when I watched Harvey that it was kind of painful, making comedy from the experiences of "patients" at sanitariums (sanitaria?) and all. While the overall message was, I guess, positive, I was totally horrified by that area of the film.
2) I hated Shrek 2. I couldn't get what everyone was so excited about. Dishonourable mention to the last two Star Trek movies. See also "most unnecessary sequel."
3) I haven't seen a single one of those movies. Not one. My parents would answer Shakespeare in Love, so we'll go with that.
4) To avoid repetition, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I knew better than to get excited for it, because they cast Americans in key roles (Sam Rockwell, Mos Def), and Americans don't do British comedy well, full stop. What served as a second dagger, through the spine and straight to the heart, was them cutting off the motherfucking punch lines of some of the best jokes in the series, and devoting a good 20 minutes of plot to some new piece of the story that Adams wrote before he died, which he never got a chance to actually make funny. At least that dude from the British version of The Office was good as Arthur Dent.
5) I have the same problem as Matt, in that I tend to steadfastly avoid garbage whenever possible. Probably one of those early-90s video game adaptations, like Street Fighter or any of the Mortal Kombat movies after the first one. I'd have to think on that some.
I could do a completely different list tomorrow.
1.Pulp Fiction
2.The Full Monty
3.Ordinary People [1980]
4.Casino Royale [1967] - Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Charles Boyer, George Raft, Jean-Paul Belmondo, John Huston....
5.Little Miss Sunshine [from a list of 14,079]
Movies are my job, but I'll keep it in the realm of popular knowledge. Garden State could take about three of those categories for me. But...
1. Scarface. Spelling out all subtext and dumping blood all over the place does not make a good film. Oliver Stone is a terrible, terrible writer/human being.
2. Goodfellas gets way more credit than it deserves. Scorcese made some fine, fine films in the 1970s and early '80s, thanks mostly to Paul Schrader, but Goodfellas is just a really rote, totally average gangster film with a few quotable scenes. I think it's result of too many people listening to critics who were warmly soaking up Scorcese's decade-long afterglow/desperate to see anything halfway decent from him after Last Temptation.
3. Paul Haggis' Crash. Big, screaming, trying-too-hard-to-be-important mess.
4. Kill Bill Part II. I thought the first part was pretty much the most awesome thing Quentin Tarantino has ever done, but he sort of abandoned the hyperstylized thing for Tarantino-brand talking (like Death Proof, which sucked outright, but I was expecting as much) and it got pretty boring. Though the Superman speech at the end was good.
5. Garden State. I hate this movie so much: if you like it, you should stop watching movies. Forever.
Dave: the dog & baby from Family Guy had a pretty funny 3-minute bit at last year's Emmys. Your take on Garden State reminds me of the little Zach Braff blast at about the 0:45 mark.
I'll play:
1) Donnie Darko. The only way Richard Kelly could have been more convoluted is if he had written in a space-time continuu...ohhh wait, he just did. Now I'll navigate through the official website to try and figure this shit out, and ultimately be told to read a non-existent book. Ugh. Why do so many people I know swear by it? Good soundtrack though.
2) A lot of people talked up Into the Wild this year, but for me it was an extremely irritating movie. The main character was likeable enough, but I don't see how viewers can get past his ridiculous naivete.
3) Titanic is the easy answer but I'm going to go with American Beauty here. The entire counterculture bent just grates on me; of course the marine homophobe is a closet homosexual/Nazi and Kevin Spacey's character disavows materialism by buying sportscars.
4) The 3 that Matt listed are excellent choices. I would also add either of The Matrix sequels. Maybe I just hate Baudrillard too much to get past the ideas.
5) Norbit. Let's just say that there is a lot of downtime on military bases, and this was a valid diversion for us. It's horrible even by Eddie Murphy standards.
Your take on Garden State reminds me of the little Zach Braff blast
I totally liked Braff when he was on Scrubs (that is, when I used to watch it, about six years ago), but Garden State soured me on everything. It was directed like a series of shitty music videos, and Natalie Portman's whole painfully "quirky" pixie girl routine made me want to throw up on her face. I still hate her to this day, as a matter of fact. But not nearly as much as Braff.
5. Garden State. I hate this movie so much: if you like it, you should stop watching movies. Forever.
haha...I actually enjoyed much of Garden State, although being beaten over the head with metaphor isn't ideal. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the soundtrack.
Another option for (2) is Juno. We get it - she is deliciously quirky and Michael Cera is good at portraying an awkward teenager. Too much hype (but I admit laughing a bunch of times).
I would add more but I'll give other people a chance.
This list suffers from the fact that I haven't seen all that many movies (I've only seen twelve best picture winners, and I can barely remember a few of them) and my disinclination to put much thought into this (my answer to #2 is just what jumped immediately to mind, for example, and might have been different if I'd really considered it).
1. I'm tempted to say Children of Men, despite never having seen it, because everybody was talking about how awesome the preview made it look, despite the fact that the preview made it look terrible. Other than that, I don't know - is 300 sufficiently well-regarded to qualify?
2. Juno. Not bad, just severely overrated.
3. Probably Titanic. As I understand it, the more popular picks (among those that I've seen) are Rocky and Forrest Gump, but I'll not hear a word against either of those.
4. Fierce Creatures, maybe? Would I look like too much of a doofus if I said The Naked Gun 33 1/3?
5. Lots of competition - Biodome, Catwoman, Dungeons & Dragons, and probably a couple of others that I can't remember offhand.
As for Garden State, I understand the hostility, but repopularizing Simon and Garfunkel's "Only Living Boy in New York" buys a movie a lot of slack from me.
Unable to laugh during Talledega Nights? Really? I laughed my ass off in that movie. What about the dinner table scene? Or the PSA's? Or the "this is like a Whitesnake video" scene? Nothing?
Don't have time to go through the list, but I'll just answer Worst Film: 2008's "Wanted".
That movie was a two hour slap in the face. I have never so thoroughly despised a film before I watched that piece of shit a few weeks ago.
I'm bored, so I'll bite. I don't watch a lot of movies outside my usual norm of shitty comedies and huge money blockbuster action movies.
1: Didn't really find Raiders of the Lost Ark all that entertaining.
2: The Dark Knight. Yeah I'm going to probably get killed for this one, but as decent as the Joker was, would he have been considered that great if he wasn't dead? Christian Bale has only one emotion as Batman; seriously fucking angry. Not enough Morgan Freeman
3: I've seen parts of 3 or 4 of them (Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, LOTR), but of the ones I've seen it's The Sound of Music...because it's a musical. It's a personal preference and probably was a decent movie.
4: Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Great cast, crappy plot. Opening up the movie in SINGAPORE? I know the 1600's didn't know much of their Geography but still...
5: The Ringer. Only movie I've ever turned off halfway through. Johnny Knoxville is not funny unless he has some explosive item near his genetalia, and even then it's the bottle rocket that's funny and not him.
I used to work in a video store and spent much of my twenties watching movies of every description.
1) Have to go with Scarface - it was not good at all.
2) Jesus every movie is overhyped these days; scratch that, everything is overhyped these days.
I'd have to say The Matrix - maybe I just don't get it. Boring.
3) How about Forrest, Forrest Gump? It was fun but better then Pulp Fiction? Come on.
4) Superbad. Superbad. I love Judd Apatow but I hated this movie, worse thing about it is we returned it to the wrong store or some shit and had to buy it.
5)Howard The Duck.
My friends and I watch bad movies all too often, usually (hopefully) for entertainment value, but even then there are movies from which you cannot squeeze anything but cringes:
1) Anchorman - save for Steve Carell, this is a painful one for me to watch.
2) Superbad - I was surprised by how much I liked previous Apatow movies, but this one just didn't work well for me at all, despite the face everyone else seemed to enjoy it.
3) The English Patient - ow.
4) No Country for Old Men - Not bad so much as underwhelming. Given all the hype and my previous enjoyment of the Coen brothers' films, I really thought I'd like this one.
5) The Cat in the Hat - bar none, the most painful-to-watch movie we've ever seen in our bad-movie ritual. I can't imagine a single decision made in the making of this film that could have been worse. That a movie this inappropriate was marketed towards kids is horrifying.
(As an aside, the clear winner for most entertaining bad movie is The Core, hands down.)
1. Classically, I'd say Gone with the Wind. Maybe I just don't like it because I'm not a girl, but it just seemed kinda shitty to me. Recently, I'd say Blood Diamond.
2. Juno. I was out when I heard her friend say, "Honest to blog?" Also acceptable: Borat, Napoleon Dynamite, The Departed.
3. West Side Story, Chicago, Shakespeare in Love. Also:
No Country For Old Men
Haha, what?
4. Reign of Fire. Dragons fighting humans in an apocalyptic future, starring Christian Bale, Gerard Butler and Matthew McConaughey. How does that not work?
5. Little Nicky or The Notebook.
Wow Rudykelly, based on the movies you've seen I'm going to assume that your girlfriend beats the shit out of you.
My girlfriend at the time cried when I told her I hated The Notebook because she thought it meant I couldn't love her. She sucked.
1.) THX 1138 - I lack the vocabulary to express how horrible this movie is, though the critics seem to love it.
2.) The Matrix - let's pretend to make a movie with depth and philosophy and follow through on none of the ideas.
3.) It's a toss-up between Rocky and Titanic. Titanic was ridiculously melodramatic with no style or substance, and I'm unable to take Sly Stallone seriously.
4.) The Two Towers - Seriously.
5.) Highlander II - The only movie I've ever seen that is so bad that it makes the movie that came before it worse. This will be quickly replaced if The Last Battle (The last Narnia book) is made into a film, as it had the power to destroy all 6 books that came before it.
1) Worst well-regarded film (ie not deserving of its place in the pantheon?) The Searchers. 1956. John Ford, John Wayne. A Western that's supposed to be a comment about racism but is bloated in every way: improbable color, ridiculous orchestral score, cringe-worthy emoting. Barely watchable.
Dishonorable Mention: Easy Rider. Incompetently made, self-indulgent, hippie crap.
2) Most over-hyped? Citizen Kane. It's not a bad film, but it's easily the runaway winner as Most Over-Hyped. Film critics get boned up over it because Orson Welles invented all sorts of camera work. Big woop. There's nothing remarkable about the story or the acting. Rosebud is nominally Kane's sled but in fact was William Randolph Hearst's pet name for his girlfriend's nether region.
Runner-up: Gone With the Wind. OK, so it made spectacular use of Technicolor. One time my wife turned it on and Vivien Leigh was crying. We went for a TWO-HOUR walk and when we got back Leigh was still crying. I was praying she'd die in the Fire.
3) Worst to Win Oscar? The 2000s alone are chock full of worthy candidates, but No Country for Old Men is so pointlessly violent I felt violated. Worse, I fear I may never be able to excise the memory of it from my brain.
Runner-Up: Gladiator. It's a revenge fantasy dressed up in swords and sandals.
4) Most Disappointing Film? Broken Flowers. 2005. Bill Murray is an aging rich Lothario who gets a letter from a heretofore unknown son. He seeks out a bunch of long ago ex-girlfriends to try figure out which one popped the kid. What a waste of a great premise and a stacked cast. Her Indoors thought they should have cast Jeff Bridges in the lead role.
Runner up: Every movie John Cusack's ever been in except Being John Malkovich. He should fire his agent for putting him in so many dogs.
5) Worst Movie (major studio release)? Wild Wild West. You put a black guy and an Englishman together in a sci-fi Western. What could possibly go wrong?
Runnerup: Black Snake Moan. 2006. This movie is so unredeemingly awful that everyone from Samuel Jackson down to the caterer should be banished from Hollywood.
1) Anything with Denzel Washington.
2) Juno. A smart-ass prego teenager as its delightful hero? I don't think so.
3) It's a tie between Crash and The Departed.
4) Cosh is right -- Hitchhiker's Guide was a disappointment, although how one could actually film an essentially unfilmable book is beyond me.
5) Exit to Eden. Rosie O'Donnell in dominatrix gear. 'nuff said.
I just want to second the above poster who picked American Beauty as absolute worst move to win Best Picture.
Judging by the depth of the characters, the screenplay might have been the work of a 14 year old. I won't both to list all the outrageously offensive things in it...
1. Gone with the Wind. It's eleven hours long and the only thing I remember is the drapes.
2. ET
3. Amadeus. "Rock Me Amadeus" was better.
4. The Enlgish Patient. Death took too long, if death happens earlier maybe something interesting might have happened.
5. Prince of Tides.
A bad movie survey? I'll be there like shareware!
1) Worst well-regarded film: If I disqualify myself from plain ol' 'genres I don't like' (which I think is the idea here), I'd probably roll with A Clockwork Orange. It combined nauseating semi-random unpleasantness without at least the enjoyable fantasy-world excess of, say, Scarface.
Honorable Mention, Kubrick Division: the first half of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a prolonged nap and then Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood show up and it's go time. I mean, when you think about that movie, you think about the monkey throwing the bone in the air and then an endless series of Dave-Frank-HAL moments and then the trippy ending and you completely forget that there's, like, an hour and a half of movie that you're totally skipping over.
2) Most Overhyped Film: Pan's Labyrinth featured characters so two-dimensional that you could use them as tracing paper, a plot that I felt was better ignored than thought about, and lots of Lucas-style annoying CGI. But whereas Star Wars had shiny spaceships, Pan's Labyrinth had Mike Tyson with eyes in his palms and all of a sudden that's awesome. God, I need a drink. Why did I ever decide to think about these movies again? :P
Honorable Mention, Forgetting That Putting CGI Characters in the Movie Means that You Still Have to Have Actual Character Division: Pick any of Jackson's three The Lord of the Rings movies. I'm not convinced he ever read the actual books: he just cribbed Ralph Bakshi's old screenplay and decided to pad it out by adding lots of tedious slow-motion fight scenes.
3) Worst "Best Picture": Got to be Titanic, which was like Gone with the Wind without the good ol' Southern charm and with Leonardo DiCaprio instead of Clark Cable. I was eleven when it came out, but in hindsight it sounds almost like a story from The Onion.
Honorable Mention, Films Where a Major Theme is Getting Over Water Division: Bridge on the River Kwai. Dated, dull, and I always thought Alec Guinness was overrated as an actor. Had some interesting themes, but shouldn't a best picture have more for it than "some interesting themes"?
4) Most disappointing film: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which could easily have answered question two and provided a sequel to answer question three. I'm one of those guys who can quote lengthy passages of the book verbatim, I went to see Fellowship just before my birthday, and I went out of the theatre with the thousand-yard stare all the way from West Edmonton Mall to St. Albert. I'd expected either genius or something completely divorced from the book to the extent that I could ignore it. What I got was mindblowing tedium and a permenant hatred for New Zealand.
Honorable Mention, ah, hell, the other two were just as bad.
5) Worst movie: I'll give you a hint. It featured Liv Tyler and a gang of scrappy misfits who may have been simple but who were also the last hope for saving the world.
That's right, it's Armageddon! I DON'T WANNA CLOOOOOSE MY EYES, DON'T WANNA FALL ASLEEP, BABY, 'CAUSE I oh god I can taste vomit surging into my skull.
I DON'T WANNA CLOOOOOSE MY EYES, DON'T WANNA FALL ASLEEP, BABY, 'CAUSE I oh god I can taste vomit surging into my skull.
That was the greatest hair metal ballad of the 1990s. It's like having sex on a burning American flag, while eagles drive Pontiacs in the background.
1. The Passion of the Christ. The Bible used as exploitation film fodder.
2. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. How to make a horrifically hyped kung fu picture boring as hell.
3. Rain Man. We have this film to thank for Tom Cruise's fantasy that he can be a serious actor.
4. Strange Brew. How could the Mackenzies go so wrong?
5. Leolo. Most people haven't seen this French-Canadian tripefest, and you're the lucky ones. It starts with someone peeing off a balcony and "builds" toward a cinematic depiction of beastiality. Somehow it's on Ebert's best film list. I was forced to watch in Canadian Film class. Ugh.
Let me quote one of imdb.com's user comments: "You may regret seeing this but it's worth whatever irrepareable (sic) mental problems."
No, it's not.
I can't believe I forgot both Highlander II and Crouching Tiger. The former went from bad to so bad it's good to so bad it's horrible faster than any movie I've ever seen, and the latter was overblown wirework and nonsense. I also can't believe I forgot that Return of the King won 37 Oscars a few years ago, so I have seen one.
And at the risk of being self-aggrandizing, I had Hitchhiker's way back in Comment #3.
I'm kicking myself for forgetting Napoleon Dynamite and Crouching Tiger. Also, I just remembered that I possibly should have made space in one of the first two categories for There Will be Blood. I haven't seen No Country, but based on comments here last year might have been the year of the overhyped Best Picture nominee, what with those two and Juno. I'm glad the Coen brothers won, though, just on principle.
Most overhyped this year - Wall-E. Critics loved it, kids get bored with it, and parents realize it's an animated version of Space Odyssey.
That's just sad that anybody would think Aerosmith was "metal". What, is Whitesnake too hardcore for you?
1. Worst well-regarded film: Royal Tenenbaums
2. Most overhyped film: Bee-Movie
3. Worst film to win a best picture Oscar: No Country for Old Men
The three above weren't good, nor were they awful. The next three though...completely putrid.
4. Most disappointing film: Miami Vice (technically it doesn't really fit the category as I'm not too sure it could be labelled as "should have been good"...but it absolutely stunk, so it deserves a vote somewhere...)
5. Worst movie, full stop: School for Scoundrels
-runner up: Mystery Men
All right, I'll play.
Worst well-regarded film - anything by Michael Moore. How his propaganda can be called a documentary is beyond me. He's like all the negative stereotypes about bloggers, except he doesn't blog.
Most overhyped film - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After first watching, I'd have put it in worst well-regarded, but I watched it again and realized that part of the reason I hated it so much the first go round wasn't that it was bad, but that it wasn't great.
Worst film to win a best picture Oscar - I don't actually follow the Oscars, so I had to refer to the Wikipedia list, where I realized that I actually liked most of the ones I've seen. I avoided the bad ones because, well, I thought they'd suck. Having said that, Titanic wins it for me, mostly since I saw it with a hot chick who thought it was the most romantic movie ever, and I still went home alone. She even walked home rather than accept a drive with me. Gladiator was pretty horrible too. Wasn't too fond of Braveheart, but that's more because of the shoddy history than anything else.
Most disappointing film - gonna have to say Phantom Menace here, kind of a copout, but I loved the original Star Wars movies (saw Empire and Jedi first-run as a kid, Star Wars in a double-feature with Empire again).
Worst movie, full stop - you guys don't watch bad movies. I, on the other hand, have been known to go out of my way to find "so bad they're good" flicks. The Leprechaun series is a good example, as are the Child's Play past the first one. Some movies turn out to be just bad. Leprechaun In Space is one of these. I'd rather watch "Hocky Scores" back to back for 24 hours straight than watch 5 minutes of this thing ever again. House of the Dead is right down there too, but Uwe Boll is pretty cool, so Leprechaun wins.
1. Worst well-regarded film: Good Night and Good Luck. Yes it is in black and white, and features rants against communism. It is also handy as a cure for insomnia.
2. Most overhyped film: Transformers. Lousy dialogue, lousy plot, and bad acting, and somehow almost all of my friends recommended it.
3. Worst film to win a best picture Oscar: Dances With Wolves. Sorry, but I thought the whole noble savage routine had already run its course. Caveat: There are a lot of best picture winners that I have not seen.
4. Most disappointing film: Alexander. Given the potential of film on this subject and with that cast had, what a waste. If somebody wants to make a film with the central tenet being homosexuality, at least the advertising should be honest. Plus, the actual depiction of so many classic characters (Alexander, Ptolemy, Aristotle, etc.) was way off-base.
5. Worst movie, full stop: I would have said Master of Disguise, but instead I will go with any of the three post-Tim Burton, pre-Christopher Nolan Batman films.
mike p: lmao, what the hell did you DO? That was a classic story. The only good thing to ever come from Titanic is that story.
Beauty.
The hands-down most overhyped film of recent memory has to be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The acting is good in that both leads are note-perfect as horrible, unsympathetic people, while the so-called groundbreaking visual effects were all nicked from Being John Malkovich.
As for movies that should have been good but weren't I'll say Colverfield because I just watched it. JJ Abrams and rampaging space monsters looks solid on paper, but what a fucking piece of shit.
Guess I'll take a go before this topic fades:
1.) Magnolia. Hate, hate this movie. A hodge-podge of paper-thin, unsympathetic characters in a poorly cobbled together series of events that can only be charitebly called a plot. Stinks of pretension, particularly the grand "ending".
2.) Mystic River. I remember walking out of that film feeling emotionally manipulated and wondering WTF the hype was all about.
3.) Forrest Gump. This was a tough one because I tend to pointedly avoid many so-called "best pictures". Still, I'll go with the Gump. My father aptly described it back in the day as a movie about "a retard with lots of luck."
4.) Star Wars - Phantom Menace. Another popular choice. It's just so damn hard to get around how long one waited for the next batch of Star Wars films and how incredibly terrible they were. Phantom Menace was the worst of the lot. Tim Burton's second Batman film might belong here too.
5.) Mullholland Drive. I know I already said "Master of Disguise", but I now think my second choice is the better pick. Aside from a lesbian love-scene, there is almost not a single thing worth watching in Lynch's over-long nightmarish abortion. Nonsense stacked atop nonsense with the added gall to marvel at the resultant heights.
Lowetide: wish I knew man, wish I knew. Not much at all, which may have been the problem. I never really got a chance to find out. C'est la vie.
Women are a mystery, and that's a fact.
1. Fight Club. Come on, it doesn't even make sense. Half-decent film with good fight scenes up until the last half-hour which completely ruins the film.
2. Any of the Bourne movies. The acting is stale and the filming is so shaky that you can't even watch the fight scenes properly.
3. A Beautiful Mind. It turned a good film about game theory into a boring film about some nutter. But then again, I may be the only one who would have enjoyed a full two hour film about game theory…
4. The 3rd Matrix. Ruined the series for me. I can't even watch the first two movies anymore.
5. 2001: A Space Travesty. I think it ran for about 1 week in the theatre, and even that was too long. I got free tickets and still wanted to be compensated for my wasted 99 minutes. People actually got up and left half-way through. Easily Leslie "Dick Dix" Nielsen's worst work ever.
It's just so damn hard to get around how long one waited for the next batch of Star Wars films and how incredibly terrible they were.
I don't understand why it was such a shock given how shitty the first three films were. Star Wars: not just the most overrated movies ever, but quite possibly the most overrated anything of all time.
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Worst film? Three Words: Master of Disguise. Honorable mention to almost anything by David Lynch (written and directed).
I dont think the Roy signing is a two-way deal BTW.
Jeez, I'm not good at this negativity thing either.
Still, I guess one of the movies I hated the most was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I spent four dollars to see this movie seven years ago, and I'm still pissed off.
I'm not much of a cinemaphile, either, so it's less likely to be about whole movies than specific bits, in some cases. Also, the tendencies of my childhood will probably shine through here, given that mine is still somewhat recent.
1) Despite my parents' best efforts, I haven't seen many "classic" films to really be able to make a statement here. However, I did find when I watched Harvey that it was kind of painful, making comedy from the experiences of "patients" at sanitariums (sanitaria?) and all. While the overall message was, I guess, positive, I was totally horrified by that area of the film.
2) I hated Shrek 2. I couldn't get what everyone was so excited about. Dishonourable mention to the last two Star Trek movies. See also "most unnecessary sequel."
3) I haven't seen a single one of those movies. Not one. My parents would answer Shakespeare in Love, so we'll go with that.
4) To avoid repetition, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I knew better than to get excited for it, because they cast Americans in key roles (Sam Rockwell, Mos Def), and Americans don't do British comedy well, full stop. What served as a second dagger, through the spine and straight to the heart, was them cutting off the motherfucking punch lines of some of the best jokes in the series, and devoting a good 20 minutes of plot to some new piece of the story that Adams wrote before he died, which he never got a chance to actually make funny. At least that dude from the British version of The Office was good as Arthur Dent.
5) I have the same problem as Matt, in that I tend to steadfastly avoid garbage whenever possible. Probably one of those early-90s video game adaptations, like Street Fighter or any of the Mortal Kombat movies after the first one. I'd have to think on that some.
I could do a completely different list tomorrow.
1.Pulp Fiction
2.The Full Monty
3.Ordinary People [1980]
4.Casino Royale [1967] - Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Charles Boyer, George Raft, Jean-Paul Belmondo, John Huston....
5.Little Miss Sunshine [from a list of 14,079]
# posted by 
: July 21, 2008 2:31 pm
: July 21, 2008 2:31 pm Movies are my job, but I'll keep it in the realm of popular knowledge. Garden State could take about three of those categories for me. But...
1. Scarface. Spelling out all subtext and dumping blood all over the place does not make a good film. Oliver Stone is a terrible, terrible writer/human being.
2. Goodfellas gets way more credit than it deserves. Scorcese made some fine, fine films in the 1970s and early '80s, thanks mostly to Paul Schrader, but Goodfellas is just a really rote, totally average gangster film with a few quotable scenes. I think it's result of too many people listening to critics who were warmly soaking up Scorcese's decade-long afterglow/desperate to see anything halfway decent from him after Last Temptation.
3. Paul Haggis' Crash. Big, screaming, trying-too-hard-to-be-important mess.
4. Kill Bill Part II. I thought the first part was pretty much the most awesome thing Quentin Tarantino has ever done, but he sort of abandoned the hyperstylized thing for Tarantino-brand talking (like Death Proof, which sucked outright, but I was expecting as much) and it got pretty boring. Though the Superman speech at the end was good.
5. Garden State. I hate this movie so much: if you like it, you should stop watching movies. Forever.
Dave: the dog & baby from Family Guy had a pretty funny 3-minute bit at last year's Emmys. Your take on Garden State reminds me of the little Zach Braff blast at about the 0:45 mark.
I'll play:
1) Donnie Darko. The only way Richard Kelly could have been more convoluted is if he had written in a space-time continuu...ohhh wait, he just did. Now I'll navigate through the official website to try and figure this shit out, and ultimately be told to read a non-existent book. Ugh. Why do so many people I know swear by it? Good soundtrack though.
2) A lot of people talked up Into the Wild this year, but for me it was an extremely irritating movie. The main character was likeable enough, but I don't see how viewers can get past his ridiculous naivete.
3) Titanic is the easy answer but I'm going to go with American Beauty here. The entire counterculture bent just grates on me; of course the marine homophobe is a closet homosexual/Nazi and Kevin Spacey's character disavows materialism by buying sportscars.
4) The 3 that Matt listed are excellent choices. I would also add either of The Matrix sequels. Maybe I just hate Baudrillard too much to get past the ideas.
5) Norbit. Let's just say that there is a lot of downtime on military bases, and this was a valid diversion for us. It's horrible even by Eddie Murphy standards.
# posted by : July 21, 2008 3:44 pm
: July 21, 2008 3:44 pm Your take on Garden State reminds me of the little Zach Braff blast
I totally liked Braff when he was on Scrubs (that is, when I used to watch it, about six years ago), but Garden State soured me on everything. It was directed like a series of shitty music videos, and Natalie Portman's whole painfully "quirky" pixie girl routine made me want to throw up on her face. I still hate her to this day, as a matter of fact. But not nearly as much as Braff.
5. Garden State. I hate this movie so much: if you like it, you should stop watching movies. Forever.
haha...I actually enjoyed much of Garden State, although being beaten over the head with metaphor isn't ideal. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the soundtrack.
# posted by : July 21, 2008 3:48 pm
: July 21, 2008 3:48 pm Another option for (2) is Juno. We get it - she is deliciously quirky and Michael Cera is good at portraying an awkward teenager. Too much hype (but I admit laughing a bunch of times).
I would add more but I'll give other people a chance.
# posted by : July 21, 2008 3:56 pm
: July 21, 2008 3:56 pm This list suffers from the fact that I haven't seen all that many movies (I've only seen twelve best picture winners, and I can barely remember a few of them) and my disinclination to put much thought into this (my answer to #2 is just what jumped immediately to mind, for example, and might have been different if I'd really considered it).
1. I'm tempted to say Children of Men, despite never having seen it, because everybody was talking about how awesome the preview made it look, despite the fact that the preview made it look terrible. Other than that, I don't know - is 300 sufficiently well-regarded to qualify?
2. Juno. Not bad, just severely overrated.
3. Probably Titanic. As I understand it, the more popular picks (among those that I've seen) are Rocky and Forrest Gump, but I'll not hear a word against either of those.
4. Fierce Creatures, maybe? Would I look like too much of a doofus if I said The Naked Gun 33 1/3?
5. Lots of competition - Biodome, Catwoman, Dungeons & Dragons, and probably a couple of others that I can't remember offhand.
As for Garden State, I understand the hostility, but repopularizing Simon and Garfunkel's "Only Living Boy in New York" buys a movie a lot of slack from me.
Unable to laugh during Talledega Nights? Really? I laughed my ass off in that movie. What about the dinner table scene? Or the PSA's? Or the "this is like a Whitesnake video" scene? Nothing?
Don't have time to go through the list, but I'll just answer Worst Film: 2008's "Wanted".
That movie was a two hour slap in the face. I have never so thoroughly despised a film before I watched that piece of shit a few weeks ago.
I'm bored, so I'll bite. I don't watch a lot of movies outside my usual norm of shitty comedies and huge money blockbuster action movies.
1: Didn't really find Raiders of the Lost Ark all that entertaining.
2: The Dark Knight. Yeah I'm going to probably get killed for this one, but as decent as the Joker was, would he have been considered that great if he wasn't dead? Christian Bale has only one emotion as Batman; seriously fucking angry. Not enough Morgan Freeman
3: I've seen parts of 3 or 4 of them (Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, LOTR), but of the ones I've seen it's The Sound of Music...because it's a musical. It's a personal preference and probably was a decent movie.
4: Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Great cast, crappy plot. Opening up the movie in SINGAPORE? I know the 1600's didn't know much of their Geography but still...
5: The Ringer. Only movie I've ever turned off halfway through. Johnny Knoxville is not funny unless he has some explosive item near his genetalia, and even then it's the bottle rocket that's funny and not him.
I used to work in a video store and spent much of my twenties watching movies of every description.
1) Have to go with Scarface - it was not good at all.
2) Jesus every movie is overhyped these days; scratch that, everything is overhyped these days.
I'd have to say The Matrix - maybe I just don't get it. Boring.
3) How about Forrest, Forrest Gump? It was fun but better then Pulp Fiction? Come on.
4) Superbad. Superbad. I love Judd Apatow but I hated this movie, worse thing about it is we returned it to the wrong store or some shit and had to buy it.
5)Howard The Duck.
My friends and I watch bad movies all too often, usually (hopefully) for entertainment value, but even then there are movies from which you cannot squeeze anything but cringes:
1) Anchorman - save for Steve Carell, this is a painful one for me to watch.
2) Superbad - I was surprised by how much I liked previous Apatow movies, but this one just didn't work well for me at all, despite the face everyone else seemed to enjoy it.
3) The English Patient - ow.
4) No Country for Old Men - Not bad so much as underwhelming. Given all the hype and my previous enjoyment of the Coen brothers' films, I really thought I'd like this one.
5) The Cat in the Hat - bar none, the most painful-to-watch movie we've ever seen in our bad-movie ritual. I can't imagine a single decision made in the making of this film that could have been worse. That a movie this inappropriate was marketed towards kids is horrifying.
(As an aside, the clear winner for most entertaining bad movie is The Core, hands down.)
1. Classically, I'd say Gone with the Wind. Maybe I just don't like it because I'm not a girl, but it just seemed kinda shitty to me. Recently, I'd say Blood Diamond.
2. Juno. I was out when I heard her friend say, "Honest to blog?" Also acceptable: Borat, Napoleon Dynamite, The Departed.
3. West Side Story, Chicago, Shakespeare in Love. Also:
No Country For Old Men
Haha, what?
4. Reign of Fire. Dragons fighting humans in an apocalyptic future, starring Christian Bale, Gerard Butler and Matthew McConaughey. How does that not work?
5. Little Nicky or The Notebook.
Wow Rudykelly, based on the movies you've seen I'm going to assume that your girlfriend beats the shit out of you.
My girlfriend at the time cried when I told her I hated The Notebook because she thought it meant I couldn't love her. She sucked.
1.) THX 1138 - I lack the vocabulary to express how horrible this movie is, though the critics seem to love it.
2.) The Matrix - let's pretend to make a movie with depth and philosophy and follow through on none of the ideas.
3.) It's a toss-up between Rocky and Titanic. Titanic was ridiculously melodramatic with no style or substance, and I'm unable to take Sly Stallone seriously.
4.) The Two Towers - Seriously.
5.) Highlander II - The only movie I've ever seen that is so bad that it makes the movie that came before it worse. This will be quickly replaced if The Last Battle (The last Narnia book) is made into a film, as it had the power to destroy all 6 books that came before it.
1) Worst well-regarded film (ie not deserving of its place in the pantheon?) The Searchers. 1956. John Ford, John Wayne. A Western that's supposed to be a comment about racism but is bloated in every way: improbable color, ridiculous orchestral score, cringe-worthy emoting. Barely watchable.
Dishonorable Mention: Easy Rider. Incompetently made, self-indulgent, hippie crap.
2) Most over-hyped? Citizen Kane. It's not a bad film, but it's easily the runaway winner as Most Over-Hyped. Film critics get boned up over it because Orson Welles invented all sorts of camera work. Big woop. There's nothing remarkable about the story or the acting. Rosebud is nominally Kane's sled but in fact was William Randolph Hearst's pet name for his girlfriend's nether region.
Runner-up: Gone With the Wind. OK, so it made spectacular use of Technicolor. One time my wife turned it on and Vivien Leigh was crying. We went for a TWO-HOUR walk and when we got back Leigh was still crying. I was praying she'd die in the Fire.
3) Worst to Win Oscar? The 2000s alone are chock full of worthy candidates, but No Country for Old Men is so pointlessly violent I felt violated. Worse, I fear I may never be able to excise the memory of it from my brain.
Runner-Up: Gladiator. It's a revenge fantasy dressed up in swords and sandals.
4) Most Disappointing Film? Broken Flowers. 2005. Bill Murray is an aging rich Lothario who gets a letter from a heretofore unknown son. He seeks out a bunch of long ago ex-girlfriends to try figure out which one popped the kid. What a waste of a great premise and a stacked cast. Her Indoors thought they should have cast Jeff Bridges in the lead role.
Runner up: Every movie John Cusack's ever been in except Being John Malkovich. He should fire his agent for putting him in so many dogs.
5) Worst Movie (major studio release)? Wild Wild West. You put a black guy and an Englishman together in a sci-fi Western. What could possibly go wrong?
Runnerup: Black Snake Moan. 2006. This movie is so unredeemingly awful that everyone from Samuel Jackson down to the caterer should be banished from Hollywood.
1) Anything with Denzel Washington.
2) Juno. A smart-ass prego teenager as its delightful hero? I don't think so.
3) It's a tie between Crash and The Departed.
4) Cosh is right -- Hitchhiker's Guide was a disappointment, although how one could actually film an essentially unfilmable book is beyond me.
5) Exit to Eden. Rosie O'Donnell in dominatrix gear. 'nuff said.
I just want to second the above poster who picked American Beauty as absolute worst move to win Best Picture.
Judging by the depth of the characters, the screenplay might have been the work of a 14 year old. I won't both to list all the outrageously offensive things in it...
# posted by : July 21, 2008 9:53 pm
: July 21, 2008 9:53 pm 1. Gone with the Wind. It's eleven hours long and the only thing I remember is the drapes.
2. ET
3. Amadeus. "Rock Me Amadeus" was better.
4. The Enlgish Patient. Death took too long, if death happens earlier maybe something interesting might have happened.
5. Prince of Tides.
A bad movie survey? I'll be there like shareware!
1) Worst well-regarded film: If I disqualify myself from plain ol' 'genres I don't like' (which I think is the idea here), I'd probably roll with A Clockwork Orange. It combined nauseating semi-random unpleasantness without at least the enjoyable fantasy-world excess of, say, Scarface.
Honorable Mention, Kubrick Division: the first half of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a prolonged nap and then Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood show up and it's go time. I mean, when you think about that movie, you think about the monkey throwing the bone in the air and then an endless series of Dave-Frank-HAL moments and then the trippy ending and you completely forget that there's, like, an hour and a half of movie that you're totally skipping over.
2) Most Overhyped Film: Pan's Labyrinth featured characters so two-dimensional that you could use them as tracing paper, a plot that I felt was better ignored than thought about, and lots of Lucas-style annoying CGI. But whereas Star Wars had shiny spaceships, Pan's Labyrinth had Mike Tyson with eyes in his palms and all of a sudden that's awesome. God, I need a drink. Why did I ever decide to think about these movies again? :P
Honorable Mention, Forgetting That Putting CGI Characters in the Movie Means that You Still Have to Have Actual Character Division: Pick any of Jackson's three The Lord of the Rings movies. I'm not convinced he ever read the actual books: he just cribbed Ralph Bakshi's old screenplay and decided to pad it out by adding lots of tedious slow-motion fight scenes.
3) Worst "Best Picture": Got to be Titanic, which was like Gone with the Wind without the good ol' Southern charm and with Leonardo DiCaprio instead of Clark Cable. I was eleven when it came out, but in hindsight it sounds almost like a story from The Onion.
Honorable Mention, Films Where a Major Theme is Getting Over Water Division: Bridge on the River Kwai. Dated, dull, and I always thought Alec Guinness was overrated as an actor. Had some interesting themes, but shouldn't a best picture have more for it than "some interesting themes"?
4) Most disappointing film: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which could easily have answered question two and provided a sequel to answer question three. I'm one of those guys who can quote lengthy passages of the book verbatim, I went to see Fellowship just before my birthday, and I went out of the theatre with the thousand-yard stare all the way from West Edmonton Mall to St. Albert. I'd expected either genius or something completely divorced from the book to the extent that I could ignore it. What I got was mindblowing tedium and a permenant hatred for New Zealand.
Honorable Mention, ah, hell, the other two were just as bad.
5) Worst movie: I'll give you a hint. It featured Liv Tyler and a gang of scrappy misfits who may have been simple but who were also the last hope for saving the world.
That's right, it's Armageddon! I DON'T WANNA CLOOOOOSE MY EYES, DON'T WANNA FALL ASLEEP, BABY, 'CAUSE I oh god I can taste vomit surging into my skull.
I DON'T WANNA CLOOOOOSE MY EYES, DON'T WANNA FALL ASLEEP, BABY, 'CAUSE I oh god I can taste vomit surging into my skull.
That was the greatest hair metal ballad of the 1990s. It's like having sex on a burning American flag, while eagles drive Pontiacs in the background.
1. The Passion of the Christ. The Bible used as exploitation film fodder.
2. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. How to make a horrifically hyped kung fu picture boring as hell.
3. Rain Man. We have this film to thank for Tom Cruise's fantasy that he can be a serious actor.
4. Strange Brew. How could the Mackenzies go so wrong?
5. Leolo. Most people haven't seen this French-Canadian tripefest, and you're the lucky ones. It starts with someone peeing off a balcony and "builds" toward a cinematic depiction of beastiality. Somehow it's on Ebert's best film list. I was forced to watch in Canadian Film class. Ugh.
Let me quote one of imdb.com's user comments: "You may regret seeing this but it's worth whatever irrepareable (sic) mental problems."
No, it's not.
I can't believe I forgot both Highlander II and Crouching Tiger. The former went from bad to so bad it's good to so bad it's horrible faster than any movie I've ever seen, and the latter was overblown wirework and nonsense. I also can't believe I forgot that Return of the King won 37 Oscars a few years ago, so I have seen one.
And at the risk of being self-aggrandizing, I had Hitchhiker's way back in Comment #3.
I'm kicking myself for forgetting Napoleon Dynamite and Crouching Tiger. Also, I just remembered that I possibly should have made space in one of the first two categories for There Will be Blood. I haven't seen No Country, but based on comments here last year might have been the year of the overhyped Best Picture nominee, what with those two and Juno. I'm glad the Coen brothers won, though, just on principle.
Most overhyped this year - Wall-E. Critics loved it, kids get bored with it, and parents realize it's an animated version of Space Odyssey.
That's just sad that anybody would think Aerosmith was "metal". What, is Whitesnake too hardcore for you?
1. Worst well-regarded film: Royal Tenenbaums
2. Most overhyped film: Bee-Movie
3. Worst film to win a best picture Oscar: No Country for Old Men
The three above weren't good, nor were they awful. The next three though...completely putrid.
4. Most disappointing film: Miami Vice (technically it doesn't really fit the category as I'm not too sure it could be labelled as "should have been good"...but it absolutely stunk, so it deserves a vote somewhere...)
5. Worst movie, full stop: School for Scoundrels
-runner up: Mystery Men
# posted by : July 22, 2008 4:32 pm
: July 22, 2008 4:32 pm All right, I'll play.
Worst well-regarded film - anything by Michael Moore. How his propaganda can be called a documentary is beyond me. He's like all the negative stereotypes about bloggers, except he doesn't blog.
Most overhyped film - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. After first watching, I'd have put it in worst well-regarded, but I watched it again and realized that part of the reason I hated it so much the first go round wasn't that it was bad, but that it wasn't great.
Worst film to win a best picture Oscar - I don't actually follow the Oscars, so I had to refer to the Wikipedia list, where I realized that I actually liked most of the ones I've seen. I avoided the bad ones because, well, I thought they'd suck. Having said that, Titanic wins it for me, mostly since I saw it with a hot chick who thought it was the most romantic movie ever, and I still went home alone. She even walked home rather than accept a drive with me. Gladiator was pretty horrible too. Wasn't too fond of Braveheart, but that's more because of the shoddy history than anything else.
Most disappointing film - gonna have to say Phantom Menace here, kind of a copout, but I loved the original Star Wars movies (saw Empire and Jedi first-run as a kid, Star Wars in a double-feature with Empire again).
Worst movie, full stop - you guys don't watch bad movies. I, on the other hand, have been known to go out of my way to find "so bad they're good" flicks. The Leprechaun series is a good example, as are the Child's Play past the first one. Some movies turn out to be just bad. Leprechaun In Space is one of these. I'd rather watch "Hocky Scores" back to back for 24 hours straight than watch 5 minutes of this thing ever again. House of the Dead is right down there too, but Uwe Boll is pretty cool, so Leprechaun wins.
# posted by : July 22, 2008 8:01 pm
: July 22, 2008 8:01 pm 1. Worst well-regarded film: Good Night and Good Luck. Yes it is in black and white, and features rants against communism. It is also handy as a cure for insomnia.
2. Most overhyped film: Transformers. Lousy dialogue, lousy plot, and bad acting, and somehow almost all of my friends recommended it.
3. Worst film to win a best picture Oscar: Dances With Wolves. Sorry, but I thought the whole noble savage routine had already run its course. Caveat: There are a lot of best picture winners that I have not seen.
4. Most disappointing film: Alexander. Given the potential of film on this subject and with that cast had, what a waste. If somebody wants to make a film with the central tenet being homosexuality, at least the advertising should be honest. Plus, the actual depiction of so many classic characters (Alexander, Ptolemy, Aristotle, etc.) was way off-base.
5. Worst movie, full stop: I would have said Master of Disguise, but instead I will go with any of the three post-Tim Burton, pre-Christopher Nolan Batman films.
mike p: lmao, what the hell did you DO? That was a classic story. The only good thing to ever come from Titanic is that story.
Beauty.
The hands-down most overhyped film of recent memory has to be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The acting is good in that both leads are note-perfect as horrible, unsympathetic people, while the so-called groundbreaking visual effects were all nicked from Being John Malkovich.
As for movies that should have been good but weren't I'll say Colverfield because I just watched it. JJ Abrams and rampaging space monsters looks solid on paper, but what a fucking piece of shit.
Guess I'll take a go before this topic fades:
1.) Magnolia. Hate, hate this movie. A hodge-podge of paper-thin, unsympathetic characters in a poorly cobbled together series of events that can only be charitebly called a plot. Stinks of pretension, particularly the grand "ending".
2.) Mystic River. I remember walking out of that film feeling emotionally manipulated and wondering WTF the hype was all about.
3.) Forrest Gump. This was a tough one because I tend to pointedly avoid many so-called "best pictures". Still, I'll go with the Gump. My father aptly described it back in the day as a movie about "a retard with lots of luck."
4.) Star Wars - Phantom Menace. Another popular choice. It's just so damn hard to get around how long one waited for the next batch of Star Wars films and how incredibly terrible they were. Phantom Menace was the worst of the lot. Tim Burton's second Batman film might belong here too.
5.) Mullholland Drive. I know I already said "Master of Disguise", but I now think my second choice is the better pick. Aside from a lesbian love-scene, there is almost not a single thing worth watching in Lynch's over-long nightmarish abortion. Nonsense stacked atop nonsense with the added gall to marvel at the resultant heights.
Lowetide: wish I knew man, wish I knew. Not much at all, which may have been the problem. I never really got a chance to find out. C'est la vie.
Women are a mystery, and that's a fact.
1. Fight Club. Come on, it doesn't even make sense. Half-decent film with good fight scenes up until the last half-hour which completely ruins the film.
2. Any of the Bourne movies. The acting is stale and the filming is so shaky that you can't even watch the fight scenes properly.
3. A Beautiful Mind. It turned a good film about game theory into a boring film about some nutter. But then again, I may be the only one who would have enjoyed a full two hour film about game theory…
4. The 3rd Matrix. Ruined the series for me. I can't even watch the first two movies anymore.
5. 2001: A Space Travesty. I think it ran for about 1 week in the theatre, and even that was too long. I got free tickets and still wanted to be compensated for my wasted 99 minutes. People actually got up and left half-way through. Easily Leslie "Dick Dix" Nielsen's worst work ever.
# posted by : July 24, 2008 12:06 pm
: July 24, 2008 12:06 pm It's just so damn hard to get around how long one waited for the next batch of Star Wars films and how incredibly terrible they were.
I don't understand why it was such a shock given how shitty the first three films were. Star Wars: not just the most overrated movies ever, but quite possibly the most overrated anything of all time.
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