Tarantino, Four Rooms (1995). This is really unbelievable bad, and Tarantinos part still is the best of the four episodes in this collaborative work. The whole thing is a pain to watch. Four Rooms may be the lousiest film of all the other participating directors, too (Robert Rodriguez, Alexandre Rockwell, Allison Anders).
Fellini’s Satyricon might be the most horrifyingly awful movie ever made. It is the mean, narrow, and immature ramblings of a director who had reached a point were he felt he was some kind of deity of cinema, and proceeded to test both the mental capacity of his audience and our penchant for putting up with such lousy craft as Fellini has on show here. It really is as if he’s testing to see just how idiotic the world has become. It’s all the more worse because all of his early films had such colossal capacity to connect.
I really do not like:
Fellini, Voice of the Moon
Hitchcock, Juno and the Paycock
Antonioni, The Oberwald Mystery
“Fellini’s Satyricon might be the most horrifyingly awful movie ever made.”
Have you seen Roma?
It’s becoming more frequent that good directors make one or two movies for the masses to get enough money before they try to film a more personal movie. In that case, I think it is a fair reason (though a bit painful for their followers)
Someone called Bergman’s “The Silence” a lousy movie? Wow. I would think if you like Bergman at all that you would at least respect “The Silence,” though it’s a bit unfortunate to see Ingrid Thulin dying of TB (or whatever) in sweltering hotel room in full, perfectly applied makeup with her eyebrows plucked and highlighted.
I find things to like in almost all Bergman films (even “The Touch” and “The Serpent’s Egg”) except, perhaps, “All These Women,” a “comedy” that made me laugh exactly once in its otherwise interminably long 80 minutes.
What about Michael Ritchie? He made The Candidate and Smile, and since then just dross.
Brian De Palma – Bonfire of the Vanities
Scorsese – Gangs of NY, Age of Innocence, New York New York
Sidney Lumet – The Wiz
Coppola – One from the Heart, Jack
Spielberg – 1941
Lucas – Phantom Menace
Hitchcock – Torn Curtain
I’d argue that the Hitchcock films (with the possible exception of the deadly dull Topaz) do not warrent inclusion here
These do:
DePalma – ANYTHING since Casualties of War (one of the great unsung movies of the ‘80s)
Lucas – ANYTHING since Star Wars (77)
W. Allen – September (WTF?)
Lumet – (The Wiz is at least so outre, it’s a curiousity…he directed the Sharon Stone remake of Gloria…YIKES!)
Scorsese – Gangs of NY (sometimes studio-bound films work…this one didn’t)
B. Schroeder – Kiss of Death (hack work from one of the most risk-taking directors)
Godard – Hail Mary (sleep inducing faux controversy from kooky Godard)
W. Allen – September (WTF?) September was GReat !!!
Stanley Kubrick- EYES WIDE SHUT
David Lynch- INLAND EMPIRE
Lawrence Kasdan- DREAMCATCHER
Brian De Palma- THE BLACK DAHLIA
M. Night Shyamalan- THE HAPPENING, LADY IN THE WATER
Wong Kar Wai- MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS
I thought Satyricon was a masterpiece, and actually one of Fellini’s best movies.
The same goes for Marnie.
I’m going for Altman’s MASH. Sorry guys, I just didn’t like it.
Someone mentioned John Huston, and only one film (“Annie”? Was that it? He did that?), but I think a large part of his later work was garbage. Silly performances and massive amounts of unconvincing dialogue, not to mention he somehow forgot how to pace his scenes and entire films (Wiseblood is totally crammed and sped through, yet Maltese Falcon’s final scene goes on for what, 15-20 min, not to mention it’s perfect?). I’ve only seen Wiseblood, The Dead, and Fat City from his later years but they’ve done nothing but irritate me.
Coppola’s horrific short LIFE WITHOUT ZOE in NEW YORK STORIES — the real lowpoint of a great director’s career. Stupid puerile story, gorgeously produced, about a poor little rich girl in New York City, the film has all the warmth and charm of Dick Cheney.
ANOTHER WOMAN — well, it seems pretty clear how Woody Allen could have allowed this disaster to happen. His ongoing fetishization of Berman led him to create what might be the worst film of his wildly uneven career. Bogus pretentious crap, blatant phony symbols and the worst kind of phony intellectual posturing. Not a single moment of honest humanity anywhere to be found in this piece of SHIT.
Yeah, I must agree, “Another Woman” was terribly boring and uninteresting. I did find “Interiors” to be really strong though.
“Now…The Fountain is indefensible. I will go to work on anyone who thinks it’ll be remembered ten years down the road. The film is a conceptual nightmare, something that should’ve been best left when aborted the first time.”
I accept your challenge, at least the first sentence (the second sentence will be proven or disproven next decade, now won’t it?).
The Fountain is conceptually very simple and structurally admirable. The three different stories aren’t something that will strike most philosophers as profound, but they still have their reasonable place in philosophy: that the Fountain of Youth can be found through religion, mysticism, or science, as you wish, and that most typically it is found through an understanding instead of ignorance of death. Again, this isn’t world-changing knowledge but it’s well presented in a visually compelling way, and pieced together by the structure, which is where this film REALLY shines. Sit back and enjoy the gorgeous visuals all you want, did you notice that the angles were basically exactly the same, in nearly the same order, for each of the three time periods? He doesn’t just tell the stories with different ideas in each segment, but actually gives them a rhyming pattern. This, for me, along with the visual rhymes of the circular graphic matches and the rhythm of the rays (literally, patterns of lines) that appear throughout the movie takes the formal concepts of Aronofsky’s work beyond the narrative and towards poetry. Now, I’ve seen a lot of cinepoems created throughout film history, and so I acknowledge that making a film follow a poetic as opposed to narrative or dream structure isn’t entirely knew, but Aronofsky pulled it off epicly. As in, literally, The Fountain is one of cinema’s few actual “epic poems”, which is why it gets compared so often to 2001: A Space Odyssey even though the two are very different (might as well compare Alighieri to Milton, there’s a lot in common but it’s much more informative to look at the differences).
That is my defense. Even if you don’t like my defense, it is a defense, and therefore makes the movie, uh, defensible. But even if you don’t like my defense, I honestly believe it to be a good defense and do believe that The Fountain will be remembered ten years from now.
IN terms of this topic proper: David Lynch gets mentioned from time to time here, but nobody has yet mentioned Wild at Heart. Basically, it seems he wanted to make a combined Wizard of Oz/Elvis Presley road movie with the look and feel of his other works, but instead he just got really annoying characters getting themselves into obnoxious situations. At least the soundtrack was great, as always.
—PolarisDiB
David Lynch’s THE STRAIGHT STORY
Wim Wender’s MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL. I know Wim hasn’t really been the same after WINGS OF DESIRE, but come on. Mel Gibson? What was he thinking? And that horrible, horrible script! I still can’t believe he made that film. Truly horrible.
I have to voice my disagreement with Satyricon. Not his best, but I still like it a lot.
What are 2001:A SPACE ODYSSEY and INLAND EMPIRE doing in this thread? Aaaaaacckkkkk!
Russell’s Gothic.
Yeah that’s a real nipples for eyes shocker, that one.
I agree with Aaron, Satyricon is one of Fellinis best and one of the greatest movies ever! And so is The Silence.
Cape Fear is the clearest outlier in Scorsese’s work and I kinda liked it. Guess I haven’t seen New York, New York or even Gangs for awhile.
Absolutely unwatchable to me is Fellini’s Satyricon. I tried and tried multiple times. Nothing connects in it very well and as outlandishand shocking as it must have been at the time it came out, the shock value doesn’t hold up over time and today seems absurd.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s “La Notte”…. I have also attempted to see it a few times and it just never ends – and there is nothing sympathetic about poeple bored with life. In another post I have mentioned “Rules of the Game” as a bummer – almost unwatchable except for the poor lttle rabbits.
I’m sorry, Satyricon is a masterpiece!
If you think it’s too “crazy” or “weird”, you’re not fit out to be a cinephile,Rodney!
“I’m sorry, Satyricon is a masterpiece!
If you think it’s too “crazy” or “weird”, you’re not fit out to be a cinephile,Rodney!”
really..this comes from the guy who thinks Truffaut and Yimou are mediocre,wow..
as if there aren’t people who think that Fellini is mediocre,by Jove!!!
Spielberg and Coppola have had far too many misfires to really mention. For Coppola, one could cite EVERY SINGLE film post-Apocalypse Now (it seems he just lost it after that one, which, having seen ‘Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Journey’, I can understand) is at best mediocre. Spielberg is a constant source of frustration for me. His early output was nothing short of brilliant. ‘Jaws’ is one of the best horror vehicles ever (and ‘Duel’ is no slouch in this matter, as well). However, it seems that when he decided he wanted to “grow up” he became increasingly manipulative. ‘The Color Purple’ is maudlin and full of saccharine. ‘Always’ is absolutely terrible. ‘Amistad’ is at best forgettable. ‘Saving Private Ryan’ is a bunch of empty filler and war movie cliches pasted together by two hyperkinetic battle sequences (‘Black Hawk Down’ is far superior to ‘Saving Private Ryan’ even at playing its own game). ‘A.I.’ is a Kubrick distopyan story polluted by Spielberg’s childish wide-eyed sensibilities. ‘Munich’ is one misstep after another (including the most unfortunate sequence in the man’s career- the murder of the hostages intercut with Eric Bana having sex with his wife).
Of his “serious” films, only ’Schindler’s List’, ‘Empire of the Sun’ (minus the third act), and ‘Catch Me if You Can’ hold up (in fact, ‘Catch Me If You Can’ feels like a perfect vehicle for his specific type of cinema).
…and then you can throw in the following:
‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’
‘Hook’
‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park’
‘War of the Worlds’
‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’
Earlier in this thread, somebody stated that they felt Fassbinder missed the mark on every other film (I disagree wholeheartedly). One should look at Spielberg’s output from the mid-1980s on, and try to say that statement doesn’t ring true for him. More duds than any director of his caliber.
Yes Dimitri, I find Truffaut and Yimou to be mediocre, because of their popular/mainstream ideologies and their too-classic narratives/charater development/camera choices.Life is not Antoine Doinel.There are a lot more interesting filmmakers out there than these two.I watch films to see something new, and Truffaut/Yimou never made me dream,think or listen to what they have to say: They only mildly entertain me, and for that, I think they’re mediocre.
I don’t like Fellini very much, but Satyricon is the best film he ever made, along with Nights in Cabiria and La Strada.
“They only mildly entertain me, and for that, I think they’re mediocre.”
thank you,at least you’re admitting it’s a subjective opinion and not a universal one ;)
Just wanted to add some more support to Fellini Satyricon- I think it is one of his very best films
witkacy
Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3