From what I’ve seen (Life Aquatic, Darjeeling Limited), I think Wes Anderson is completely mediocre.
Also I really hated Taxi Driver, If…, and, of course, the Boondock Saints… I really don’t like when movies try to justify brutal murders, like these did.
I can’t hate on No Country, or Fight Club. The movies just made so much damn sense to me when I saw them that they have had a lasting impression on me. Also, I loved the Dark Knight. Despite the hype and the fact that I have been an avid Batman fan since I was 5, it was nice to see something worthwhile, as opposed to detested Batman And Robin.
I can agree that 21 Grams was nothing special.
Inland Empire was a 180 minutes of contemplating suicide.
And I really didn’t like Jaws.
I think No Country was way over rated. The Coens have done much better and that film was just missing something. I also fill you with Crash. It could have been a lot more.
I would like to add Oldboy. Sure it’s got cool scenes but the plot holes were huge and I found the ending very predictable.
The Sound of Music
No Country a parable for Good vs. Evil? Hmm. Watch it again. I think the characters are far more complex than that—there’s a lot of gray area.
Citizen Kane
Crash. Never have I seen a more pretentious and convoluted mix-mash of racial stereotypes and people acting out on them. I find that the characters act through their “archetypes” rather than human beings.
I think it will always baffle me how this film could have won best picture considering it was going up against Brokeback Mountain. Don’t get me wrong, I like Haggis’s work, he’s a good screen-writer, but this is a terrible film.
Like Mr. Stanley Kubrick’s opinion of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, I find Crash to be a moronic story, full of lies.
Oh, I totally forgot. I fucking HATE Juno. I was majorly disappointed when it came out. I don’t even get how Diablo Cody won an oscar for best original screenplay. Slim pickings, I guess.
Jonathon – I was refering to what Roger Ebert and a few other critics said about the movie (I also read that Javier Bardem said he didn’t do research on the role because he was playing violence personified). Never watching it did I think of it as a parable, but after reading more about it later I figured that’s what they were going for. I think all those deeper meanings of what this movie’s about are half-baked.
But what’s complex about any of these characters? Anton’s a killing machine that flips a coin every now and then to decide if he should kill some inconsequential. Bell is a wistful kind-hearted sheriff that doesn’t really do anything good or bad (he would be the ineffectual Good if this was a parable). Moss is the every-man protagonist who finds himself over his head and against all odds. He’s not complex because we just see him as someone trying to survive, obviously he can’t be perfect. Of course there are gray areas, you’re taking good vs. evil too literally, the movie shows how little good there is, but I feel it’s just an action movie that vaguely draws on deeper meanings to come off more profound than it actually is. Like Blood Simple I think it’s just your standard genre picture done with more style than usual.
Hmm. Solid points. I still don’t really see it that way. For instance, I remember moments where Anton had a humanism about him, especially toward the end, when it seemed like he was tired of killing. I haven’t seen it in a while, but I definitely didn’t see it as “Good vs. Evil.” But even if it has parable elements, is that such a bad thing? I mean, The Seventh Seal had death personified. Lots of stories have done it throughout history—I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.
Sorry I can’t offer a more stimulating argument—I’d have to watch it again, first.
As a longtime Cronenberg fan, it shocked me how much I detested “History of Violence”. I don’t like it when fans use “selling out” as a reason for turning their backs on artists, but as Cronenberg’s films become more mainstream, the people who used to be turned off by him are now fans, and I walk away feeling deeply let down.
Movies that many people I know loved…but just grated on me and I hate:
Any Cormac McCarthy novel turned into a film…
I loathed No Country for Old Men and will never see The Road. In fact, after reading The Road, I will never read a Cormac McCarthy novel ever again.
No Country for Old Men is part of a list of films I call Complete Wastes of Time:
It includes (partially)
The Departed – everyone dies, by having their brains blown out. Joy.
No Country for Old Men – everyone dies except Death himself, with the police only existing as a Greek Chorus.
Atonement – Old lady feels bad for a mistake she can never atone for…so she re-writes history so she can. But she doesn’t deserve Atonement. She deserves to be crushed by something heavy.
Remains of the Day – Anthony Hopkins is the most inhibited and unchanging servant since Chance the Gardner—except Being There is a great film. Two and half hours of watching paint dry and Hopkins DO NOTHING. Hell, even Forrest Gump picked up on his opportunities.
These are films in which either every character dies or there is no denouement or change in the main character. Now, granted in some of these films that is the point: that Life is Random, that evil exists and indeed triumphs, and some people never rise above their station or situation…but that can be stated in a sentence, there is no need to sit through two to three hours of it.
Related to that list are Seven, Saving Private Ryan (except the amazing D-Day sequence), and The Dark Knight, which are films that I have seen once and never need to see again.
Seven is a nearly perfect film visually, but the breakdown of internal logic near the end and the telegraphed “shock” ending ruined what could have been one of the best serial killer/cop films ever made. As soon as Brad Pitt called out his personal info to an unseen person, you just know that it was the killer and that his choice would come back to destroy him. And sure enough, you are waiting for something to happen to his wife…and it does. And you just KNOW that the brilliant killer would push Pitt over the edge…and he does. A better way to mess with the audience and keep the killer’s internal sense of logic and honor would be for him to push Pitts buttons…by making him think that the killer had done something…when he hadn’t. Then only the “guilty” would have been punished.
Fincher made a much better film with Zodiac, which was a gripping procedural that slowly draws you in and turns the screws slowly, until you find yourself telling Gyllenhal to not go into the basement.
Saving Private Ryan was so forced, cliched and predictable (and the film structured after a Slasher film—right down to Vin Diesel, the “ethnic” character dying first) that any and all enjoyment was quickly drained out of it. We get it, Steve. War is Hell —and everyone is culpable. Had Spielberg focused on one event (either the beginning or the end) and allowed the events to play out in nearly real time, his themes of sacrifice and horror would have been better served than by shoehorning too much into his film. I tried watching it about a year ago…and had exactly the same reaction. The subject matter of world war ii was much better served by the mini-series, Band of Brothers, which had an authenticity in it’s events that was lacking from Saving Private Ryan.
The Dark Knight was a film that started so well that I was hopeful that it would be a continuation to the world that Nolan had created in the flawed but enjoyable Batman Begins…and was quickly disappointed in only being in Chicago and Heath Ledger’s flawed interpretation of The Joker…who is supposed to be the Clown Prince of Crime, not Osama Bin Bozo. Also, the film is so back heavy, they should have revealed Two Face only at the end…and allowed that character to be the villain in a third film which would have been all about the fallout of the events in The Dark Knight. In fact, I think that Nolan should stay away from popcorn franchises and only make his own films, like The Prestige, which are better quality and better uses of his time.
Oh, and one of the most disappointing films in recent memory was Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Jackson takes a childhood lark, and makes it so tedious and ponderous that it defies description. No subtlety. No joy. He makes his Skull Island so horrible and visually monotonous that I actually enjoyed the 1976 version of the story better than this film. This was a film that should have been fun…and was like attending a three-hour funeral with bad color processing and special effects. Jurassic Park felt more like King Kong than King Kong did…the one good thing that came out because of this film was the amazing DVD collectors edition of the original film, which I watch with some regularity.
Any film comedy that is really a bad half-hour sitcom episode stretched to 90 minutes:
Death at a Funeral
Meet the Parents
…well, almost any mass-audience American comedy film made in the last ten years.
SO, there is my bitch list. I am sure there are many films that I like that others hate.
Wow, Jeff, looks like you had some hate pent up inside you. Glad you had a chance to get it out.
oh u guys have to see this new bollywood film called YUVRAAJ…..ITS SO BAD THAT IT WOULD GET RAZZIES FOR THE NEXT 5YRS IN A ROW.
ALSO I AGREE WITHSOME OF THE ABOVE CHOICES LIKE
DARK KNIGHT
FIGHT CLUB
NO COUNTRY FOE OLD MEN.
Well I don’t feel too bad now about saying I didn’t care for No Country For Old Men and The Shining, but I can also mention another Coen Brothers film I never liked, Miller’s Crossing. That is one where their film geek roots really show, as they take bits from every 30’s gangster film imaginable and shove them all together. It doesn’t feel real or authentic at all. It also doesn’t help that the plot is simply two Dashell Hammett novels, The Glass Key and Red Harvest, stitched together with a little bit of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye tossed in as well.
I like Miller’s Crossing. But if you want to talk about a bad Coen film that really felt like a poor stitching-together of older genres: Untolerable Cruelty. They just took every 40s screwball comedy and madcap film and fused it into a really crappy romantic comedy. I love the Coens, but it was a pretty terrible movie.
Raging Bull, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Psycho
Oh, I loathed Grey Gardens: the Maysles Brothers trying to get us to enjoy the inane ramblings of two mentally ill women.
English Patient: I’m with Elaine Bennis on this. Minghella wants us to respond to a grand passion but gives us nothing by way of dialogue or character development to back it up. Just longing looks, a bit of fucking. You want real romance from Minghella? Try Truly, Madly, Deeply.
Also passionate loathing for The Aristrocrats, the doc. Appreciated the premise—how different comics approach material—but it didn’t change the fact that the joke was profoundly, resoundingly unfunny. The comics could do all the contortions they wanted; they were still working with the feeblest of material.
Ditto to No Country for old Men, . My additions: Little Miss Sunshine; Unforgiven; Dark Knight was overrated; so was Pulp Fiction
Spartacus – I bought the criterion version and watched it once and was just bored and wanted it to end. I watched Ben Hur around the same time and loved it, so I know it’s not something against 50s and 60s epics.
I second being bored with Spartacus, and I love Sword and Sandal movies and Kubrick films.
Anything by the talentless Kevin Smith. In revenge for having had to sit through Chasing Amy, I now picture his face at the bottom of each commode when watching The Phantom of Liberty.
I already said that I think No Country was overrated but I want to add to what I think it was about. It was about death. When your time comes, it comes and there is nothing you can do about it. I also think they should have had the killer die in the wreck.
This thread was dead. Why bring this hate back?
There are so many members playing hatemonger.
Post about things that you like and understand.
Of course, that last sentence is pointless.
Too many of you are ignorant adolescents who mistake negativism for intelligence.
To those I say, you don’t know cinema. There are worlds outside your knowledge.
Perhaps it is I who does not belong here.
I thought this site favored those who know what film is all about.
Maybe it does. But the filth always seems to wash back up, doesn’t it?
I’m sorry, Melissa Miranda. You had something special here.
Too many people have turned this into another trash-talk site.
And Garden State is a bad movie, yes.
But I thought this was a site whose members would have other subjects on their minds.
I thought I would finally have a place to participate in intelligent conversation.
I didn’t think the top thread would constantly involve, “What’s bad? What’s overrated?”
I really do wish all the people who instigate such things find the attention they starve for.
“A Glorious Death!”
Peace.
Donnie Darko sucked. Cormac McCarthy is a genius.
Sleepy Hollow (or “How to go out of your way to create mood with fancy production design and art direction, succeed in creating none whatsoever, and pale into insignificance beside the Disney original” – how sad is that!)
In the Bedroom
I had heard so many good things about this from so many people, and I tried really hard to like it…yeah, Spacek and Wilkinson do some fine work here. But other than that, I really hated this movie.
Kids, i just don’t like Harmony Korine very much:(
gothman
Donnie Darko is a movie I loathed, and continue to loathe, much to the amazement of virtually anyone I mention it to.