High-hyped movies that made you go "Meh"

Cafe Society
61

How about a hyped director that makes me go “meh”?

Tim Burton movies disappoint me more than thrill me.

While he has had some decent flicks (Edward Scissorhands- his masterpiece, Mars Attacks!- most people hated it but I like it’s tongue in cheek sillyness, and Beetlejuice- a whimsical kids movie)
and made a couple that were good more so because of the main characters and not the movie (Ed Wood, PeeWee’s Big Adventure)
he has also trashed some of the best source material and made boring movies with them.
Batman/Batman Returns- Everybody wanted dark kick-ass Batman ala’ Batman Begins. Burton gives us “whimsical” Batman.
Sleep Hollow- Everybody wants dark horror action. Burton gives us a “whimsical” headless horseman.
Planet of the Apes- Everybody wants a slick and powerful retelling of some of the best known creatures of film. Everybody was disappointed.
Big Fish- Looked like a promising whimsical story. It was okay.
Charlie & The Chocolate Factory- Again, takes on some of the greatest source material, and I was zzzzzzz… I’ll take my Gene Wilder any day.

62

Well I do strive for courtesy in my ramblings

Now indeed I have no problem with any of that but your OP framed it in different terms. You posted “Why? Why? Why?” when there were perfectly valid answers for those questions. Some you obviously didn’t buy (such as human curiosity/stupidity in looking too closely at the eggs to begin with) which is fair but others such as questioning the Doctor’s actions isn’t because the movie explains that in full.

This makes me feel like either you’re not understanding my point (or that I’m not understanding your rebuttal of my point which is quite possible) Liberal posted he fell asleep during Star Wars however he didn’t post “Why did they care about the Death Star? Why did they steal those plans? Why were they fighting the Empire to begin with? The movie sucked” you saw enough of Alien to decide it wasn’t your thing but you didn’t see enough to ask why things weren’t explained to your satisfaction.

63

Yeah, as one who wanted to search for any mention of the song “Bad” by U2, I feel your pain. :wink:

64

Man oh man, The Departed was not particularly good, for reasons I’ve detailed in a previous thread.

I really don’t get why so many people like that movie so much.

65

I’ve ranted about them before, so I’ll try to restrain myself, but Moulin Rouge and Sideways are two of the worst movies ever made, and both were described to me as movies I would “LOVE”.

I’m not sure I like what that says about me.

66

Unless you also tell me the name of a movie you thought was excellent, I cannot make heads-nor-tails of any of your “bad” movie opinions.

Telling me you hated 2001 is one thing.
Telling me you hated 2001 but loved Die Hard tells me volumes.

So I 'll go on the record saying the following were tedious/unwatchable
“Moulin Rouge”, “Twins”, “Curley Sue”, “Beaches”,“Dumb and Dumber”,“Spiderman”

Enjoyable were: “Animal House”, “Clerks”, “Alien”, “Clockwork Orange”, “Shining”,
“LOTR (all three)”.

67

Well, I could have stuck with the movie long enough to have my "Why?"s explained, but given how turned off I was by bailout time, I suspect the answers wouldn’t have impressed me either. :wink: Evil corporate masters using their employee pawns to a nefarious end? WOOOOO!!! What a shocker! No, sorry, that was snarky, but really, given that I found the characters to have less depth than a cardboard cutout, why should I care what motivated any of them?

Seriously, I do get your point about giving the work a chance to explain itself on its own terms. However, if one has found it impossible to accept those terms for a good quarter to half of the work in question, it’s hard to see how the rest could be any more palatable. The "Why?"s for me were irritants piled atop an overall boredom with the gestalt of the movie. And hey – when that monster erupted from the guy’s stomach, it wasn’t the least bit horrifying or frightening or, well, moving in any way for me; in fact I thought the thing looked rather silly (“slick little colon with teeth”). Why on Earth or beyond would you go on watching a monster movie with a monster you find ludicrous? Wouldn’t such a reaction make the entire enterprise seem silly?

Can’t speak for Lib, of course, but my suspicion is if he’d found Star Wars good enough that he wanted to know the answers to “Why did they care about the Death Star? Why did they steal those plans? Why were they fighting the Empire to begin with?” he would have stayed awake long enough to find out. That the answers to those questions didn’t motivate him to ward off Morpheus suggests he did indeed think the movie sucked. He just took a different route of escape than I did.

Let me ask you this: Have you never quit reading a book or watching a movie or TV show before the finish, because you just didn’t like it and thought it was a colossal waste of your time? And didn’t you find that certain nitpicky details of the work annoyed you, no matter how good an explanation they might have somewhere further along the way, simply because they were part of (what you considered) an overall godawful tedious waste of your time?

Oh, yeh, just thought of this: Remember how they were in the medical bay and that tentacle dangled behind Ripley, then the monster that hitch-hiked aboard plopped down? That sequence is supposed to give you a jolt, right? Only, for me, all it evoked was, “Oh, yeh, the scary thing behind the unwitting heroine. Bet it’s going to drop down and – uh-huh, there it goes.” Now, it could be that if I were fresh to the genre, that would have had the intended effect. But if that bit of business put me in a “Yeh yeh, what’s the next cliche?” frame of mind, does it seem likely that this particular movie could have overcome that degree of detachment?

68

The Godfather, Citizen Kane and Titanic…ten hours of my life I want back.

The Godfather was OK, but did it really need to be that long? It just drug on and on for me.

As for Citizen Kane…I understand that it’s an important movie that set landmarks in cinematography and storytelling…but that doesn’t mean it was a compelling movie.

And Titanic was just bad. Over-hyped and underwhelming.

69

As far as recent films go, I saw <i>Once</i>, which was touted as one of the best music films ever, and found the music irritating (no fault of the musicians; just not really my thing), the love story contrived, and really couldn’t remember much of the details of the film an hour or two after leaving the theater. I just couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

70

I passionately hated Titanic. So I guess that’s not a “meh” as mentioned in the OP. So what picture gave me a “meh?” A Few Good Men would be a candidate. I fell asleep half way through.

71

I agree with a lot of your points, but I wouldn’t classify Beetlejuice as a whimsical kids’ movie. It’s whimsical and fun, but definitely not just for kids, considering most of the subject matter. So many of the sex and death jokes went way over my head when I was a child.

Batman, maybe, but Batman Returns? That’s whimsical? Batman Returns seemed like typically dark Burton. And I really enjoyed it. A creepy, dark take on the Batman myth.

72

I don’t know what’s worse about Titanic—the godsawful song that got played to death everywhere or the movie itself.

73

I couldn’t stand this movie. Most of what I remember about it was being very bored.

74

EddyTeddyFreddy, I think part of your problem with *Alien *was that it was a product of its time, and it *was *groundbreaking and amazing (hence the hype) to the degree that every movie thereafter that in some way shared genre elements with it borrowed from it, so that by the time you saw it, you’d already seen its major elements done to death, and usually with poorer quality, in other movies.

To give you an idea why this was special at the time it came out:

[ul]
[li]Science fiction probably meant Star Trek to most people - shiny, clean spaceships filled with forward-thinking humanists exploring in the name of peace and knowledge. So the set design was shocking and interesting. The run-down factory appearance and the “space truckers” attitude made people sit up and take notice, and also I’m sure made it feel more real.[/li][li]Same kind of thing goes for the monster design. People were used to humanoid aliens in gaudy polyester, or laughably stiff rubber-headed bug-eyed monsters. H.R. Giger reached into a sick, twisted place with his design for the alien, and even if the movie itself bored you, take a look at some images of that puppy, and tell me that wouldn’t scare the shit out of you in a dark alley.[/li][li]The design also lent the movie its atmosphere. This is not just a monster movie. It’s about claustrophobia. The crew is completely unprepared to fight back, and totally incapable of running away. I think that is the real source of dread and horror, not that the monster was really scary, and had good “Boo!” moments.[/li][li]Personally, I think this movie was terrifying to a lot of people - especially men - because of the rape themes. A male crewman is attacked by a creature that frankly looks like it has a vulva for a “face,” with a penile organ which violently punches through his face mask and down his throat. For some time it has complete control over his body, during which time it “impregnates” him, and once the offspring has matured, it bursts forth from his body in a graphically bloody and painful manner. [/ul] [/li]
If you’re interested in more detail on the historical background and why the movie was groundbreaking, check out The Alien Saga . (I believe I saw it on TV when they showed an *Alien *marathon.) You get a taste of the revolutionary design and why people went so crazy over it, without having to sit through the movie.

I also surmise you disliked this because you were expecting something more like the sequel, *Aliens *- action, scary monsters chasing people, and so on - when, as I said, the horror of this movie is much more about atmosphere - the dinginess of the ship, and later the number of hidey holes it has; the look of the alien planet and the crashed ship; the building realization that they are totally screwed, with no way out; and the paranoia as it becomes clear that they’ve been sold out. It’s a slow burn, and not everyone’s cup of tea.

Oh, and I don’t think you’re supposed to like or sympathize with many of the characters. Ripley, yes. Dallas, possibly. Everyone else - they’re not meant to be sympathetic, but more to exemplify some human failings, and of course to serve as cannon fodder.

I don’t argue with you that you didn’t find it to your taste, and I don’t think you have to see a whole movie to decide you don’t like it. But as **Darkhold **said, some of the questions you raise as problems with the movie are in fact explained and used to good effect in the later section of the film.

Now, to add my nomination: The English Patient. I’d heard SOOOO much hype, but it wasn’t my husband’s type of thing at all, so I was really jazzed when it happened to be on TV while he was out of town. After it ended, I just stared at the TV, wondering if I’d watched the same movie as everyone who was lauding it to the skies. Basically, stupid, obnoxious people do stupid, obnoxious things, the leads have an affair for no discernible reason (YMMV, but I could sense no sexual chemistry at all), and it ends “tragically” (i.e., it would have been tragic if I’d cared at all about any of the characters).

75

Well, if you watched the whole movie (not to mention the sequel, which further develops this theme), you’d have seen

that the central theme of the movie is that humans are deliberately messing with the alien; the evil corporation intends for it to infect the crew, since they plan to recover the life form and market it as a biological weapon. Of course this plan goes wrong for all the reasons Jeff Goldblum spuriously outlined in Jurassic Park – man cannot control life, chaos is unpredictable, hubris will be punished, etc. Some of the crew members are in on this plot and are manipulating circumstances to increase the danger of infection (i.e., scary encounters with the beastie). This doesn’t absolve all the characters for their dumb risk-taking behavior, but it does make the whole scenario less absurdly improbable.

Sailboat

76

I don’t like Star Wars. I don’t like the original trilogy. I don’t like the prequels. I don’t like the cartoons or the games. I don’t like the music. There’s pretty much nothing about those movies that I find remotely enjoyable or pleasant.

My husband has threatened to divorce me over this. My family wants to disown me. Probably if anybody on this board ever had any respect for me, it’s gone now. I don’t care. I really don’t like those movies, and I sat through all 1000+ hours.

But as for other movies mentioned in this thread, I don’t hate Moulin Rouge, I adore The Big Lebowski, and I’d happily rewatch Magnolia.
Once is one of my new favorite movies. It makes me think of what Lost in Translation wanted to be if it weren’t quite so shallow (and I don’t hate LiT. It’s not my favorite flick, but I wasn’t angry i watched it).

77

Yeah, it tells me the second guy has taste. :stuck_out_tongue:

I kid, I kid.

I’ve never actually seen 2001, but implying Die Hard is some lesser movie because it’s an action flick punctuated by a man screaming “Yippie-ki-yay motherfucker!” is just wrong.

Die Hard is the perfect movie.

78

Thank you! Your explanation makes most excellent sense. Pity then that I didn’t see it when it first came out. I might well have had a far different reaction to it, or at least been more willing to sit through the whole thing.

[tangent]

What must it have been like to see, for example, Shakespeare’s plays with no previous knowledge of them? Putting aside the gulf in time and culture that separates us from his works, how can we possibly experience his plays with minds unaffected by all the references, out-of-context snippets, parodies, analyses, etc., that any educated citizen of the English-speaking world imbibes?

We rightly spoiler-box discussions of current works so as not to ruin the experience for others. But that can’t be done for works that have become thoroughly embedded in our culture, like Alien or The Godfather or Casablanca or, well, fill in your own candidates for icons. Try as we might, we can’t come to them without preconceptions, it seems to me, that will inevitably color how we perceive them.

79

Hey Pepperlandgirl - I feel the same way you do about Star Wars. And I thought I was the only one.

80

Yay! We’re not alone anymore!