# Most Over-Rated Film Directors
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [October 10, 2004, 10:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462 "2004-10-10T10:05:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@well\_he\_s\_back](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/well_he_s_back)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/41 "2004-10-11T00:57:31Z")
Interesting discussion.
Personally, I think Kubrick was, and still is I gues, way way overrated. But I could forgive him since he gave us Dr. Strangelove. It’s his super-intellectual admirers that really turned me off to him. That ones that always seem to imply that since I thought Eyes Wide Shut was worthless I should just go back to my trailer park. Too much air of pretension around the whole Kubrick cult.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/42 "2004-10-11T00:58:03Z")
> [@Gamaliel](#):
>
> Yeah, that’s it. Anyone who disputes the greatness of your Brave Visionary Auteur is just a mindless sheep afraid of the bold, terrifying insights of _Starship Troopers_. :rolleyes:
>
> Baa. Baa.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/43 "2004-10-11T01:03:59Z")
> [@well he's back](#):
>
> Interesting discussion.
>
> Personally, I think Kubrick was, and still is I gues, way way overrated. But I could forgive him since he gave us Dr. Strangelove. It’s his super-intellectual admirers that really turned me off to him. That ones that always seem to imply that since I thought Eyes Wide Shut was worthless I should just go back to my trailer park. Too much air of pretension around the whole Kubrick cult.
\*Pretension \*suggests they were lying to you. Another option is that they had a different approach to his films and saw something different from what you saw. Some books are difficult and benefit from secondary material; try reading Joyce on your own. I think the elitists are the ones who insist that film is not worthy of such complicated artists, and that everyone who suggests differently–anyone with a different approach from yours–is necessarily pretentious. Seriously: do you think that anyone who says it’s difficult to find all there is to be found in Ulysses on your first pass, without any secondary context? Do you think it’s impossible that an artist of the caliber of Joyce or Shakespeare or whoever, might be drawn to the medium of film in this era of visual communication? Some books are single-layered and meant only to entertain. Some books are the result of great effort and thought and may require great effort and thought to make the most of them. Films, ditto, on both counts. Show me the pretension.
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### Author:  [@Snooooopy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snooooopy)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/44 "2004-10-11T01:14:01Z")
> [@Gamaliel](#):
>
> Yeah, that’s it. Anyone who disputes the greatness of your Brave Visionary Auteur is just a mindless sheep afraid of the bold, terrifying insights of _Starship Troopers_. :rolleyes:
And “Showgirls”! Lest we forget the bold, terrifying insights of that film. 😃
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### Author:  [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/45 "2004-10-11T01:31:16Z")
> [@](#):
>
> The buck stops at the director. If he can’t see the flaws in the material, and get them corrected, then he’s just another Ridley Scott, who couldn’t tell a good script from a bad script if one was titled “Good Script” and the other was titled “Bad Script.” His movies are decent only when he lucks into a good script. Most of his movies suck.
Don’t be small-minded. You completely ignored the part where I mentioned how different directors have different strengths, and people who don’t like those strengths won’t like their movies.
George Lucas doesn’t “suck”, he just makes movies that you don’t like. What, every director should tailor their projects for Lissener? Lissener has the Alpha And Omega opinion on what a good movie is?
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### Author:  [@Gamaliel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gamaliel)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/46 "2004-10-11T01:32:11Z")
This piece expresses more eloquently how I feel about Verhoven and in particular ST, though I don’t necessarily agree with everything the author says, I do concur with most of it:
[http://www.everything2.net/index.pl?node\_id=1301627&displaytype=printable](http://www.everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=1301627&displaytype=printable)
and the conclusion of it:
> [@](#):
>
> Guys, I’m not quite stupid enough to have missed the Nazi symbols and the propaganda spots. But having satirical elements does not make a movie a satire. The satire, no matter what the filmmakers say in the DVD commentary, is NOT the main point of the movie. Every one of Verhoeven’s movies has had some satire in it. He is, in fact, a very good director of violent and sleazy thrillers, and he knows how to use satirical bits to make a movie more effective. But he is not an intellectual, and the satire has never been the main point. Verhoeven’s Johnny Rico is no different from every single one of his other heroes: a Good Guy caught in a Bad Situation, sorting it out through the application of violence, naked force - in unprecedented bucketloads.
>
> But just for a moment, let’s pretend that Verhoeven really is the bold, intelligent, masterful satirist some people say he is. Let’s say Troopers really is a satire. Okay, so what? Does that make it good? No, not at all. Not every satire is good. Some of them are, in fact, very bad. Just because you have a point to make doesn’t mean you automatically did it right. Satire needs to move the audience. It also needs to carry the audience long enough to make its point. Starship Troopers doesn’t do either.
>
> A few of you seem to think that if Troopers is a satire, it’s okay for it to be completely unrealistic, with characters we don’t identify with, dialogue that could well have been written by five-year-olds, and huge amounts of gore. It isn’t. Quite the opposite. If Verhoeven had such lofty ideas in mind for his desecration of an SF classic, he should have made even more of an effort to give us some kind of quality work.
>
> Final analysis: as a straight war movie, Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers” is terrible. As a satire, it is still every bit as terrible. As an ironic celebration of fascism, it is quite, quite bad. As a parody of science fiction, it STILL sucks. No matter how you view this movie, the fact remains that it is no damn good at all.
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### Author:  [@Askia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askia)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/47 "2004-10-11T01:40:49Z")
I’ve always viewed it as a compelling argument for co-ed showers.
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### Author:  [@Ilsa\_Lund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ilsa_Lund)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/48 "2004-10-11T03:06:38Z")
> [@Some Random Website](#):
>
> A few of you seem to think that if Troopers is a satire, it’s okay for it to be completely unrealistic, with characters we don’t identify with, dialogue that could well have been written by five-year-olds, and huge amounts of gore.
WHOOOSH
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### Author:  [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/49 "2004-10-11T03:38:39Z")
Through the years, Alan Smithee’s work has been absurdly over-rated.
😛
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### Author:  [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/50 "2004-10-11T04:13:08Z")
One question: how do you define “overrated”? Overrated by whom?
I mean, it’s fine by mean if you hate Paul Verhoeven’s films, but how is he “overrated”? Has he won a bunch of Oscars? Does he get rave reviews from adoring critics? Is “Starship Troopers” studied in film schools? Do academics write lengthy dissertations on “Total Recall”?
You get my point. He MAY be a lousy director- that’s a matter of opinion. But it’s hard for me to see how he’s “overrated.”
I could say the same thing about many of the directors cited in this thread. If you don’t like Rob Reiner, fine- but he’s never won an Oscar, and is hardly worshipped by critics or academics. Bad, perhaps, but “overrated”? How?
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### Author:  [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/51 "2004-10-11T04:21:03Z")
> [@SPOOFE](#):
>
> Agreed. I think too many people tend to gravitate “blame” towards a director. Like George Lucas… I think he’s an excellent (visual) director, so he tends to emphasize the visuals in his movies. He plays to his strengths. And obviously, people that don’t care much for visuals aren’t going to like his movies.
>
> If you’re not a visually-oriented person, then don’t go see movies by a visually-oriented director. Start looking at the WRITER of the movie (which is, admittedly, occasionally the same as the director, at least partly). To go back to Lucas, he’s a LOUSY writer.
I’m not saying this never happens, but it seems to me that it’s more often the other way around – people blame the writer for the director’s mistakes. I’ve known people to criticize the “stupid writers” for things that were purely visual. And directors usually have the power to call for the script to be rewritten or to chop it up and rearrange it or delete bits altogether, so it’s not like they’re at the mercy of the screenwriters.
Admittedly, if a director gets sucked into agreeing to make a movie from a script that’s not so great, sometimes there’s only so much they can do.
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### Author:  [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/52 "2004-10-11T04:31:10Z")
MSmith537 dises all the directors he can think of in the order he thinks of them:
John Carpenter - Hey I’ll just have Kurt Russel fight shape shifting aliens/ Chinese spirits or post apocyliptic gangs to the tune of cheesy sythesizer music (composed by me).
John Woo - I like doves and guys flying through the air firing pistols sideways.
Stanly Kubrick - I like filming long dull static shots of predominantly blue or red rooms to the sounds of classical music.
Paul Vorhoeven - I like taking classic science fiction writers, making their stories comically over-the-top violent and calling it satire.
James Cameron - Anyone can make a blockbuster if you give them $200 MM. Even if you put Bill Paxton in them all.
Michael Bay - Forget what I said making a blockbuster with $200 MM
Tony Scott - Plot holes and weak character development can be covered up by LOUD GIGANTIC EXPLOSIONS!
Steven Speilberg - Dude…you’re not all Schindler’s List and Jaws.
Francis Ford Coppala - Should have stopped at Godfather II.
Martin Scorsese - We get it. You like ganster movies and working with DeNiro.
Brain De Palma - Alfred Hitchcock called. He wants his technique back.
Roman Polanski - What? Chinatown and being a pedophile. That’s it.
Sam Raimi - Meh. I’ll call you if I need another Evil Dead movie or some crappy sci-fi/fantasy show with scantilly clad girls to occupy my Saturdays.
Akira Kurosawa - Ok…I don’t make films…but if I did they’d have a Samuri.
George Lucas - The only man alive who doesn’t like the original Star Wars movies.
Quinton Tarrentino - A true genius…provided you are a college sophomore.
Robert Rodriguez - Get me Quinton Tarrentino or his non-union Mexican equivalent!!!
Farrelly Bros - Should have retired the super-hot-chick/doofy guy/grossout comedy after Something About Mary.
Tim Burton - What the shit dude? Lay off the crackpipe!
Mel Gibson - Making a movie about Jesus does not make YOU Jesus.
M Night Shamalang - For the twist in your next movie - how about making it not suck?
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### Author:  [@Silentgoldfish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silentgoldfish)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/53 "2004-10-11T05:26:36Z")
Every time **Lissener** and **Ilsa Lund** post to a film thread I always picture them off in the corner of a smokey bar wearing berets, black turtlenecks and self-satisfied smirks. 🙂
John Woo has always seemed really overrated to me. I watched some of his more famous Hong Kong movies as his fans say those are his best movies but they’re exactly the same as his western movies only in Chinese.
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### Author:  [@NDP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NDP)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/54 "2004-10-11T05:27:59Z")
A few words in defense of some of the directors named in this thread.
Tim Burton is not so much an overrated director as uneven one. Although I generally like most of his films (except for **Mars Attacks** ), all to often, they promise more than they deliver. This is especially true in the cases of the **Batman** movies, **Sleepy Hollow** , and **Planet of the Apes** (although, I think in the case of latter, he had the TPTB at Fox pressuring him to get rid of most of his trademark quirkiness and quickly turn out a typical big budget sci-fi action flick). Then again, he’s succeeded with movies like and that, on the surface, seemed have subject matter’s that were either awfully thin (e.g., **Pee Wee’s Big Adventure** ) or hopelessly misguided (e.g., **Ed Wood** ).
As for Blake Edwards, I think it’s debateable anyone really considers him great. I think he does get demerits for trying squeeze every last bit of juice out of the **Pink Panther** franchise even after it had long gone bone dry. Still, I will give him some credit because **A Shot in the Dark** is one of the funniest comedies of all time. Basically, I think he’s Billy Wilder Lite.
Anyway, my pick for overrated directors are John Frankenheimer and Peter Bogdanovich. This is not to say I hate their movies or that they are untalented. But I do think both did some great early work and then spent the next 20 or 30 years coasting on their successes without doing much else that was notable.
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/55 "2004-10-11T05:29:56Z")
You could spend a hundred hours of so watching every film Stanley Kubrick ever made, or you could read this: Institutions dehumanize individuals. There, I’ve just summarized Kubrick’s entire body of work. Everything else in his films was just the particular details he decided to use to repeat the same message.
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### Author:  [@roger\_thornhill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/roger_thornhill)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/56 "2004-10-11T05:33:31Z")
> [@Silentgoldfish](#):
>
> Every time **Lissener** and **Ilsa Lund** post to a film thread I always picture them off in the corner of a smokey bar wearing berets, black turtlenecks and self-satisfied smirks.
Gesticulating madly over glasses of _Pernod_ as they draw on their _Gitanes_ with books by Derrida and Foucault scattered over the table?
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### Author:  [@Ilsa\_Lund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ilsa_Lund)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 5:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/57 "2004-10-11T05:53:21Z")
> [@Little Nemo](#):
>
> You could spend a hundred hours of so watching every film Stanley Kubrick ever made, or you could read this: Institutions dehumanize individuals. There, I’ve just summarized Kubrick’s entire body of work. Everything else in his films was just the particular details he decided to use to repeat the same message.
Wow. You must have seen all of Kubrick’s films, including _Barry Lyndon, The Killing_ and _Lolita_.
[QUOTE]
Roman Polanski - What? Chinatown and being a pedophile. That’s it.
Wow, you must have seen _all_ of Roman Polanski’s films, including _Le Locataire_ and _Noz W Wodzie_.
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### Author:  [@Gangster\_Octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gangster_Octopus)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/58 "2004-10-11T06:29:06Z")
> [@Gamaliel](#):
>
> George Lucas had one good story and a lot of luck. That’s about it.
Luck, yeah, but the guy has worked very hard, is very bright, and made a lot of his own luck.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/59 "2004-10-11T06:48:10Z")
> [@Gamaliel](#):
>
> This piece expresses more eloquently how I feel about Verhoven and in particular ST, though I don’t necessarily agree with everything the author says, I do concur with most of it:
>
> [Starship Troopers (thing) by DejaMorgana - Everything2.com](http://www.everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=1301627&displaytype=printable)
>
> and the conclusion of it:
Mouthing the words of another ignorant asshole does nothing to prove your case; I could match 2 to 1 with quotes from people who \*did \*get it. None of his complaints are valid: every single choice Verhoeven made in that movie was completely intentional communicated exactly what he meant to communicate, for anyone who’s willing to listen.
Besides, TELL me I gonna lend any credibility at ALL to someone whose prejudice and bias is so blatant:
> [@](#):
>
> If Verhoeven had such lofty ideas in mind for his _desecration of an SF classic_ . . .
:rolleyes:
The people who don’t get \*Starship Troopers \*the MOST are the SF geeks who feel that a god has been disrespected. It was not a tribute to Heinlein, so you can lay offa THAT horse right now.
Ever seen a modern adaptation of Shakespeare? The goal for most of them has been to find something new and original underlying the original text; to reinterpret an old cliche. It’s like a good cover song: same lyrics, totally different meaning. _Starship Troopers_, the film, is not a simple translation of the story from one medium to another. It’s a cover, by an artist in his own right, reinterpreting the work of another artist from a new angle; to speak HIS voice, as an artist, and not just parrot the source material.
If Heinlein is too sacred a cow for you to swallow this, then go watch the TV version of _The Shining_. I’ll wake you when it’s over.
I will never understand why people INSIST that a movie provide the IDENTICAL experience that the source material does. If you want to re-experience the same exact experience, READ THE FUCKING BOOK AGAIN.
And if you don’t want to put the effort into seeing the, um, the “fabric” of Verhoeven’s satire–his big picture, as it were–and just focus on the individual components of the tone, then YOU’RE the one who’s missing something, not me.
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [October 11, 2004, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-over-rated-film-directors/268462/60 "2004-10-11T07:00:39Z")
> [@Ilsa\_Lund](#):
>
> > [@](#):
> >
> > Originally Posted by **Some Random Website, through Gamaliel**
> > A few of you seem to think that if Troopers is a satire, it’s okay for it to be completely unrealistic, with characters we don’t identify with, dialogue that could well have been written by five-year-olds, and huge amounts of gore.
>
> WHOOOSH
**O._K_?**
All of those criticisms are SO NOT GETTING IT that I can’t begin to begin. The POINT of Verhoeven’s satire is made largely by these specific devices:
[ul]
[li]completely unrealistic[/li][li]with characters we don’t identify with[/li][li]dialogue that could well have been written by five-year-olds[/li][li]huge amounts of gore[/li][/ul]
Those criticisms are ALWAYS leveled at propaganda; that’s generally how you can spot a piece of propaganda. ST is specifically an attempt to imagine a propaganda film as it might have been made by some future Fascist government. Except the gore; which is intended to, A) have some fun at the expense of directors who rely too much on FX gore to carry their pictures; and B) to point out the real savagery that underlies the cliche platitudes of the propaganda. It’s like intercutting concentration-camp segments into _Triumph of the Will_; the gore is your FIRST CLUE that this is a satire, because none of the shallow characters, who were created as propaganda automatons and not real people, are “allowed,” by the agenda of the propaganda, to acknowledge the dirty secret of a militarist society. The gore is the “skeleton in the closet,” so to speak.
All of the things that Gamaliel and his sockpuppet are making fun of are _exactly the same things that Verhoeven is making fun of._ Why is that so difficult?
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