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.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
*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.
And “Showgirls”! Lest we forget the bold, terrifying insights of that film. 
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?
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
and the conclusion of it:
I’ve always viewed it as a compelling argument for co-ed showers.
WHOOOSH
Through the years, Alan Smithee’s work has been absurdly over-rated.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Gesticulating madly over glasses of Pernod as they draw on their Gitanes with books by Derrida and Foucault scattered over the table?
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.
Luck, yeah, but the guy has worked very hard, is very bright, and made a lot of his own luck.
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:
: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.
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?