I have to admit I don’t get why people think the Coen Brothers are so great. To me, they are trying so hard to be quirky and to get in witty reference points to Hollywood classics, that I can’t really get into the films. I’m just sitting there thinking…um, there’s another little in-joke. I think true originality is less self-conscious than this. I enjoyed Fargo, but not so much that I ever bothered to see it a second time. Admittedly, I’ve never got round to seeing Miller’s Crossing and one day I will. But Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski? - I think these are overrated films. And now they’re doing straight covers.
And then some!
Well, as to the last two fils you mentioned: to paraphase Jessica Rabbit, they make me laugh. Big Lebowski especially is to me one of the most hilarious movies since the the Marx Brothers. But since humor is highly subjective, its perfectly understandable that you disagree.
As to the other reasons I love the Coen Brothers, I think I’ll let Cervaise explain. He does it better than I can.
I like Quentin Tarantino but I don’t think he’s a genius. He makes entertaining movies about movies. And he deserves credit for his ability to draw great performances out of some mediocre actors. But when he starts believing the hype and thinking he’s got a message, it leads him astray. Tarantino needs to realize he’s the modern version of Hitchcock; a great master of the skills of film making but limiting in artistic vision.
As to the other reasons I love the Coen Brothers, I think I’ll let Cervaise explain. He does it better than I can.
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Yeh, that site sums it up well.
“O Brother, Where Art Thou is a perfect example of this approach. Where the Coens have applied themselves, and indeed where the entertainment value of the film lies, is the allusive interplay, in recognizing where the Coens are directly referring to Homer, as with the Sirens, and when they’re deliberately reversing their source. (For example: In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero has a son, Telemachus, who plays a significant supporting role. In O Brother, not only do the Coens not give their hero a son, they underline the joke and give him seven daughters.) We grin at the pure absurdity of a meadow full of Klansmen performing high-school-band synchronized marching routines, and we chuckle when a character is literally “run out of town on a rail.” The escapist fun in a mainstream movie is in watching stuff fly around and blow up; the escapist fun in a Coen Brothers film is in feeling that one’s intelligence, one’s literacy and wit, is being catered to”.
The films are light confections - fine, just usually not quite my humour. I think when they go absurdist, as in Klansmen doing high school band routines, I saw it all thirty years ago in Monty Python. As for being run out of town on a rail, did they steal that from “Carry on Sherriff”? Have to admit that Intolerable Cruelty, the one that all the true fans hate, made me laugh more than anything else they’ve done, and I didn’t feel empty afterwards. Maybe now they’ve sold out, I’ll like them…maybe I should try The Ladykillers after all.
Count one true fan who loves it. 
By the way, is there any director, really, that would escape this thread if it were topped long enough?
Yeh, Billy Wilder I reckon. Rated highly, but surely, perceptibly, still underrated.
Please don’t. I had to turn it off after about 20 minutes.
Added to that, the Coens were often not directly referring to Homer (even by inversion), but referring instead to the Odyssey by way of James Joyce’s Ulysses. One example of this is John Goodman as the “Cyclops”, who doesn’t resemble Homer’s Polyphemus much at all, but turns out to be a race-bigot that the protagonist has to stand up to, just like Joyce’s Citizen.
Tim Burton was the first person I thought of before I opened this tread. Someone once said that Tim Burton is the kind person who, when he was a kid, had all the coolest comic books… but never read them.
Spike Lee should also be getting more of a spanking in this thread… one good movie (Do The Right Thing) at the most. Me hate him.
Andrei Tarkovsky. I know the guy has a reputation for being a maverick genius Soviet-era filmmaker, but I’ve tried three of his films and only barely made it through two of them, and it was like enduring water torture. And I don’t generally have a problem with lyrical imagery and, ahem, stately pacing in a film – I can sit through an Ozu picture just fine – but A.T. bugs the heck out of me for some reason.
I used to thin so.
But Summer of Sam and 25th hour is showing him with more mature work. He is a gifted director. I don’t think he’s ever been over rated, though.
You must! My fave gangster movie…not that I remember much about it except what a great performance John Turturro gave - that scene where they’re in the woods and he’s begging for his life is branded into my memory forever.
Peter Greenaway Not that I don’t love what a visual feast “Prospero’s Books” was. And I quite liked “Cook, Theif, Wife, Lover” too. I just don’t get his cult following. I actually kind of think he’s a sadist…he just seems to use violence in a really creepy, off way. Not that I object to screen violence per se. I love the over-the-top, comic book way **Tarantino ** uses violence, for instance. I found the three-way Mexican stand-off in “Reservoir Dogs” and its culmination exhilirating in its stylishness. Likewise, I thought the “Kill Bill” bloodbaths were great fun, and as for reaching out and pulling out someone’s eyeball…laugh! But Greenaway just seems to revel in suffering in a very unfunny way.
and the winner is…
Kevin Smith!
…admittedly, it’s not as though he is rated that highly anyway, but there are enough people around who rate him as some sort of genius that it must be mentioned, yet again, that he is in fact an incompetent bore.
It’s strange, really, that we even know this guy’s name. Clerks was so bad that it should have been “one try and your done” with this guy. But enough fools gave him attention and money that he was allowed to shit all over the screen again and again. That level of horribleness can’t be seen in most of the directors mentioned here so far. Some of them are overrated, yes (ahem-- Spielberg) but geeeeez-- this Smith guy is in a category by himself in terms of being allowed to continue to make crap films even after he has already shown that he is (and I’ll be nice here) really not good.
Oh well, chacun a son gout. I was flicking channels on the plane a couple of years ago and started watching something which turned out to be Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. I thought it was very funny all told. Like all comedies a bit uneven, of course.
I don’t think Paul Verhoeven is an overrated director. A shitty one, yes, but not overrated because other than lissener, I’ve never seen anyone online or IRL take him so seriously. Even the Showgirls fans I know love the movie as a guilty pleasure, an over the top romp, much in the same way that I absolutely love Prison Heat or Return to Savage Beach.
I’d say Kevin Smith is overrated, but critics seem to knock him movies pretty hard. I was shocked to see a piece of garbage like Chasing Amy get a Criterion DVD and am stunned to hear college kids go on and on about how great his characters are.
James Cameron might take the cake, though more and more people are waking up when it comes to him. Really, can anyone think of a movie with as many awards as Titanic that has that many detractors? The girls who flocked to see it a dozen times are grown up now, so the films has lost most of it’s luster. I even think the reason Cameron hasn’t made a follow up feature yet is because he doesn’t want his collossal ego to get bruised when his next film gets laughed at and bombs.
Martin Scorsese is another one. I don’t think he’s awful, just not “The Great American Filmmaker” as so many critifcs portray him. His body of work is too uneven to support such a reputation, though I loved The Last Temptation of Christ.
I’m really surprised–but pleased–that no one has mentioned David Lynch. A lot of people love to knock his entire post-Eraserhead output, but I think he’s made great films (Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive) more often than not (Dune, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) and has been a true original all the way.
Also surprising is that no one said Peter Jackson. I’ve loved everything he’s done since Bad Taste to Return of the King, but people seem to turn on commercially successful filmmakers, as shown by the wave of anti-Tarantino message board posts and articles in film publications and websites.
And, C.K., how could you! Bergman films are “deep” and “artsy”! 
You all just wait until I film my screenplay about hostile invaders from outer space with their 1920’s style death rays!
What do people here think of Coppola? I think he’s a tad overated, tho I don’t have the time to go into an essay about why.