Movie You Looked Forward to Seeing, Then Was Totally Disappointed In? Spoilers Welcome

Cafe Society
1

So okay, I finally watched The Prince of Tides.

I’m not a big Streisand fan, but I’m not a Streisand hater either. I really enjoyed Yentl, and I liked some of her early stuff, What’s Up Doc, and like that.

When The Prince of Tides came out, waayyy back in 1991, I considered seeing it, but then life went on, and I never did.

So I’m renting movies from the library, and I come across The Prince of Tides, and I remembered wanting to see it, and since the big tragic secret in the movie had never been ruined for me, I decided what the hell, I’ll rent it.

I remembered all the hoo-hah when the movie came out, and all the Oscar buzz, and all the controversy that Babs was snubbed for Best Director, so I was looking forward to the movie as I got home.

In short, while I watched, I was transfixed. I was stunned into jaw-hanging amazement.

What a piece of crap this movie is!

Okay, put aside the ethics of all the adultery and doctor/patient hanky panky. That wasn’t really what struck me. No, no, what struck me most was the much heralded deep dark secret.

The mother, daughter, and son are all raped by escaped lunatics, during which the older son blows all the attackers away. Then the family buries the bodies in the backyard, and no one ever mentions the incident again.:dubious:

I mean WTF? The movie shows them washing the blood with soap and water, and then eating dinner with the father who apparently was never the wiser about any of this.

All I could think of was what, four people, three of them children, three of whom have just been violently sexually assaulted, and one child who’s just committed multiple justifiable homicides are able to perfectly dispose of three bodies, and clean the bloody crime scene so professionally that not a spot of mess remains in time for Dad to come home to dinner? And never again say a word even amongst themselves? They sure don’t have to talk to the police who never even investigate three escaped criminal psychopaths.

After I came out of my stunned silence, I laughed my ass off, all while Nick Nolte was sobbing in Babs’ arms. I have never heard of a deep dark secret that was more ridiculously improbable.

People actually swallowed this story in 1991? Were we all morons or something?

Anyhoo, only My Dinner With Andre was more disappointing to me as a movie.

Any movies you would like to mention?

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Wait, how could you be disappointed by “My Dinner with Andre”? Like, you didn’t know what you were getting into? You didn’t know in advance that the movie was literally Wallace Shawn and his buddy Andre having dinner and shooting the shit?

I can understand hating the movie, I can understand being bored by the movie, but disappointed?

OK, now my candidate. I know I really shouldn’t have been, but I was really disappointed by Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”. I kind of had a twinge going in, and that twinge was horribly confirmed. Tim Burton can be awesome, even in his newer movies there are plenty of good ones, like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. And even when he makes a horrible movie, you can at least see the effort being made.

But man, was “Alice” bad. Do we really, I mean really, need to have the 1,000,001st Chosen One who is destined to save everyone? God Damn, but I’m fucking sick and tired of the Chosen One trope. Next Chosen One I see, and I’m tracking down the director and screenwriter, and I’m kicking them right in the breadbasket.

And see, the original plot of “Alice” would work FINE for Tim Burton. Twee girl wanders through bizarre landscape interacting with bizarre creepy characters, the end. It’s Burton’s wheelhouse. He does mutant characters and set design, not plot. Who gives a fuck about the plot? No one who’s gonna buy a ticket to “Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland”, that’s for sure.

3

The Last Airbender.

I tried so hard to be upbeat about this. Sure, Shyamalan hasn’t been very good, but now somebody else is plotting his crap. A lot of dialogue is practically laid out for him. There’s already strong characterization and a powerful story.

He changed the already-vague ethnicity of the characters. Ok, I could bend* that way. I defended this.

He made a teaser trailer which was, at least cool in concept although it probably didn’t communicate much to anyone who didn’t know the series. But it looked kinda cool.

Then… the movie came out.

Oh God. Oh GAWD! Oh GAWD OH NO OH GAWD!

I don’t even know exactly what to describe as being worst in this movie. I can, quite literally, think of almost nothing which was not completely and ham-fistedly screwed to hell and back. There was almost not one single solitary scene which didn’t utterly suck, and yet the movie as a whole somehow combined all of these parts into something far, far worse than the whole. It was a movie so completely unredeemable I cannot even begin to imagine how he could do it.

In short: The plot makes no sense, even to someone who has seen the series. The main characters are blandly uninteresting, so even being a fan of the gAang, I just didn’t care about the movie versions. The villains are shown too early and too blandly. The villains frankly come off as giant pussies who could be beaten savagely by anyone who wasn’t a total dumbass. The plot is mostly exposited blandly and I just zoned out. The visuals would be nice, but it’s overexposed and overdone it comes off as unbelievable and trite. The “action” is incredibly bland and boring.

The worst part is that there are hints of half-decent idea there. Zuko and Iroh are well-acted enough and the bits with them are fairly good, but few and far between. The action scenes are bad, but there are a couple bits which had me thinking, “Huh, that could have been good if only…”

Sad. Just… sad.

*Pun intended.

4

Oops, that’s the one I was going to mention. It promised to be more faithful to the book than the Gene Wilder version, but in fact was much less so. The biggest aberration were the recurring flashbacks to a young Willie Wonka prevented by his father (Saruman, DDS) from eating candy, which were pointless and annoying. If “Alice in Wonderland” was worse than that, then it’s amazing the movie screens didn’t just melt right off the walls.

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The one that still stands out for me was Four Rooms.

Four segments, each one with a different “hot” director: Robert Rodriguez, fresh off of El Mariachi and busy with Desperado, which I was really looking forward to. Tarantino, one year removed from Pulp Fiction. Allison Anders, who had just made Gas, Food, Lodging, and Alexandre Rockwell, indie darling at the time.

Huge cast of “it” people: Valeria Golino, Madonna, Ione Skye, Alicia Witt, Jennifer Beals, Antonio Banderas, Marisa Tomei, Salma Hayek, Bruce Willis (unbilled), and Tim Roth as the “bellhop,” featuring in every segment to tie them together.

It was bad; the bad kind. Tim Roth has never been worse, hamming it up in every scene. Tarantino has never been more indulgent, having Bruce Willis play himself and basing his entire segment around a joke my grandfather told me. Rodriguez basically used his entire cast from Desperado and decided to make a rated R version of a Three Stooges short. The other segments I barely remember - in one they were witches with a big tub in the middle of the room, and the other was some one act S&M stage play.

Worse, you would shake your head at the last bad segment and think the next one would be better by the nature of the different director. Nope - it was bad too. I think it was the first time that I felt like I’d been had.

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Second Avatar: The Last Airbender (no I refuse to simply call it The Last Airbender)

I’ll mention another: Cloverfield

This was supposed to be THE monster movie, an American Godzilla, one created specifically with the hype and myth of the Japanese version but with more awesome special effects for a US audience.

I loved the viral campaign, the mysteries of the photographs on the official website, the many many tie in’s like the back history of Slusho, the creepy backstory, and the supposed leaked concept art of the monster. I was obsessed for the entire 6 months once I saw the trailer with the Statue of Liberty’s head being torn off (I believe the original trailer came with the first Transformers movie and the movie came out in January the following year) and eagerly gobbled up every piece of news. I liked the whole “dizzycam” concept, I thought it was a unique way to tell the story even at the risk of getting sick.

Eventually when the movie came out and the monster was sighted, it was such a huge letdown. Not only because the monster looked like some generic beast, but that the story revolved around some guy and his girl and we hardly ever got to see anything else. I was hoping that there were multiple cameras “found” of the event and the movie was pieced together from many different POVs. Plus, the monster didn’t seem that creepy or big in scale at all. I liked the faked concept art of the whale monster better.

I wish I could go back in time, unsee that movie, and simply dream about the viral campaign instead. That was more interesting than the movie

7

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The trailer was absolutely awesome, and evoked the exact sensawunda I got from classic pulp science fiction.

The film didn’t.

8

Blair Witch Project. I win.

OK, back when I saw a lot more movies taking the girls at least once a month to some kid-appropriate movie, I would have to say “Babe: Pig In The City” , the sequel to “The Incredible Journey”, and “Harriet the Spy” were absolutely appalling. We walked out of the first, cried at a part during the second, and I think I fell asleep during “Harriet the Spy” (full of actors who were not exactly noted for great beauty :p). Yeah, I looked forward to these movies, but I guess I was spoiled by Disney. Those three kids movies stand out as disappointing.

9

Starship fucking Troopers.

10

Independence Day.

They got me. From the subtle marketing to start to the full out trailers and special effects, I was stoked to see the movie. I avoided reading reviews (didn’t want anything spoiled) and went the first weekend it opened.

It stunk. The stupid in the movie was so overwhelming, the cliches so overdone, and the characters so pedestrian that I couldn’t even enjoy the “Let’s watch shit get blown up real good!” part of the movie. Very, very disappointed.

11

Is The Phantom Menace just assumed to be the winner of this thread so no one mentioned it?

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Wild Wild West. Will Smith. Kevin Kline. Kenneth Branagh. No brain.

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I like David Fincher’s Fight Club so I was eager to watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and ended up quite underwhelm.

Yes, Matrix sequels and StarWars prequels will be winners for this thread.

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The book was even more over the top, if you can imagine.

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and Indy 4.

16

…yeah… I used to pick the movies we’d go to Christmas day… I lost that privilege that year.

I will say the Rodriquez’s segment was actually very funny and laid the groundwork for the Spy Kids movies.

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Yeah, either that or the Matrix sequels.

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Second vote for The Blair Witch Project. The idea seemed interesting and full of promise. But not the execution.

My Dinner with Andre. I had heard it was good and even though I knew it was going to be Wallace Shawn and his buddy Andre having dinner and shooting the shit, the buzz convinced me that they had somehow made that into a good movie. But no.

19

I went into The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with high hopes. * Very* high hopes.

You can imagine my distress.

20

Alien vs. Predator - it’s got Aliens. And Predators. Fighting each other! How can that not be awesome?!!

It was not awesome. :frowning: