The flaw WAS that Gwyneth Paltrow was the lead. This movie could have been a really good classic with a decent actress in the lead. I never noticed exactly why the fight scenes bothered me before, but you hit the nail on the head. Yes, a little too much action/no brains.
I remember it came out around the same time as Top Secret, which didn’t have the distraction factor of “of course this is hilarious: we’re 1970’s comedy gods.”
Fantastic Four probably would have been better received if they had spent less time on dialogue and character development and seeing how developing superpowers completely changed all the characters relationships, and instead spent more time with stuff blowing up on screen and Jessica Alba running around in her underwear.
I’m saying that if they’re going to make a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae (a real historical event), they could have chosen better source material. Of course, I’m sure that’s not how it went down though- someone probably read “300” and thought it would make a sweet movie, and the rest is history.
What I’m talking about is something on par with the difference between the John Wayne Alamo movie and the Jason Patric/Dennis Quaid/Billy Bob Thornton one. One was cartoony and pretty stylized, and one tried for more historical accuracy. That’s not to say that the 21st century one couldn’t have been better… but it was better than the 1960s one.
Cloverfield had the best viral marketing I’ve ever seen in a movie. Weird ass websites, mysterious pictures appearing on a website, some drink with a bizarre history.
It wasn’t a terrible movie, but they should have used the “whale” monster, that looked a lot more distinct than the thing they came up with. Plus, once the monster emerged, it didn’t do much different than your typical giant monster, it just looked silly. It could have been more mysterious, more epic, but it felt like they chickened out in doing something different and just went with the same old stuff
True. But nothing could have salvaged Rise of the Silver Surfer.
YMMV, obviously.
See, to me, SLU was funny. Period.
Real Genius — Funny
Top Secret — Funny
Threads like this are going to have a lot of opinion in the posts. I think the Star Wars prequels suck. Some other will think the Star Trek reboot sucks. Tastes and opinions will vary quite a bit.
Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch. A capsule summary makes it sound like it will be campy eye-candy with a dash of exploitation-film sexy.
In practice, it’s like watching somebody play a bad videogame run through with a bunch of low-grade misogyny, terrible writing, and no plot.
It was never going to be high-art, but I didn’t expect unwatchable.
The “whale monster” wasn’t created by JJ Abrams and company.
I stopped watching that movie when the stretchy guy used his stretchy arms to save someone falling off a bridge, and the f/x they used had his shirtsleeves stretching all the way with him.
I figured if they didn’t even give enough of a shit to bother explaining / fixing that, I didn’t need to waste my time further. From what I’ve read that decision saved me the time of that movie and its sequel.
To the OP: League of Extraordinary Geltlemen. Talk about a movie that you thought would’ve been impossible to make boring.
Ooh, thought of another one. Halle Berry is sexy, right? And Catwoman is sexy, and torn skintight leather is sexy. Yet somehow they managed to combine those three elements into something that was completely unsexy.
Granted, I never saw the movie, so I don’t know how well they did on the plot etc. But sexy is a large part of the point of Catwoman.
Like others have pointed out, Spies Like Us was supposed to be a spoof on spy movies. And it did a good job, if I remember correctly. I think if you went into that movie looking for serious, you made a mistake. I liked it. Not oscar-worthy, but I didnt expect it to be.
I’ll go with two rather recent movies.
Lincoln, which I started a thread about recently, was a major disappointment from so many angles. You can throw away all of the crap-ola Spielberg jams down your throat and it is still unwatchable because the movie is shot in the dark. Even outside, in the daylight, every character is shot in half-face. Why directors choose to do this is beyond me, but it makes an unbearable movie unwatchable.
For similar reasons, I’ll nominate the new version of Total Recall, with Colin Farrell. This movie was also shot in the dark. I don’t think Total Recall needed a remake, but if you are going to remake it to take advantage of today’s special effects, for God’s sake make it watchable.
And one vote goes for anything that Paul Greenglass makes, because he is big on usi g the jiggly camera to shoot his movies. I don’t know who came up with this “technique”, but i’d like to find the person responsible for “jiggly screen” and beat him over the head with a pipe wrench. I believe the last movie I saw of his was The Bourne Ultimatum, and it gave me motion sickness.
I always post this when it comes up, but matrix revolutions could have been great. Reloaded ended where Neo’s power affected the real world, and agent smith managed to inhabit a humans body. That ending would have set up the ultimate twist: what the humans thought was reality was just another layer of the matrix, and they were still enslaved. I have no idea how a satisfactory conclusion could have made if this were the case, but it is a far better idea than how it actually panned out. I cant watch the subway of boredom scene, or a retread of the French guy. Even the architect scene stank. We don’t even know if the survivors got released from the matrix.
I liked both. If you take either as just martial arts movies, they’re fine. Catwoman in particular. It is one of the few English language movies in existence with capoeira featured in more than one scene, the other being only the strong.
I agree. However, I can’t recall any serious discussion about the Star Wars prequels being anything but bad.
One CGI character (Jar-Jar for anyone who has no idea) ruined SW-I for me so completely that I never bothered to watch the other two. And ased on what I’ve read, I never will. That truly is amazing considering how much I enjoyed the first three SW movies. I had all the interest needed to get me to want to see how everything got to IV-A New Hope, and Lucas blew it.
I’m sure there are fanboys out there for the three prequels, but I don’t think anyone that grew up on the first three are members. Of course, when Star Wars VIi comes out, and Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are playing the same roles, curiosity will get the better of me and I’ll go.
I think.
“Star Trek Generations” should have done like the “TNG” episode “Relics” with Scotty was done. Put two different individuals in a desperate situation and have both discover the other guy has some merit.
I rewatched Mystery Men recently, thinking it had to have been better than I remembered, but it still wasn’t. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it was Ben Stiller’s performance and laggardly pacing in general.
OK, wait, and the fork thing was stupid.
And Paul (PeeWee Herman) Reuben’s character was stupid.
Wes Studi’s character got old.
I still have a huge crush on Janeane Garafolo, and Macy was pretty good.
Superhal: +1 to infinity
My picks:
- The recent Star Trek reboot. Lemme 'splain:
I thought it was a fun movie: fast paced, snappy dialog, and the actors pretty much nailed their predecessors (with a nice character lift for Uhura, but hyper-Chekhov was annoying). Good SFX, with a…different look for Lady E.
But all-in-all, it was a series of action sequences with the thinnest of plots draped across it to (try, IMO) tie it all together. Cadet Kirk, about to get booted from Star Fleet Academy, gets bumped straight to Captain of Star Fleet’s flagship?
Granted, saving Earth is always career-enhancing, but right up to Captain? Did he at least graduate from the Academy?? Wouldn’t it be a bit more realistic to make him, say, a Lieutenant, and let him get some real-world shipboard experience before handing him the keys to a shiny new Star Fleet cruiser?
And Scotty invents the Warp Transporter that just about puts most space travel right next to dinosaurs in utility, and then it’s conveniently forgotten once it gets Kirk and Co. back aboard the Enterprise?
- Starship Troopers.
Say what you will about the source material, it was much better than the anti-war/anti-military satire Verhoeven kicked out. Kindergarten-level ground tactics, over-the-top acting, and no freakin’ Power Armor? This is what we get??
Green Lantern. As a lifelong fan of the character, I expected to love it. As it was, I merely liked it. But I can understand the people who hated it. The story was all over the place, and went in too many different directions for one movie. If they had stuck to the basics, there would have been a better chance that there would be a sequel, where all of the more esoteric story elements could have been introduced gradually. And the costume was horrible.
No idea if it’s true, but I’ve read at least once or twice that this WAS the twist the Wachowskis were building to all along but decided to go a different direction when they realized their “big twist” would seem really, really obvious by that point.