I figured my presence would elevate the film enough to make it a decent movie.
Speaking of M. Night movies, they could have fixed up The Village a lot by simply adding in one scene. Ok, keep the village hidden in the nature preserve, that was dumb but forgivable. But the fact that there was no payoff to the creatures is maddening. Near the end, when Adrian Brody’s character lay dying in the pit and he looks up into the sky, a curious monster head should have popped up over the edge and looked down at him. It would make at least some of the fear and plot of the previous 90 minutes matter.
Oh, and don’t send the blind girl out to get random medicine. Just have one of the village elders sneak off, get it, and come back. Claim it was a miracle of god or something
I really liked “Eyes Wide Shut”, although I was disturbed by seeing Cruise trying to be uber-hetero in his sex scenes with Nicole. I don’t know if he is gay, but I believe he is. And his interaction with his wife was odd, unromantic, and non-sexual. Kidman looks like she would be a good time in bed, but Cruise is not believable as a heterosexual lover in graphic scenes. He does a lot better when the sex is implied on screen. I also found it a bit “icky” to be honest, because they WERE married at the time, and the sex scenes didn’t feel natural.
Anyway, i’ll toss a couple more films on the pile.
*2001 - A Space Odyssey *another Kubrick film that was IMO terrible. It could be the most over-hyped film of al time, at least until Avatar came around. I know, I know… I am clearly not cultured enough to appreciate art, but 2001 is one of those movies that i think are cursed by pseudo-intellectuals that speak of the movie as if it was a religious experience. This movie is just plain bad on so many levels. I’d be here all day if I tried to touch on them all. It could have been amazing.
Another movie I’ll toss out is “The Brave One” with Jodie Foster. I am a big Jodie Foster fan, and. I know it sounds like I’m some sort of a homophobe, but she was not credible in her love scenes with her boyfriend/fiancé. Watching her kiss the lead actor is painful. When I watch it, it makes me think of how I felt when I was 8 and had to kiss an old female relative on the lips. Sort of tight-lipped, and cringing at the same time while you try to pull away from the kiss. She was beautiful in Maverick, but she looked a bit more butch in The Brave One. It would have worked much better if she was in a relationship with another woman instead of forcing her to kiss a man. She couldn’t pull it off.
I agree with whoever mentioned Stripes. The first part of the movie is first-rate humor, and even annoying things like everyone but Murray getting a buzz cut for basic training were ignored because the script was very funny. And then, the second half of the movie happened. It’s like watching two different movies, spliced together after the graduation day scene. I have watched Stripes countless times, but I never watch the second half, and haven’t since it first came out.
Stripes makes me think of another movie from the same era that lost the plot in the third act: Trading Places. Well, that’s not entirely fair, because the bit on the stock exchange is great, and Don Ameche’s plaintive “Turn those machines back on!” is one of the all time great villain comeuppances.
But that whole scene on the train was just so dumb. Their plot to steal the financial report apparently consisted entirely of dressing up in costume and doing funny accents until… I dunno, the guy shot himself in despair? For god’s sake, he’s met two of them! Don’t put those people in the same room with the guy you’re trying to scam!
Starship Troopers’ big problem was that it took out all of the politics and military action from the book and then substituted in much worse politics and military action.
Now I’ll grant you the political scenes in the book were too wordy and more than a little half-baked so it probably made sense to take them out. But it made no sense to replace them with the movie’s pseudo-fascism.
It would have made more sense to just drop politics all together and have made it a straight sci-fi thriller about a young man joining the future military. But they managed to screw that up to and throw out all of the good military scenes from the book and replace them with dumb shoot-em-up action.
Adding gratuitous female nudity was a good idea though.
The Fountainhead. It needs to be remade.
I blame it on the director. He was a newbie, whose big claim to fame was some commercials he made, and he had some of the most talented comedic actors in Hollywood at the time and* he would not let them ad lib! * Repeat, would not let **Janeane Garafolo, Ben Stiller, Paul Rubens, William Macy **and company ad lib! Jeebus what an idiot.
Prometheus: If they had just dumped the really obvious bad stupid or at LEAST given us some handwaving, it would have been so much better. Like, DON’T take off your helmet in a strange environment even if there IS oxygen for you to breathe, dumbass. When giant circular spaceship is rolling toward you, run to the left or right, not IN THE SAME DIRECTION IT’S ROLLING IN! If you have to have a character do some fighting and running about right after giving herself a C-section, at LEAST give us some damn arm-waving about why she’s capable of it. Super science stim and painkiller pills and such. Was it too much to ask? Apparently, YES, it was .
Also, it wouldn’t have hurt, if you are going to claim your movie will be based at least in part on HP Lovecraft’s stories, to, like READ and UNDERSTAND them.
There was a lot of POTENTIAL in Prometheus, too bad they let an idiot script get written.
John Carter of Mars: Let the actors run around mostly naked like Burroughs and God intended!
I appear to be one of the few people out there who liked the film and wanted to see a sequel. Admittedly with a different lead (Scarlett Johansson, perhaps?), but a sequel all the same.
I doubt I’d like that. It’s a rare bit of magic that things line up to make a movie like “The Fountainhead.” It may not be what most people would call a “good” movie, but it’s so much more.
I’ve got the published screenplay with notes from Frank Darabont. IIRC, they had originally filmed the more open ending. But during previews, they realized that after all those two had been through, the audience NEEDED to see a payoff.
That’s also where I learned why the movie didn’t have one of my favorite scenes from the book–the scene where they send a guard down Andy’s escape tunnel, and after landing in the sewage, the poor guy calls up, “Smells like shit…oh, shit, it IS shit!” Turns out they actually filmed that scene, but it got cut after previews. Everyone laughed their heads off at that scene in the book, but it fell flat in the movie…because after seeing Andy’s escape, we needed to know how it happened, not take a ten-minute detour with a character we’d never met. Just cut from the revelation of the tunnel to the police cars headed towards Shawshank…much more effective.)
The Shadow had a serviceable script and a great cast, and could have been up there with the better Batman movies. It looked like they cheaped out on special effects, not something you do with that kind of movie.
You stir middens/compost, not manure.
My big 2 for all time:
JFK - What Oliver Stone should have done…what ANYONE should have done…was really dive into the story of the Kennedy assassination. Unveil the political and social climate of the time (particularly the Cold War and the bipolar world view it engendered), the kind of man JFK was, and get into why so many people thought there was a conspiracy, why they didn’t trust the Warren Commission Report, why a conspiracy was plausible, who would have, could have killed him, how they could have done it, why this one slaying intrigues so many even today. Instead, Stone was convinced that the government did it and clumsily plods ahead to an ending where the defiant protagonist vows to take down that bastard LBJ at all costs. Oh, and most of the possible conspirators are never even heard of again.
Tau Man Ji D (Initial D) - The truly, utterly, inescapably depressing thing about this was that there were two ways you’d expect a limited-budget Hong Kong studio to go about it: 1. Screw the source manga and make it a brainless high-octane racefest with lots of scrapes and bumps and screaming tires and wrecks, or 2. Go with one of the later volumes, where the focus is on Project D and Natsuki, Bunta, Itsuki, Koichiro et al. are out of the picture…either of which would’ve been vastly better than the emotionally loaded schlockfest with clumsily blended characters, the most disgusting incarnations of Bunta and Itsuki ever (and I’ve read a lot of fanficiton), and yet another clumsy smear job on Natsuki’s side business this turned into. On top of that there’s, like, 10 minutes of racing footage.
My honorable mention 2, possibly for all time:
Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom - For those of you who missed it the last 2 or 3 times 
: Make Willie anything but and eternally screeching, aggravating harpy, and this is the best Indiana Jones movie. Easily. Heck, you don’t have to change a word of her dialogue, just give her a ditzy, clueless deadpan and replace “scream” with “grimace” or “wince”. I know a lot of you found Short Round irritating, but he was like a garbage can placed next to a 5000-gallon tank of toxic waste. Kinda bratty, I can deal with. Not Willie.
Grave of the Fireflies - Make no mistake, this was a good movie. The problem is, looking back on it, I can’t tell you why. The fact that a movie ending in the senseless death of two children has been debated so long and heatedly says something, and I really think it has way too much ambiguity for its own good. Was the boy a doomed idealist, a good person who tried his very best, a lazy good-for-nothing brat, a monster who led his sister to her doom, or just another war victim? Did he make an incredibly stupid decision not to empty his bank account, was he unable to, or would it not have made a difference either way? Was the aunt selflessly supporting two useless ingrates, sponging off of the boy, wracked with the trauma of war, or just doing her best given the circumstances? Was robbing the houses a reprehensible act or justifiable? And what about the final scene, are they just visiting, living out what would be the rest of their natural lives, trapped forever in a world they can never experience, what? I don’t know. Heck, I’m not sure even the man who came up with the idea for the move knew.
I saw it in the theater when it first came out. I was really looking forward to it. I was very disappointed. Horribly unfunny.
On the other hand, Top Secret was hilarious.
From another thread I’ll go with Godfather 3. I don’t think its as bad as most think. The disappointment after so many years and the fact that it is not nearly as good as two masterpieces made people hate it. I agree its not great but it could have been.
Rein in Pacino. In The Godfather Pacino showed he could act with subtlety. I wish Coppola could have found that again.
Of course get a real actress to play the daughter. The relationship was not unrealistic because Sophia is not attractive enough. Its because she is made of wood.
Make some of the action less cartoony. I know you can make comparisons with the causeway scene and the christening. But those worked. The helicopter didn’t. And neither did the twin assassins.
Pay Robert Duvall and bring back Tom.
Things that worked.
I did like Michael coming to terms with his past and the fact that he is a monster.
Andy Garcia is great in it. His character arc is the movie and I thought it was written and acted well.
All the small touches. Bringing back the minor characters in the background. Even if they were little more than extras. Enzo the baker. Sonny’s side piece. Very good attention to detail.
Some didn’t like the Vatican plot. I don’t think it matters much. Its more about the characters.
I’d have made it a true sequel, not a prequel, and had Marion be the main gal instead of Willie. We could still have Willie at the beginning, but replace Wu Han with Marion (who would NOT get killed), undercover as a cigarette girl at the club and working on Indy’s behalf. Then we leave Willie behind as Indy and Marion flee the club, drop into the car Shorty’s driving (dialogue establishes that the three of them have been traveling together for a bit by now), and the story begins.
If it hadn’t been for the writers’ idea that Indy should, Bond-like, have a new girl for every movie they could have had Marion in the series throughout. It would’ve taken some rewriting of Last Crusade (especially so Indy DOESN’T sleep with Elsa) and Kingdom, but it could’ve worked.
There are two movies I always mention in threads like this:
-Sphere. An incredible cast, a wonderful premise indicating something fascinating involving time travel, and it all turns into… something idiotic about nightmares becoming real or something
-Click, the Adam Sandler movie where he gets a remote control that he can use to control the world. This could have been at least 3 different good movies:
(1) an American-Pie-style gross-out comedy with no pretensions to anything greater than some laughs and some nudity
(2) a thriller with all sorts of awesome time-slowing and time-reversing special effects
(3) some kind of crazy meta-film like “Being John Malkovich” in which a characters starts somehow controlling the very movie that he’s in
Instead, we got the umpteenth unambitious family comedy in which someone learns an important live lesson.
JFK - This is one of the most misunderstood movies of all-time. What you suggest would have been nice, but how much time do you think that would have taken? Stone’s movie was hammered up and down before it was even released, and once it was, it really got blasted. For some reason, the Kennedy Assassination is a subject that the mainstream media labels off-limits, and any serious discussion of conspiracy theories gets the person tossed into the tinfoil hat camp. Stone was no different.
He did touch on the different conspiracy theories, but not like you wanted. And that’s because the main outline for his book was the Garrison investigation.
However, the problems with your movie are these: one, time, obviously. You would not be able to adequately cover all of those topics in two hours, and you would leave your audience dumbfounded at the end, and completely confused. Two, presentation. Your movie would not be a story, but a documentary. I don’t see how you could cover it any other way, which leads to the third problem, which is credibility. Stone’s JFK was extensively footnoted, and those footnotes were given out to reviewers, the press, and anyone else that wanted them. Few did the research to see if Stone’s work was accurate; they derided the movie because Garrison was derided in the 60’s, and very few reviewers that I recall, anyway, spent any time looking at the totality of the movie and asking the question “was this accurate?” So, my guess is that anyone tackling the movie your way would also have to document it, and it would also be trashed by the press as another attempt to prove a conspiracy when everyone knows the Warren Commission was right. :rolleyes: Which takes us to the fourth problem, which is money. Odds are very high that a major studio would not fund a project like this because no one would sit through a 6 hour movie. And the few that would could not possibly cover the investment with ticket sales. Maybe the DVD’s would be a big hit and sales would be good, but no one is rolling the dice on that for a movie on the Kennedy Assassination.
In fairness, that’s what makes it a faithful adaptation of the book.