I used to believe Psycho was the most overrated film ever, but in recent years I think it has been replaced by Vertigo. The former suffers from its reliance on shock value, the most facile of a filmmaker’s tools. Most repeat viewers forget how long and dreary the story is before it gets to the first murder, and thereafter are only watching to see subsequent shock scenes; the film ends up as less than the sum of its parts. Cheaply made (by a Canadian TV crew) and flatly lit, the story’s tiresome post-climactic explanation of events is a hallmark of Robert Bloch’s bad screenwriting. There is also the issue of legacy: the film spawned a heinous rot of Italian slasher movies, U.S. slasher films, and imo, ultimately inspired “torture porn.”
Acclaimed in recent years as a “great” film, Vertigo does have a number of virtues, including excellent production values, fine use of its San Francisco locations and a good supporting performance by Barbara Bel Geddes (whom I usually dislike); even the process work is not as bad as usual for a Hitchcock film. That said, Jimmy Stewart is miscast as a romantic lead, the plot is utterly ludicrous and clumsily told (the bad guy gets away with murder and is totally forgotten!) It is essentially Hitchcock’s most De Palma-like movie and that is not meant as a compliment. Worst of all - as a friend once pointed out - no film can be considered all good which kills off Kim Novak not once, but twice.
After Royal Tenanbaums, I gave him another chance with Life Aquatic. Then for some reason I gave him another chance with Darjeeling Limited. By then I hated him passionately and swore him off; but I love Roald Dahl, so I gave him another chance with Fantastic Mr. Fox.
NEVER AGAIN!!!
(I’m fine with being pig-ignorant about his later movies and freely own that. Let me rant in peace, dammit.)
Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, you claim that all (or most?) of Wes Anderson’s films are about rich self-centered white dudes having a middle-aged crisis about how useless they are. O.K., here are all the feature-length films he’s directed that have been released so far:
Isle of Dogs The Grand Budapest Hotel Moonrise Kingdom Fantastic Mr. Fox The Darjeeling Limited The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou The Royal Tenenbaums Rushmore Bottle Rocket
Which of those are you willing to defend as being about rich self-centered white dudes having a middle-aged crisis about how useless they are?
O.K., so your statement about what Wes Anderson’s films are like isn’t a characterization of all of them or of most of them but just a random observation off the top of your head.
C’mon. It’s not a random observation, but it’s also not SRS BSNS. If you disagree with me, I’m super happy; but I’m not on trial here, and am not interested in defending myself to you.
I didn’t actually make it all the way through The Big Short, but I think it might be my least favorite movie I’ve ever watched. It starts with the cookie-cutter Hollywood B.S. movie any time there’s an important issue where The Good Guys are smart and always right but for some reason they are surrounded by The Bad Guys who are either evil or just too stupid or evil to understand what’s going on. And the way you can tell that The Good Guys are misunderstood geniuses is that when they make a prediction they always get every detail right even though The Bad Guys always get every detail wrong. But wait, there’s a twist - the stupid people were the evil people all along! Who could have realized this?
It’s especially stupid because Burry is applying exactly the same mindset as the investors who created the bubble in the first place, and the concept of proving that someone is good and wise because of the point where the predicted when the mortgage market would hit an inflection point is moronic because it was a fucking bubble. The people in 2003 who predicted that prices would skyrocket by 2005 were just as right as Burry was that they would tank in 2007.
The thing that really drove the unwatchability over the top is the incessant “witty” remarks, the voiceovers, fourth wall breaking and cutting away to Margot Robbie taking a bubble bath (yes I realize they were trying to imitate Michael Lewis’s writing style but they should have just dropped this entire thing and told a narrative story).
I didn’t think “Jaws” was all that great either, nor did “The Exorcist” impress me much when I re-watched it recently, except maybe for the special effects.
“Pulp Fiction” has great acting, plot, etc. but I still want to take a shower every time I mention that I saw it in the theater, and sat through it.
Have you seen “The Straight Story”? That’s right, a Lynch film that was rated G, and throughout, I would see scenes that, had they been given the usual Lynch treatment, would have warranted an NC-17.
I personally thought PG would have been a more appropriate rating because of several adult situations.
Its not the gore I find particularly terrible about Lynch stuff. Kronenburg films make Lynch films look like Disney, but I don’t mind some of his stuff. I actually like surreal messed up films, but they can’t be just “messed up stuff happened, everything’s weird, the end” . I need a story and characters I care about, Kronenburg does that (sometimes) Lynch does not.
Robocop was much better reviewed at the time than most 80s action movies. You tend to remember the really good ones like Die Hard or The Terminator, but at the time theatres were awash in some real shit, stuff like Invasion USA, Cobra, and Iron Eagle. People knew a good movie when they saw it.
In retrospect, Robocop was even better than they thought at the time.
Yeah I’d definitely say Robocop was an example of a film that “didn’t take itself seriously” that actually pulled it off. Whereas some other examples, e.g. Commando or Predator are just bad movies.
Predator is a good action film, and in many respects very clever. Commando was competent, but not as original or interesting.
Without going into straight to DVD level stuff, if you wanna see a bad 80s action movie, watch Invasion USA or Missing In Action, both Chuck Norris films. Death Wish 3 is extremely bad. Iron Eagle is soooooo bad.
I have friends that I love dearly that think his movies are just the best thing since cotton candy. I don’t give them shit for it, because, I mean, of course he does what he does very well, brilliantly even.
It’s just that what he does fills me with inchoate rage and makes me want to see all the characters messily devoured by tigers.
Okay, I’m gonna say it here, 'cause I’m tired of sitting on the sidelines:
Chuck Norris is overrated as an entertainment entity. His movies from the 1970s and '80’s “taking the crown from Bruce and moving forward” with martial arts were jingoist junk, his movies from the 1980’s and '90’s “I served in Korea, I’m a war hero” military/rescue films were nationalistic* nonsense, his Texas TV show was pseudo-patriotic pablum, and I don’t know what he’s doing any more but it’s undoubtedly dreck indeed!
I started my martial arts training in a branch of the Chuck Norris School and, when it relocated far away, I went to a local studio that had been teaching the Tang Soo Do that (at the time) he claimed was his style. It was amazing to find out how much I didn’t know that other students of my rank considered basic. I guess those techniques weren’t flashy enough for the camera.
–G!
*And no, President Rump, Nationalism is NOT a good thing!
Oh, yeah I grew up in the 80’s, and even at the time Chuck Norris was considered a second-rate action star at best. You wanted to see a good action flick, you went to something from Arnie or Sly or (sigh) Mel Gibson; Norris’s films were disposable crap (although the Delta Force was 2/3 of a good film, pretty much despite him).