Scorsese is a great director. Nicholson is a great actor. I hated The Departed. I don’t feel like Di Caprio’s character’s motivation was developed well enough. The whole psychiatrist love triangle thing was a hell of a coincidence. Several scenes just didn’t work for me. The “I drink cranberry juice, what are you on your period” scene wasn’t funny or exciting nor did it seem like a great way to infiltrate an organized crime syndicate. Nicholson’s “we’ve got to catch the cheese eating rodent” monologue came across as weird and annoying rather than menacing. The ending of many rapid head explosions was the final straw though. That’s how I ended all my short stories when I was 11. You see the good guys thought they’d won but then one of the good guys who was barely even a character was secretly a bad guy the whole time even there was no prior evidence of this and killed the good guys. But he trusted another bad guy who and the other bad guy killed him. Oh then someone shot him too.
Now I don’t think The Departed was a horrible movie, it had a couple of good scenes. I think I judge it particularly harshly because I was expecting a great movie from such a talented director and cast and instead received a very mediocre one.
One might think that, indeed! But I don’t think it was faithful to the feeling of the book at all. It LOOKED great in terms of character design and what-not, but in almost every scene after the beginning I found myself cringing. The inflections, the stuff the people were supposed to be feeling - the fear, failure, etc. - it all became phony, confused nonsense wrapped in pretty special effects, to me. It was actually quite an accomplishment that the scenes could follow the panels so obsessively closely and still turn out so wrong. It made me think Z.S. really didn’t have a clue, in the end, just kinda threw money and designers at the thing.
The Departed was based on the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs and… well, that sort of thing happens a lot in Hong Kong cinema. That and people jumping through the air in slow motion with guns in each hand whilst doves flutter into the sky behind them.
I really thought I was going to love The English Patient. It had been picking up breathless acclaim from critics and public alike. I thought Ralph Fiennes was the hottest thing ever, that Kristin Scott Thomas was great. The posters looked gorgeous, the plot sounded intriguing. I was soooo looking forward to it and so I went along with my boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend to sit down all excited in the cinema to appreciate their epic, yet tragic romance.
Hated it. HATED it. Couldn’t have cared less about any character and frankly, I’ll watch any old crap because I get so invested in narratives, no matter how clumsy. I kept thinking… it will get good when we meet Ralph Fiennes …then when he meets Kristin Scott-Thomas… Oh well, maybe when they start their affair. After about an hour of this, gloom settled on me that it was never going to get good, that this was a very long film and that I didn’t know the person I was seeing it with well enough to just say “This sucks. Let’s try and sneak into another film in the multiplex”.
Years later, when I saw the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine hates the movie, I all but jumped up and down in front of the TV yelling “that’s me!, that’s ME!”.
Though I did like Lost in Translation, these others I found dull and uninteresting.
I also didn’t like Office Space. I was prepared to buy it because it sounded great, but I’m glad I got it from Netflix because I definitely won’t watch it again and have no interest in any extras that may be included on the disk.
Terrible casting was one problem. Doesn’t matter how good the script is if the actors can’t deliver the lines.
Being too comic book styled was another problem. Watchmen wasn’t supposed to be another Spiderman or Iron Man. Those movies were straight comic book adaptations so they worked by being comic books on screen. But the idea of Watchmen was “okay, but what if superheroes lived in the real world?” It was supposed to be comic book superheroes in a real world setting. Instead they took the characters and put them back into a comic book setting.
Third, eliminating the minor non-hero characters was a mistake. Sure their story didn’t seem important to the main plot but they were actually important to the final climax. We had been following these minor characters throughout the series so when Adrian set off his bomb he was killing real people not just anonymous figures. That showed the hollowness of his claim to have made himself feel every death. We felt their death because we had known them and we could see Adrian didn’t.
Fourth, history has passed the story of Watchmen by. It’s a cold war story. We’re now living in a post-cold war post-9/11 world. Movies like Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? or The Stepford Wives meant something in the era they were made - they were addressing concerns of their day. But when their era ended, so did their relevance.
Finally, and I’ve been saying this all along, Watchmen was unfilmable. It wasn’t about the story, it was about comic books. So the media was the message. Adapting Watchmen into a movie was like trying to adapt a painting or a poem into a movie. You might follow the story but the story is not the point.
The Matrix: Revolutions - Nobody will notice if we abandon the core ideas that made the first two movies interesting beyond superficial style and lots of explosions, right?
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - I didn’t know anything about this movie and went into it expecting it to be an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name.
So if you felt this way,you can’t also claim you went into the movie expecting to love it - and that’s the theme of this thread. Might as well start a thread called “Movies I expected to hate, and did”
I didn’t think I would love Thelma & Louise, But I thought I would dislike it for reasons opposite of why I actually didn’t like it. I was worried the male characters would all be stereotypical jerks. Instead it was insulting, (I thought), to women. It was just one irrational decision after another. :rolleyes:
Even with this, I was hugely disappointed in the lack of spoken/unspoken dread. During the Cold War there was always this background vibe of “When’s the bomb gonna drop?” that was completely eliminated from the movie. Given the terrorist attacks we’ve had in the past 10 years around the world you’d think it would be easy to recreate that.
Who appointed you topic cop? Iamthewalrus(:3= said he couldn’t understand how someone who loved the comic book could dislike the movie. So, as someone who fit that description, I was responding to that.
Tim Burton seemed like the perfect director for that project. He’s so great at creating worlds. And the special effects would be so much better than the original.
And in the end, it sucked. And the ‘twist’ ending was stupid.
Another vote for Lost in Translation I normally love arty type movies & I thought it got off to a good start. But it was dull, dull, dull.
Agree with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Even though martial arts movies aren’t usually my sort of thing I wasn’t expecting this movie to seem so long.
Return of the King wasn’t as good as the other 2 LOTR movies. I remember squirming in my seat with boredom. The first movie I never wanted it to end!
The most disappointed I have ever been in a movie was Shrek 2. It wasn’t funny & as I remember it, there were a lot of jokes you would have to be North American to get. I think it will have dated very quickly - but I don’t intend to watch it again to find out!
I thought of another couple. *Little Miss Sunshine * and Napoleon Dynamite.
I was so excited to see both: interesting casts, good reviews, quirky and different, supposedly. I couldn’t finish either. I’ve tried them a second time and I still hate to turn them both off.
