You people kill me (with laughter)!
The Pillow Book, 1996. Exasperatingly and neverendingly bad.
Grand Canyon, 1992. Overrated, pretentious, contrived piece of shit. Worse, I saw it the day I lost my car in a flood. I went to see it that night because I felt I needed some escape and somebody told me it was “magical.” I wish it was magical enough to make itself disappear.
P.S. One of my all-time favorites, Field of Dreams, is on this thread. Hurray for the subjectivity of movie critiquing!
Dead Poet’s Society: I didn’t remember this film until HelloKitty brought it up, but I didn’t like it at all.
The Breakfast Club: I’ve watched it a few times on TV trying to find any redeeming qualities whatsoever, and I’ve found none. A thoroughly boring movie, if you ask me.
Elephant: An obscure(?) low-budget independent film about school shootings. #1 on my Worst Films list. Boring, badly acted, boring, badly written, and did I mention it was boring? I mean, like “watching paint dry” boring. I don’t know whether it was the scene where the camera just follows the main character as he walks around the high school where absolutely nothing happens (literally) for a 2 minutes, or whether it was the failed attempts to depict what modern high school is like that were obviously written by people way out of touch with real high schools (a group of teenage girls are walking down the hall during lunch. One of them says “Hey! You wanna go throw up?” The other girls follow her into the bathroom. WTF?) Or maybe it was the obligatory gay scene where the two shooters make out in the shower that had nothing to do with the rest of the movie and felt completely forced and out of place, or the scene where they try to tie in a reference to Doom, in a scene I’ve officially declared the Worst CGI Graphics Ever (if you’ve seen the movie, you know which one I’m talking about.) Maybe it was the scene where one of the teachers gets shot in the chest, and he’s bleeding profusely from the back, yet his chest is completely unscathed, with not even so much as a hole in his shirt. Whatever it was, Elephant is definitely a movie to avoid. It’s not even “so bad it’s good”; I even enjoyed “Cheerleader Ninjas,” but I hated Elephant.
Unadulterated crap. The flim, I mean. Pathetic.
Amen. And the whathisface - Colin Firth - romance with the Portuguese bird was ridiculous.
Shows how bad the film was - I can’t even remember this bit - these bits, whatever.
My vote goes to Godsend.
When the mother was in danger in the shed, I was hoping she’d be topped by her cloned son. Put us all out of our misery. And De Niro in that deerstalker.
Spoilers ahead! (Sorry, haven’t figured out how to use the spoiler tag.)
I hated Hannah and Her Sisters. Hey, Woody, (and judging by your behavior I can see why you are called that), the neurotic nebbish schtick got old 35 years ago. And a movie where I sit there wondering “Is something going to happen? Is something going to happen? Why didn’t anything happen?” isn’t something I’d recommend.
Hated Thelma and Louise. This is supposed to be a feminist movie? I agree that the guy they shot deserved it but the rest of their behavior was foolish and driving off the rim of the Grand Canyon isn’t female empowerment, it’s just a dumb way to escape the consequences of your actions.
I loved **The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and her Lover ** but then I have a weird sense of humor.
THE HOURS was obviously made to exploit the American press’ aversion to being labelled “homophobic”. Any movie about STRAIGHT self-absorbed twits such as these would have been universally panned.
The remake of THE IN-LAWS really bit, as well. The original is one of my favorite screwball comedies. I watched about 10 minutes of the remake on HBO and was bored to death by Douglas and Brooks making cliched “sensitive modern man” talk about “relationships”. Glad I didn’t spend $ in a theater on that one.
I have to defend Elephant. I think if you don’t get the point of the movie you’ll rate it a lot lower than if you do.
I Hated: Gladiator and every Steven Soderbergh movie ever made.
You know, after 1,250 days on the SDMB, I really ought to know better than to open a thread like this one. I start wanting to jump through the computer screen and tell people why they’re wrong wrong WRONG about this or that movie they’ve professed to despise. But I’m not going to: de gustibus and all that. I have oddball tastes in film (my two favorites: Joe Versus the Volcano and Zhang Yimou’s To Live), and I shouldn’t begrudge anyone else their own choices. Even if those choices are incredibly wrongheaded and you should all know better!
Ahem.
Excepted are those who named Van Helsing, Gladiator, or *The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and her Lover *. Those movies sucked donkeyballs.
Oooh. Good one. I was with friends and it was their turn to pick, so I had to finish it. Terrible, terrible.
Exorcist II: the Heretic
How the hell did we get from complete no-holds-barred child possession exploitation to James Earl Jones in a grasshopper suit? I hate you, Pazuzu!
I’ll second Very Bad Things. I’m actually a worse person for having seen it.
Interesting, I love (or at least liked) a lot of the movies that have been mentioned, but many more I never saw just because I got a real “this will suck worse than a crackwhore with braces”-vibe from them.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet In fairness, my buddy and I rented it with the intention of watching a crappy movie, and it did warn me away from Baz Luhrman’s craptacularity in time to avoid Moulin Rouge. Rule of thumb: when a movie includes the author’s name in the title, it’s usually because it has nothing else to offer.
The Sunchaser. Directed by Michael Cimino. I’ve never seen Heaven’s Gate, but after watching this, I have a good idea who’s to blame for its failure. This film might work as Rush Limbaugh’s parody of how liberals think, except that Cimino says it with a straight face. Utter crap.
There have been many movies that bored me. There have been many movies that irritated or annoyed me. There have been many films that left me wondering “How could critics have said this turd was a masterpiece?” But very, very few movies merit real hatred.
So, are they movies I really “despise”? A couple. But I don’t despise ordinary bad movies. Those movies aren’t worth despising. I only “despise” films that have a morally repugnant or dishonest message. One of the few mainstream films like that was “Gangsters,” a Brat Pack flick that celebrated the rise of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, while portraying the heroic New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey as a corrupt snob.
Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano were evil. They were thieves and killers. To treat them as glamorous figures, while trashing a great man who did his best to shut down the mob (at risk to his own life) is disgusting.
That makes “Gangsters” a despicable film in a way that “Forrest Gump” or “Titanic” never could be.
One of my favourite moves growing up was ‘Mr. Deeds goes to town’. Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. Great stuff.
But they couldn’t let it alone. Lets see: who could we have replace Gary Cooper? Why the obvious choice would be Adam Sandler, wouldn’t it? After all he certainly has the same screen presence…Well no, not really. He is a great actor, too? Nope can’t be that. He has that wholesome, good looking, rugged innocence about him? Not hardly. He looks more like that creepy guy who lives down the block and gives candy to children if they follow him into the shed out back of the house.
So, what the hell was anyone thinking that Adam Sandler could be Mr. Deeds??? 
:mad:
I had pretty much the same thought after seeing Prospero’s Books.
I was forced to sit through Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star last summer on a bus trip to New York last summer. It was a welcome distraction when the lady next to me decided to change her baby’s poopy diaper on my lap, without asking.
Heaven’s Gate is called ‘The Film That Killed Universal’ and ‘A $40 Million Flop’. I bought it on VHS years ago, and then I got it on DVD. I love this film!
First of all, I like history. The movie was based on (or at least inspired by) the lynching of Ella ‘Cattle Kate’ Watson and Jim Averell. (A lot was changed, but the basics were there.) It was a fascinating incident in U.S. history that most people (unless you live in the area, which I don’t) don’t know about. One thing I especially appreciated was the attention to historical accuracy given to the wardrobe and props. They did some good research there. The cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond is beautiful. And… Isabelle Huppert is naked in it. She’s naked in it a lot. How can you not like a film with Isabelle Huppert naked in it? 
There are two scenes I didn’t like in Heaven’s Gate: The graduateion Blue Danube dance, and the roller skating barn dance. Clearly Cimino’s intention was to compare and contrast the society of Harvard students on their graduation day, and a townful of poor immigrants out on the frontier. But they were so long! When I rented the film (the first time I saw it and didn’t know what to expect) the Blue Danube scene bored me nearly to tears. The roller skating barn dance scene got on my nerves because I was still reeling from the Harvard scene. Both scenes still bug me. What a way to put the brakes on a movie! And in the case of the Harvard scene, right at the beginning! I also think the audio in the Harvard scenes was poorly handled. They’re so noisy it’s difficult to hear some of the dialog.
The rest of the film was beautiful. We can see analogies between what the Stockman’s Association does to the immigrants, and what Corporate America is doing to people today. Thinkgs really haven’t changed in the last 115 years. (Well, except whole groups aren’t actually being killed by gunmen today.)
If you like the Old West history, Heaven’s Gate is a good film about a relatively obscure incident. It’s not completely accurate historically because it changed major parts of the events that actually occurred; but it was enough to make me learn more about the Johnson County Wars. The clothing was created by people who studied period photographs, and the costumer also provided accurate accoutrements. There are zillions of films out there about the Civil War and about the period between the Civil War and the mid-1880s. Many of them are ‘generic’, timewise, taking place in ‘Any Time, Old West’. There aren’t that many films that take place at the very outside edge of the Old West period on the cusp of the 20th Century. (Big Jake comes to mind – I remember someone trying to shoot a Broomhandle Mauser.) In my opinion none of the others I’ve seen that took place in the 1890s were as beautifully made as Heaven’s Gate.
There are only two. I don’t despise movies that are bad, or boring, or wastes of time. I despise movies when their messages strike me as evil.
Which means it’s down to Bulworth and Thelma and Louise.
The movies I despise are “Pulp Fiction”, “The Silence of the Lambs”, “Pearl Harbor” , “A Clockwork Orange”, “Electra” and just about anything with Jim Carrey. I’ll gouge my own eyeballs out before I watch those again.
Since dear wifey luuuuuvs the romantic comedies, I’ve sat through 'em all. While 99% of them are exactly the same, there are occasional gems. And then there’s the festering lump of shit that is The Object Of My Affection. It’s one of only three films with a “1” rating on my IMDB list, along with Baby Geniuses and the unMSTied version of Manos, and I’d gladly sit through either of those two than suffer through TOOMA again…<shudder>
What, pray tell, was the point of that movie? It threw in every cliche about high school (budding homosexuality, harassement, video games, access to firearms, bulimia, pregnancy, et cetera) while demonstrating than Van Sant has no clue why kids would do something like this.
I gotta agree with KJ. The film was deadly dull and unrealistic about the high school experience. None of the characters had any depth to them whatsoever. And what the heck was this school that looked like it was totally abandoned. Nobody in the halls? A few students in a classroom? It looked like everybody had abandoned Portland en masse.
Mean Girls was a more accurate portrayal of high school life. Heck, Saved By The Bell was a more accurate portrayal of high school.
Stranger