Well, that’s the problem. He did it. Once.
He’s overall a superb filmmaker. His stuff is well shot, his sense of mood and pace and characterization are great. But his “twists” are getting increasingly dumb. a lot of people felt betrayed by the absurdity of The Village, Pepper Mill included. He’s got to get it together again.
A lot of people say things like “That first movie ruined him for most people. Now they spend all the time looking for the twist, and don’t pay attention to the film.” Bull. I think that having a story with a secret or a twist is entirely legitimate, and that having your audience know you do it doesn’t invalidate later works. Heck, Rod Serling ran Twilight Zone on TV for years, and most of the stories had twists. O. Henry made a career out of the twist-ending story. So did lots of 1950s science fiction and fantasy writers. So, to a large extent, did thriller writer Frederick Forsyth.
Harold and Maude
The Truman Show (Didn’t hate it, but thought it was ok)
I totally respect your opinion. I just happened to have seen that movie when I was in the middle of cliques, conformity, socializing with just your group, etc., IOW high school, and it hit pretty much every nerve. It feels so bad it does feel like something to cry about.
I’ve only ever walked out of the movie theater for one movie: Heat. Granted, I was in high school, and my major reason for seeing it was “Action movie? With Val Kilmer? He’s pretty; sure, I’ll go see it.” And as much as I liked action movies, as far as I remember:
Things blow up. Mostly cars. Too many minutes of gratuitous sex follow. Someone talks to an old guy about nothing coherent. More people get shot and blown up. There is a boat, I think. Val Kilmer looks like ass.
Apart from that:
Daredevil. Apart from my inability to take a world seriously where every single person that Matt Murdock fails to put in jail gets the snot beaten out of him and NOBODY SUSPECTS A THING (just because he’s blind doesn’t mean he can’t take a hit out on people), what’s the big shift in the character? “Killing people is wrong, even if they’re bad, so I will permanently cripple bad people instead.”
Citizen Kane made me want to sleep. I understand in a faraway sense that it’s very good, that it does a wonderful job, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care.
I can’t speak for The English Patient because I never saw it. It looked very dull and annoying.
Barton Fink never made sense.
Chasing Amy. A guy can’t get over this girl he loves who is a lesbian. He talks about sex a lot. That’s about all I got out of it.
Sideways had one marginally likeable character, and she got screwed over – literally – though I did rather like her revenge. 
I hated everyone else. Including the main character’s love interest.
Napoleon Dynamite. Hate. Heat of a thousand suns hate. Oh, there’s funny lines and all, but it’s an incredibly sad and depressing movie in my opinion.
Sin City. To be fair I don’t hate this, but I don’t like it nearly as much as many other people seemed to. I cringed in all the right places, but I wasn’t floored, I wasn’t blown away, I was just vaguely engaged and then it was over.
:eek: …BWAHAHAHAHAHA. ahem I’ll admit that as pretty as the movies were, they mostly didn’t quite manage to capture the incredible grandeur of the source material (which may be only Incredibly Apparent to people who read it early in their lives; it’s dry as hell and very likely strikes other people like Citizen Kane strikes me), but to say there is no substance behind it is laughable. There’s ACRES of substance to the story. It’s thick with the stuff. It’s just that a lot of the substance got dug out like a pumpkin’s innards when you make a jack-o-lantern.
Back to arguing about “Signs”. Thing is, the aliens just don’t make any fucking sense. But I have the feeling this was intentional. Shamalayan wanted the aliens to be incomprehensible, because, hey, they’re aliens doing mysterious things, and it would be unrealistic if we understood what they were up to. But they were so incomprehensible that they pretty much ruin the movie.
The only fanwank that makes sense is that the aliens we see aren’t the real aliens. The kidnappers are slaves, sent down to a hellworld on an impossible mission for the amusement of the real aliens. The people who were captured? Later the aliens take the enslaved humans to a lava planet and order them to capture as many lavamen as possible, otherwise their families will be brutally tortured. The real aliens are just doing this for kicks, and the kidnapper aliens are pawns, who know nothing about Earth, and can’t even recognize a doorknob.
Eh, it still doesn’t make much sense, I know it’s not supposed to make sense, but it still makes no sense.
Now, back to movies everyone likes that I can’t stand:
“Good Will Hunting”. Damn, I hated this movie. I never for one second bought the character of Will. Just found it impossible for this person to exist as presented. I can believe a genius from a blue collar background. But not this one. And the psychoanalysis scenes were just laughable. The most cringeworthy scene was were Will shows up the preppy in the bar with how knowledgeable he was compared to the preppy. What the hell? Totally unbelieveable scene. Just rank. I hated, hated, hated this movie.
Blasphemer! 
Spiderman 2
The first entire hour was, anything Peter tries to do will fail. I got that after 5 mintues, thank you very much. Doc Ock was cool, but the second hour didn’t have much more than that, and the train action was ludicrous, as well as the Christ imagry.
And she left that guy at the alter! She couldn’t make up her mind earlier.
Bitch.
Hope she makes boring Peter Parker’s life just as miserable.
By the way, I liked Spiderman 1.
All the Star Wars movies except The Empire Strikes Back.
Everything Woody Allen made after Annie Hall (parts of Bullets over Broadway were funny, but I doubt I’d watch it again).
Dances with Wolves
Terms of Endearment
That tedious movie with Mary Tyler More where some family member drowns, everybody feels guilty and they all wear golf cothing.
Dark City
Scarface. I walked out on near the beginning so I don’t know if the whole movie was repulsive. I’m not likely to ever find out, either.
Mad Max. All of 'em.
I love this description very much. I think the movie’s called Ordinary People.
Thank you, I thought I was the only one who hated that shit-fest. I just felt so bad for that astronaut kid humiliated in front of his friends and family. He was a genuinely good guy.
I usually don’t go for too much plastic surgery, but if we could get a team of doctors to work on Tobey Maguire’s face so that he could make other expressions besides “Confused virgin with the stupid grin,” I might start seeing his movies again. The kid looks like Elijah Wood’s stoner cousin.
I’ll second, third, fourth, whatever There’s Something About Mary. The movie as a whole sucked, but I still quote from it shamelessly.
That is one I forgot. Good Will Hunting was meant to be so original and so great. What on earth were those people talking about. And Oscars for screenplay and Robin Williams. WTF !! I hate this movie.
So original -not. Who did you think would solve the physics problem ? The nerds who have studied physics since they were 8 or the cute janitor ? Well, it is a movie. What a surprise…the janitor solves it.
Forgot one.
Das Boot. OK, I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t exactly empathize with the U-Boat crew either. After the triumphant return and subsequent bombing of the harbor, I found myself looking at Jurgen Prochnow as he slowly died among his crew and going “BWAAAAA-HA-HA-HAAAHHHHH!!! Yeah, that broke my fucking heart!!”
So no, I don’t think I got the message the film wanted me to get.
Apparently that character would be called a Gary Stu. I liked the movie, but that did keep bugging me.
I understand all the individual words in this sentence, but togther they just don’t make sense.
Hmm…Heat, eh…There was no boat, no gratutious sex scenes(No sex scenes at all, IIRC), no old guy (unless you consider Jon Voight as the old guy).
Val did kind of look like an ass with the long hair and all.
There were some sex scenes, but no nudity. More of some kissing followed by a “lean her down over the bed…” and then a “later, with sheets wrapped around as they talk.”
But more importantly is that Heat wasn’t an action film. Certainly it does have some shoot outs, but that is a very small portion of the film and definitely not the focus. But going into a film expecting something entirely different can certainly ruin a movie for you. Popcorn flick, Heat is not.
Napoleon Dynamite
Waking Life
I Heart Huckabees
Donnie Darko
and I hate Monty Python and Princess Bride so much that I could just stab myself in the head with a pair of scissors
I hated Casablanca. I don’t understand at all why people like it so much.
I also hate most Christmas movies. A Christmas Story is not my idea of a good time and I can’t stand It’s A Wonderful Life.
Also, while I didn’t hate it, I did find Breakfast At Tiffany’s pretty overrated. I love Audrey Hepburn and really really want to love all her movies, but that one does not make my list of favorites.
but I love Forrest Gump.
Another vote for Napoleon Dynamite here. The story wasn’t terrible, but I did not laugh once.
But my real nemesis since the day it was released is Titanic.
Maybe it was because I went in to see it a little peeved (I have an inherent bias against films based on true stories) but that boat didn’t sink nearly fast enough.
Unfortunately, that particular evasion is all too common when a lazy hack attempts to evoke Mysterious Alien Stuff. :rolleyes:
Personally, The Triplets of Belleville bored me half to death.