I recently saw a rerun of SNL that Ben Affleck hosted where they were slamming the movie Gigli. It was an infamously bad movie that I had never seen, so I thought I would finally check it out just to see what a mess it was. To my surprise, I found the film to not be nearly as crappy as it is made out to be.
Looking over some reviews of the movie, I found one by James Berardinelli at Reelviews that captured my impressions in its opening paragraph:
The oddest thing is that there are two other threads at the SDMB about this movie, one from 2005, and the other from 2007, that basically came to the same conclusion.
How is this film one of the 100 lowest rated films on IMDB? There is no way this movie deserves to be in the same category as Ishtar, Alone in the Dark, or Battlefield Earth. I feel odd defending the film because, in the end, it is still a bad movie. It is not actively bad, though, just passively bad. Its greatest sins are being boring and overly long.
It is hard to find fault the plot because it barely has one, and even at that it does not seem to care much about it. It is just a mechanism to get the two leads together. Sure, the acting may be lacking–Jennifer Lopez plays Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck plays Ben Affleck, Christopher Walken plays Christopher Walken, and Al Pacino plays Al Pacino–but, it is not like they are trying something and failing, they are not even trying.
I am disappointed. I guess when you hear about this real stinker of a movie for so many years, it sets your expectations so unbelievably low that they could never be satisfied. With that amount of build-up the reality is bound to better than the reputation. Maybe if I had set my expectations higher, I would have liked it less.
Interesting. I personally would say that Ishtar, while not a good movie, isn’t nearly so bad that it deserves to be categorized with shit like Battlefield Earth or Gigli.
I think your view is pretty much the consensus: lousy, but not the lousiest. It’s infamy was extremely heightened by the obnoxious oversaturation of the leads in the media, but the fact that it also uses a mentally challenged character for comedic effect and has a “lesbians are just waiting for the right guy” theme really doesn’t do it any favors, reputation-wise.
The imdb bottom 200 isn’t really a list of what movies are the worst. if they were, a lot more student films would be there. It’s a list of movies people hate, and there’s plenty of reasons to hate Gigli, even if the movie’s overall quality isn’t necessarily the greatest one.
Well it is not in the bottom 100, so it is not quite with the basement dwellers. I put Ishtar on that list as my own editorial comment, noting that in a recent thread, Name an unjustly derided movie, it came up as example of a movie better than its reputation.
With that film, I decidedly side with the majority in believing it deserves its rap. The first 30 minutes of Ishtar were just excruciatingly bad. I felt embarrassed for everyone involved. As it moved on it got less painful to watch, but the movie never got better. I did not think the leads had any chemistry. I did not think the jokes or situational humor were funny. I thought the story was hackneyed. The production just felt clumsy. At best, the whole thing rose to the level of hokey. Ishtar is a movie that tried and failed.
Apparently, some people find it hilarious. So, good for them!
I would have lumped it into the category of “unfunny comedies”, but I thought the mentally handicapped character was in exceptionally poor taste. That’s what made it stick out in my mind.
That is true. Both those things caused me to groan, yet neither of them bothered me too much, because the movie did not have enough confidence to commit to anything.
Unless I missed something, the brother’s disability is never specified. He has some hodge-podge of autism, Tourette’s, and brain damage that allows him to be as functional or dysfunctional as needed for a particular scene. The character is a cartoon of a mentally challenged person, so it was not too upsetting when his lines attempted to add spunky comic relief. He could have been Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber, or Jason Mewes in anything.
The lesbian thing also would be more offensive if it appeared for one moment that Jennifer Lopez was portraying an actual lesbian. As it comes up later, she is a “movie” lesbian, the kind that sleeps with guys, but only self-actualized ones. It is apparent from the get-go that that angle is just a contrivance to explain why she and Ben are not boning on the first night. For Christ’s sake, it is a rom-com. It needs a hurdle for the leads to overcome by the end of the movie.
If I actually believed in the characters, those things probably would have bothered me more. At no time, however, did it ever feel like they were going for authentic in their portrayals.
