i don’t really understand your point about pretensions, but i would argue that the twilight movies are competently put together, and why wouldn’t they be? they have big budgets and an established fanbase that guarantees the movie will make money. are they great movies? no. are they great art? no. competently made? absolutely.
the faults with them lie with the source material, and as i mentioned before, the movies are somewhat more palatable than the books (example 1: i cannot recall disliking a protagonist of a series more than bella swan. she’s slightly more tolerable in the movies, and her martyr complex is downplayed a lot. example 2: in the last book it’s made clear that rosalie takes a protective role over bella not because she gives a shit that being pregnant is slowly killing bella, but because she wants the baby.)
I haven’t seen the 4th Terminator movie, because it got such bad reviews, but I think that the third one is grossly underrated. It’s still not as good as the first two, which are each classics in their own way, but it’s a solid action movie with some exceptional scenes. Its real crime is that it nullifies the fantastic ending of T2. It would have been a much better movie as a standalone not trying to be part of a beloved franchise.
If we’re saying that a franchise is only as good as its worst member, then I think it’s hard to argue with Toy Story for best franchise.
Sorry to nitpick (and arguably to threadshit), but isn’t the lack of this what distinguishes a franchise from a series? I thought the idea with a tv/movie franchise is that just as with a restaurant franchise, you can have anybody on the inside running it and doing the work, but the label on the outside (and hopefully the standards and practices that the label represents) is supposed to guarantee success. Star Trek is a franchise, not just a tv series, because you can stick that name on a new tv series or a movie or a novel or a game or a lunchbox and it’ll hopefully sell. It doesn’t have to be about Kirk and Spock or be developed by Gene Roddenberry or even take place in the same universe, it just has to have the name, and hopefully have warp drive, transporters, and phasers, just like McDonald’s has name and the basic trademarks, but can be owned and run by anyone, and might even have different menus in different countries/locations (but always burgers, fries, and sodas).
I agree the third Terminator movie was a good action movie, though I do think Kristina Lokken’s nude scene could have been a little longer … like, an hour longer. Damn! She looked AMAZING!
What, no love for the “Hellraiser” series? I think there were six of them. I haven’t seen them all, but the ones I’ve seen were consistently entertaining.
I’d count the Bourne films, the Craig-era, Connery-era and Dalton-era Bond films, the Nolan-era Batman films, and the TOS-era Star Trek films as among my favorites.
However, the shaky-cam almost ruins Supremacy for me; Dark Knight Rises was by far the worst of the Nolan Batman trilogy, and I’d watch Star Trek V only for the kitsch value.
I’ll watch any of the Toho movies. The first, Gojira, is absolutely the best. It has a darkness to it that makes it live more than the others, by far. However, I always have an hour and a half to watch him destroy downtown in order to save it. Heck, I’ll watch it just to hear his roar through the subwoofer, these days.
Among the worst has to be the Fu Manchu series directed by Harry Towers, with Christopher Lee as the titular villain. The series was already fighting against accusations of racism, but what really killed it was its atrocious descent into poverty row cheapness. The last two were especially awful, and The Castle of Fu Manchu was an entry in the third season of MST3K – one which took a noticeable toll on Joel and the 'bots (and the Mads).