And I still hate ST because it pretends to be a movie based on a book I greatly admired.
Yeah, I don’t blame you. I don’t know how anyone could find hitting a kid funny. But when your culture has normalized child abuse I guess that’s what happens.
I was just reminded of Possession 
Add it to the list.
Oh my. Sorry the movie didn’t work out, but thanks for making me aware of the book. I just added it to my Wish List.
I didn’t hate it, but I was hugely disappointed, for exactly the same reason as the OP of the the thread you posted; because by making Roland a beefcakey American, it completely changed the nature of the relationship that develops between him and Maud. “Ice queen is melted by rougish hunk” is a pretty worn trope; “Reserved scholars bond over shared passion for the work” is an altogether fresher story.
I tried to temper my expectations when I saw Possession, as the novel has long been my “desert island” book; and I knew that the film couldn’t possibly capture all the nuances - the significance of characters’ names, the poetry, the wordplay, Byatt’s eye for color and light, her sheer virtuosity (I added it up once that she wrote in 14 different voices, in the course of the novel). There’s a reason it won a Booker prize.
But gutting one of the story’s two central relationships - or at least reducing it to something predictable and commonplace - was a letdown. Nothing wrong with Aaron Eckhart per se; he was just utterly wrong for Roland Michell. Oddly enough, I thought Gwyneth Paltrow was very good as Maud Bailey, probably the strongest of the leads. Jennifer Ehle was a bit too…soft, for Christabel. Not prickly, or self-contained enough. A little too sweet, IMO.
(I just went to Google to look at the cast; I didn’t realize that Cersei Lannister, Lena Headey, played Blanche Glover.)
It’s not my all time hated movie, but I’ve seen it recently-ish so it springs to mind:
Ad Astra
It’s a spectacularly dumb movie that thinks it’s a really smart deep movie, so is really irritating. I generally think movies that “don’t take themselves too seriously” are generally just bad movies, but in this case it took itself way too seriously. Swap out Brad Pitt for a decent action star, make it all about the fight scenes in space, and it’s a decent action movie. As it is it’s just self indulgent tosh that thinks it’s cleverer than it is.
But just because it’s satire it doesn’t mean it needs to be an episode of Beverly Hills 90201.
I get it yes it’s a satire of the fascist-ey themes of the book, why does that mean it has to be a crap movie? Dr Strangelove is a a satire but it’s still a good movie.
The only R.A Heinlein story that has even come close to his original story is Predestination, an adaptation of All You Zombies. Starship Troopers a bastardization of some other story and they should be sued for using the same title.
Sometimes I Think About Dying
This was atrocious and boring. Honestly, a terrible movie and it made me think of this thread.
Not true any more. There’s a surprisingly good Japanese adaptation of The Door Into Summer. I highly recommend it.It’s on Netflix
Haven’t seen anything worse than Fred, yet. They made two sequels but you couldn’t drag me to see them.
~Max
– in which Slow_Moving_Vehicle is responding circa 2014 to my complaints about Possession
I either didn’t see or never got around to replying to this back when, but yeah, exactly, everything you said about Possession and the personnel involved in it. And for all the same reasons, same channel.
That’s July 14, 2023. So not quite so long ago as 2014.
~Max
Oh. Then I don’t feel quite so bad for not noticing the post before.
Hmmm…this is a bit of a tough one because I often can even enjoy bad or cheesy movies on some level-- I’ll do a MST3K-style monologue in my head as I watch.
I’ll nominate Waterworld-- I think it deserves all the hate it got.
I can be a bit of a stickler for scientific and logical accuracy in a movie, but I’ll be fairly lenient on this if the internal consistency of the movie’s universe hangs together well enough. The entire Earth, save for a possible mythical spot of land, is covered in water because the icecaps have melted? Not what would happen, but I’ll let that pass-- it is the whole premise of the movie, after all.
But Waterworld takes place in an unspecified future that’s distant enough that the Mariner, or whatever Costner’s character is called, has evolved gills and webbed appendages, and terrifying sea monsters have also evolved. Yet, it’s also close enough to our present that the bad guys have plenty of leftover cigarettes to smoke, and have as a home base a floating aircraft carrier full of crude oil that they somehow refine to keep their mechanically sound jet skis fueled up. I just couldn’t get past the idiocy of the world building aspect.
Then there’s the charmless, humorless woodenness of Costner’s acting-- it’s like watching an arrogant fence post try to act.
My most hated movie this year was Lisa Frankenstein, and I’m gobsmacked at all the love it’s gotten by many of my friends who I think should know better. Nothing in it worked for me, and you could see the flop sweat all over it from the movie’s attempts to be quirky and zany. Not even sure how “Frankenstein” is in the title because it’s a zombie story (not far from a remake of My Boyfriend’s Back). Most shocking was the acting by Carla Gugino, who I think gave an Emmy-worthy performance in Fall of the House of Usher just a few months before: she’s shrill and hammy and unbelievable all through it.
I didn’t hate Lisa Frankenstein - it was fun for what it was. But what it was, was an early '90s teen comedy. Not an homage or parody of the genre, but just another film that would have been much funnier at the time. It’s like the people who made it felt like they missed the window to make this film by 30 years and just decided “Fuck it - let’s make it anyway.”
My “worst films”: The Ridiculous Six is one of the worst ones I’ve actually watched all of, hoping against hope that it would eventually be funny. It is never funny. And actively offensive in some spots.
I tried watching both Cats and WW84 twice, and only made it about 20 minutes into both on both attempts. Which still puts it ahead of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which made The Fifth Element look like Shakespeare - despite the visual feast, I was bored within 10 minutes.
My wife’s all-time hated movie was The Adventures of SharkBoy and LavaGirl, which she was dragged to see when our daughter was very young. Robert Rodriguez’ other kids films were pretty good, but this one was pretty awful – it did poorly on Rotten tomatoes and didn’t last long in the theater. It might have been a flop, but they’re not releasing critical info to tell us whether or not it made money. I think that tells us something all by itself. I’ve never seen this one, fortunately.
We both loathe The English Patient
There are plenty of “bad” films that I like, because they’re at least entertainingly bad, and were sincerely made. Plan Nine from Outer Space is a hoot. Robot Monster just barely escapes being terrible, but it has too many dull parts (hard to believe, it being a movie about a robot made of a gorilla costume with a fishbowl space helmet on top, I know).
But Birdemic: Shock and Terror is undoubetly awful, despite the advantage of laughably bad special effects. The movie is just to dull and boring to be entertaining.
I didn’t hate Lisa Frankenstein, but it wasn’t very good, agreed.
IF you care, and you probably don’t and shouldn’t, yes, there are semi-canonical answers for it. Stupid post-facto answers, but answers. But yeah, I don’t think there’s any argument that they built a world to show off what they wanted (including the stupid ship name reveal as it sinks) and gave even less of a rat’s ass about reasonability than most scifi action movies bother with.
But this is still very true. Now I wouldn’t give Waterworld zero stars, because it’s soundtrack alone elevates it, and watching Dennis Hopper chew scenery in the most Dennis Hopper way is probably worth a star on it’s own, but I can’t argue it isn’t a huge failure of a movie.