I’d say that *Gosford Park *and Observe and Report definitely fall into the above-mentioned category, although Gosford Park won the Academy Award for the Best Picture that year.
The same can be said to some degree for Slumdog Millionaire, which, although it was a good, well-done film, wasn’t worthy of the Best Picture of the Year Academy Award.
What do the rest of you think? I’d love some feedback here.
This one is easy, because critics want to believe anything they’ve seen that others haven’t is a hidden treasure, or if not, so bad that common people should thank the critic for guarding the walls against it.
So what I’m saying anything critics like that I haven’t is overrated. And definitely Slumdog Millionaire. If critics had known millions of proles would see it they would have counted its flaws more against it.
In looking back at that previous post, I think I might be telling it like it is a little too hard. I hope all of you can handle it.
I agree about Gosford Park, but it didn’t win Best Picture. Looking at recent Best Picture winners, lot of people like Titanic, and a lot hate it. I thought it was god-awful, with a terrible performance by Kate Winslet. I thought Gladiator was pretty mundane. American Beauty moved me at the time, but has aged poorly.
Joe
*My Dinner with Andre. * I walked out.
Fargo - I didn’t like it.
The title of this thread should be “What movies got rave reviews by the critics, yet I didn’t like?” It’s not that anything in particular was bad or overrated about any of the movies mentioned so far; it’s just that you didn’t like them.
As Good As It Gets - I found it just awful on the whole, but the dialogue was exceptionally poor. I remember feeling embarrassed by Helen Hunt’s performance – my skin crawled at every line she delivered. And she won an Academy Award and a Golden Glode for that performance. Go figure.
Apocalypse Now.
When it was originally on TV uncut over several nights, I was working and asked hubby to record it and he did so on 3 different video tapes. Somehow I watched it out of order, and kept falling asleep after about half an hour of watching so I kept waking up and winding it back to the last part I vaguely remember seeing. Made absolutely no sense, and was boring as fuck. We figured out that it was being played out of order, so we rented it, and sat down to watch it. I still kept falling asleep, and it made fuck all for sense. There were a few interesting scenes - the napalm strike, and the helicopter flight leaving with Ride of the Valkyries, but in general a huge boring mass of bullshit.
To be honest, you could literally cut out half the movie and have a decent movie.
I also do not have any idea why people seem to worship the Godfather, either.
The Usual Suspects. Everybody told me what a great movie it was, and I was pumped when I finally got around to renting it. But, I don’t maybe if it was because I was expecting so much, I found it kind of tedious. It felt like they were trying too hard to replicate David Mamet.
When they had the big reveal at the end, I was like “meh.” It was kind of cool, I guess, but at that point I just didn’t care enough about the story or the characters to get really excited about it.
Nitpick: *A Beautiful Mind *won the Oscar for Best Picture that year.
That being said, I agree with your choice of Gosford Park.
The Godfather. It insists upon itself.
A lot of critics wet their pants over Crash* when it first came out, so I decided it might be worth seeing while it was still in theatres. Ugh.
It felt… forced. The characters didn’t have any consistent personalities - they’d shift from good guy to bad guy for no apparent reason other than the fact that the plot called for it, and the final scene involving the young cop played by Ryan Phillipe felt so out-of-character that I had to sit on my hands lest I throw my popcorn at the screen in frustration.
I’m sure there was a meaningful message about everyone is still a racist deep down inside, no matter how much we pretend we’re not… or was it that every bigot is actually pretty decent under all that hate? Damned if I can remember. All I know is that I got bludgeoned by The Very Important Message About Race In Modern Society for a couple of hours and didn’t enjoy the experience at all.
Not to mention that half of the actors involved can’t act their way out of a paper bag anyways (Ryan Phillipe, I’m looking at you).
“The Dark Knight”. I really wanted to like this out of respect for Mr Ledger’s memory but it didn’t really do that much for me. I do think his performance was the best part of the movie but that’s not really saying all that much. I’m glad that I saw it when it came out as I,like so many people, was shocked and saddened by his death, but I don’t know that I’d ever bother to watch it again.
Whoa. This is so weird. I JUST re saw Gosford Park this weekend and I thought to myself, “I’m sure at least one person just didn’t get it and is thinking this.”
Anyway, I think Gosford Park is a brilliant, great send up of British social class system. Absolutely love it.
Agreed on the Dark Knight, though. It was fun, but entirely too long and dull in the parts that Heath Ledger wasn’t it. And agree again on Crash. Terrible film.
Lost in Translation nothing happens and then nothing happens some more.
I was thinking about this question for the last hour or so and “Lost In Translation” was the best example I could come up with, so I come here to post it and of course, I am beaten to the punch yet again…
(seriously, one of the most over-praised movies I can ever remember)
Another example was “City Of God” which was treated like the Second Coming by the critics here at Sundance.
One word: Brazil
A truly lousy film by an overrated, mostly hack director*
I don’t think the point was that we are all racist, or that bigots are, underneath it all, decent people [ha ha]. The emphasis of the movie, at least from my perspective, was that people are not one-dimensional. That was one thing I appreciated about this movie, that there was no clear right/wrong, black/white, etc., but everything was a shade of gray, which is, to me, more realistic.
However, I will say that movies like this could have the tendency to be over rated simply because people feel like movies on issues like this are profound, perhaps more profound than they really are. shrug
Oh, agree with both of those.
City of God was just so dull. Why? Because it shows poverty? Don’t hundreds of movies do that? I actually don’t think Slumdog was THAT great, but I remember thinking when I saw it that, okay, this movie isn’t JUST about poverty. It’s actually entertaining–that’s what a movie should be. Not just, “Here’s a message.” It should have a story.