Heathens! The both of you! Heathens!
I thought ‘The Perfect Storm’ and ‘Gladiator’ were both overrated.
“There’s Something About Mary.” Everyone told me what a laughfest it was going to be. Took four sittings to get through it. I didn’t laugh once. I’ve never seen a Hollywood movie with such bad comedic timing, and timing is everything in comedy. Didn’t laugh once.
Wow I can’t believe all the hatred I’m seeing here for good (or at least decent) movies. I try to find at least a little good in every movie and rarely is a movie so bad that I complain (cough, What Lies Beneath, cough) but I would have to say the biggest overrated use-this-dvd-for-a-coaster piece of absolute crap that I’ve ever had the endurance to sit through was Taxi Driver. That movie was pure eye-clawing boredom, and dont even try to say it’s not hyped up as one of the best movies ever.
I have to somewhat agree with Ebert here. I got the feeling I was watching a made-for-tv movie while watching Gladiator. And don’t even try to compare a masterpiece like Pulp Fiction to a mediocre shot in the dark like Gladiator. Pulp fiction would have been good if it was shot with a camcorder. It had great actors and a writer who cared about more than exploiting the late 20th century craze for the 3-hour epic.
Oh, and it’s shoddy, not shotty 
When I saw the topic, my first thought was The Player. It came out when I was in college, and several of my roommates and friends couldn’t stop talking about it (they were a little weird that way). I tried watching it, got bored and gave up after the first half hour.
A few year later I decided I hadn’t given it a fair shot and sat through the whole thing. It was one of the most pointless, boring, self-absorbed pieces of crap I had ever watched without Joel and the 'bots sitting in the front row.
–sublight.
Forrest Gump - A love fest for Baby Boomers. This movie pulls every emotional chain there is for the '60’s crowd. The cinematic equivalent of glurge.
Driving Miss Daisy - The worst movie ever to win Best Picture. Hard to criticize this one without sounding like a racist, but it’s wallow-fest for the guiltridden.
American Beauty - Count me among the many who think this is overrated. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the movie, but the outpouring of praise is what I don’t get. “Middle class American values can be shallow”, “Appreciate the simple things in life”, “Chill out and don’t be a homophobe”. These qualify as great themes nowadays? This film fades fast. IMHO
LM
Right. Stop this thread immediately.
Taxi Driver??
Are you sure you saw the right movie? De Niro perfectly portraying the paranoid outsider, great direction from Scorcese, Jody Foster’s best role ever, a brilliant film.
Not the best movie ever made, but certainly not overrated.
Titanic walks away with that title. Not only was it over hyped, but sucked the sweat off a dead mans balls in metaphorically large proportions.
OK, in my OP I left it as a broad definition intentionally since there’s more than one kind overrated. If you want to take that to mean critically mis-acclaimed, friend over-praised, or over-oscar nominated, thst’s your choice. What I did NOT mean was overhyped. I didn’t like Hannibal all that much, but it wasn’t overrated in my opinion. I think most people, both amateur and professional, pretty accuratly reviewed it as being “good… but not that good.”
On another note, I liked ID4, but I think because I knew what to expect from it, a sci-fi Will Smith-type action movie. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t overrated though, by the regular people who watched it. For godsakes, people shouted “Yeah!” When Will Smith punched out the alien and said “Welcome to earth!” Then they clapped and shouted “yeah!” after Bill Pullman gave that speech at Area 51 to the airforce.
Going by the listprovided by King Rat it would have to be The Wizard of Oz: I have never been able to sit straight through, despite Judy Garland’s best efforts.
Gladiator is a very enjoyable film, but it is overrated. I cannot understand how it managed to receive an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.
I’ve just seen Hannibal and thought that it was atrociously awful. The fantastic talents of Moore and Hopkins cannot save it because their parts are so poorly written. Also, why is a potntially sinister scene ruined by the fact that Lektor is wearing a ridiculous blue shell suit? Please spare yourselves from this cash-in. It has one of the most pathetic scripts you will encounter.
Count me and at least 982 others into the “American Beauty is mind-numbingly overrated club.”
This might me a double post, sorry. . .
Blair Witch Project. Hell, the website for the movie was better than the movie itself.
Oh man! It was a double post, and I misspelled “be” in the second one.
But I’d also like to nominate The Matrix as a very overrated film.
Scoff. It had a writer who didn’t create a single scene with anything more complicated than a one-on-one dialogue exchange. Really, check it out, every scene consists of exactly one character playing off against one other character, even if others are present. It’s as if he never mastered writing anything more complex. That grated on me through the entire film.
Yea…it was a dialogue driven movie, so what? No one says “Remember that part in PF where they were driving and he swings the car around that turn real fast?!!”. They say things like “All I’m sayin is you don’t push a racecar on red.”
Let me repeat: Blair Witch was a big bag of fetid gas. Halfway through, I was rooting for a deranged psycho to materialize and chainsaw the lot of them. What was more unbelievable was that lots of folks watching it left thinking it was a great moment in cinematic history.
Taxi Driver had good sections, but does anyone really take Jody Foster seriously? She has the emotional range of an ice cube. And her starring in the King & I was one of the worst miscasts ever.
How about Cocoon? It was supposed to be such a happy, uplifting story — but the message I got from it was that you could forget about having a happy meaningful old age unless some aliens land in the neighbor’s yard and you can hitch a ride with them.
Sort of like Grease, where the underlying message was if you wanted to get the guy you wanted, forget about being the person YOU wanted to be, and just dress like a slut. (but at least the tunes were catchy…)
Neither of these were really bad movies, though,if you could just overlook the message.
Critic’s over rated it: The English Patien was boring and if Gladiator wins best picture I’m going to cry. And death to Robert Zemekis and all that he represents! Cast Away is Forrest Gump on an island.
People over rated it: Scary Movie
Scary Movie would be the worst movie ever if Dusk til Dawn 2 didn’t already occupy the spot. But seriously people, American Beauty is sweet!
You missed my point entirely. I didn’t mind that it was “dialogue driven”. What bothered me was that all the dialogue was one-on-one, and there were no conversations more complex than that. A skilled writer should be able to make multiple personalities play off one another in a single scene. I saw none of that in Pulp Fiction.