BIIIIG second here on The Matrix. I saw it before the hype really got started and left thinking, “Hmmm. That was mildly entertaining. Pretty cheesy in parts, but I wasn’t bored out of my skull.” I was stunned to learn that my roommate, who had gone with me, was totally confused by what had just happened.
Oh, and in crappy movies that make a lot of money category, gotta add “Godzilla”.
** Beloved **
Yeah, yeah, I should’ve known anything with Oprah would suck, but still… my only regret is that I can’t get back the 3 hours of my life I spent watching that. To make it worse, I went on a day off from work. Good use of a vaction day :rolleyes:
For me, whenever I think of overrated tripe, I think of the morbid Leaving Las Vegas, starring Nicholas Cage. I saw it only after hearing critics practically falling over each other to praise it. Siskel & Ebert each named it the best picture of the year.
Boy, was I shocked.
It’s depressing, but that’s not necessarily a death knell for a movie. But I never had any reason to care for any of the characters. It was slow, too. That doesn’t help. I didn’t see what the big deal about Cage’s performance was (especially after he won the Best Actor award for it). I couldn’t find a single bloody point to the whole thing.
Two hours stolen from my life.
Oh yeah, and then there’s The English Patient, but others have mentioned it already, so I’ll leave that particular dead horse to fester on its own.
Oh, and I forgot to say something in my last post. I’m sure it’s blasphemy for me to say this, but I actually liked the movie Gladiator. Sure it’s not the greatest movie ever made, and it’s not even close to being the best movie of the year. But I never thought it was the pile of dung that so many have made it out to be.
Hey…i Loved Gladiator…it just seemed so epic.
I’d have to also agree on the English Patient…talkin about a freakin bore!
Okay, I also hated American Beauty and I’m glad to see I’m not the only one. But I fear I’m the only person in the USA who felt that…Usual Suspects was a terrible movie.
Everyone sees the movie and then the end and thinks it’s amazing. That he made the whole thing up. I thought it was pretty good the first time, and so the second time I tried to figure it out and it didn’t happen. You can’t explain the movie. Even when you know the ending. How much did he make up? The boat actually caught fire…where any of those guys involved? Who cares? I hated this flick!
Ok…so let’s get a general concensus going…Why did everyone in here hate American Beauty?
How about “The Cell”?
Creepy, sure. Utterly scary as hell, not on your life.
And on a side note, the most UNDERRATED movie for me was The Usual Suspects.
Shawshank Redemption.
My friends went nuts for it; I don’t know about the critics. Sappy, formulaic, and never made me sympathetic to the protoagonists who were, after all, mostly murderers.
First, to EVERYONE who’s been outraged here, or tempted to yell “HOW CAN YOU SAY MY FAVOREITE MOVIE WAS OVERRATED,” bear this in mind: EVERY movie that gets mentioned here is bound to be a critical or box office favorite. In short, nobody is going to name movies that EVERYBODY hates! Ed Wood made horrible movies, but they sure weren’t overrated!
So, relax. No matter what your favorite movie is, SOMEBODY is going to dislike it and wonder what all the fuss was about.
As for why I hated “American Beauty,” start with the fact that it was ridiculuously unoriginal. Sam Mendes apparently thinks we still live in the 1950s, and that “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” and “The Graduate” were documentaries about American life.
Gee… a Hollywood film that says American suburban life is shallow… wow, how original! Haven’t seen a movie with THAT theme in days!
The next-door neighbor is a right-wing military officer… gee, I wonder if he’s an abusive fiend and a closet homosexual (couldn’t see THAT coming down 5th Avenue, COULD you?).
The movie is a pastiche of cliches, strung together by a writer and director who fancy themselves cutting edge.
I’m not going to try to make astorian like “American Beauty” (which I liked, but it’s not, say, in my top 10 of all time), but I will just say in its defense that I agree with Roger Ebert’s edict, “What’s important about movies is not what they are about, but how they are about it.” Even the most hackneyed and obvious of stories can be told with wit and style and be made enjoyable.
And for my money, “Gladiator” was overlong, dull and depressing. I have no problem with long movies – I loved “Magnolia” – but I have a problem with long, boring movies. The only enjoyable things in the movie were Joaquin Phoenix, Derek Jacobi (far more dignified than Charles Laughton’s Gracchus in “Spartacus”), and Oliver Reed (although I preferred Peter Ustinov in, again, “Spartacus”). Russell Crowe is capable of acting with more range, and why he didn’t is a mystery.
I vote for “The Wizard of Oz.” Never did like that movie.
The first time I saw it, as a child, it scared me so much I couldn’t watch it–the witch and the flying monkeys and all.
By the next time I watched it, I had already read the book–in fact, most or all of Frank Baum’s Oz books, and I was disappointed in the movie for not being faithful to the book. (They changed the color of the slippers, left out the last part of the book, etc. I was at an age when this sort of thing particularly bothered me.)
Over time, my objections grew more substantial. The ending of the movie, for instance, is a double cheat: “It was all a dream!” and “You could have gone home any time; you just wouldn’t have believed me if I told you.”
Then, not too long ago, the movie was playing on TV, and I tuned in just long enough to see how cheesy it was. Puh-leeze! There may be some good things about it, but it’s just too stoopid to deserve all the adulation it gets.
Gone With the Wind. Four hours of my life that I will never recover. Rhett should’a just tossed that bitch Scarlet and be done with it.
I remember going off on this movie in another thread before, but I can’t seem to find it. Anyway, here was the gist of my aguemnt.
I pretty much second everything astorian said, especially about the cliches–even when the movie was trying to be the exact opposite of cliche, it was cliche. Can anyone honestly tell me that they were surprised when the blonde girl was a virgin?
And Kevin Spacey’s daughter was an inconsistent cliche–why was she a cheerleader? And was she so damn good-looking? The point of her character is that she was ugly, and the entire point of her boyfriend’s characters is that he found beauty in unconventional things.
The comedy/drama aspect of the movie bugged me to; the comedy made the drama look trite and artificial, and the drama made the comedy look forced and silly.
As astorian mentioned, the “evil undercurrent of modern-day suburban life that appears to be so normal and happy” theme has been done. To death. And it was done a lot better in Blue Velvet and Lawndogs.
And what really bugs me about this movie is that its entire
purpose, I think, was to divide the world into two groups–smart people (who “get” the movie and like it), and dumb people (who don’t get it and think it’s stupid). So when I say I hate this movie, everyone must respond “Oh, well you just didn’t get the symbolism and the deeper meaning,” and then they turn all superior on me. First of all, technically, it’s not symbolism when the main character narrates its meaning in a voice-over, and secondly, the entire attempt at a great meaning that all the intelligent and smart people in the world would understand and discuss at length with each other while they pity the ignorant
Americans who didn’t see the truth in the film just seemed
insincere to me.
I’m not sure you can say a movie is “underrated” that won two Academy Awards, got rave reviews, and has been wildly popular on video for five years.
I have to add my voice to the group of those who think “American Beauty” was overrated. It wasn’t a TERRIBLE movie, but it wasn’t great; it was essentially just the standard Hollywood “people in suburbs are zombies” stuff for the umpteenth time, which of course is Lesson 4 in the Hollywood canon of stories collectively titled “Why Everyone Who Doesn’t Live In Greater Los Angeles And Isn’t Part Of The Entertainment Industry Is Merely A Member Of An Easily Stereotyped Group Of Incomplete Semi-Humans.”
Nothing about it was particularly interesting or outstanding, and I thought Kevin Spacey’s performance was far short of Oscar-worthy - not his fault; he just didn’t have a lot to work with.
If you wanna have fun, go to rec.arts.movies.past-films and post the questions “worst movie to win a best picture Oscar?” (it’s been done on several occasions, and always generates about a terabyte of bandwidth).
The winners (but they always have staunch defenders) are always: Forrest Gump and Braveheart.
Well, I fell asleep watching “Good Will Hunting.”
Twice.
A friend told me I hadn’t given it a chance. I gave it another chance. Yawn. This movie won awards?
OK, maybe the second half really rocked.
I wouldn’t know.
Look at the linked list of great movie I have to say the Godfather. It was a good movie, but the 3rd greatest american movie of all time? give me a break.
Number one is Citizen Kane, I’m guessing. What’s in second place? Schindler’s List?
For my 2 cents “Silence of the Lambs” was the most critically praised flick that I thought sucked big red rocks. I hated it because it was built around the moronic premise that the FBI sends rookie female agents into the field ALONE to face crazy serial killers.
There’s such a thing as suspension of belief in movies - like in “Field of Dreams” when the 1919 White Sox materialize out of the cornfield - but Silence of the Lambs not only suspended my belief; it trampled all over it. This bothered me, but the critics, and the American people, loved the movie anyway.