Whats the most overrated movie ever?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Back to my personal distain for “Silence of the Lambs”.

I said it was based on "the moronic premise that the FBI sends rookie female agents into the field ALONE to face crazy serial killers.

pldennission rebutted, saying in pertinent part:
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The FBI (well, Crawford, anyway) sent Starling into a state institution to interview Lecter on her own, but the FBI did not send her out alone to “face crazy serial killers.” …
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occ expanded on this saying,

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They explained this, also. They had, for years, sent experienced agents in to interview Dr. Lecter, and he had always seen right through them and their methodology. Crawford thought that by sending in a trainee, a greenhorn, if you will, that Lecter might respond to her. They also touched on the fact that they thought she might sexually interest him, also leading him to giving up some information. The hidden agenda, which Clarice guessed, was to attempt to pry information about Buffalo Bill from Lecter.
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Sorry guys but that’s just a flimsy pretext to have a babe interact with a crazy killer, not a valid investigation technique. It’s like saying, “Hey, our experienced brain surgeons tried the operation and it failed miserably. Why don’t we give the honey just out of med school a crack at it? And why don’t we have her try it solo without any assistance close by. And then when it fails again why don’t we turn a blind eye to her attempt to fix things on her own while she’s on ‘suspension’.”

FBI investigators work in teams. They just don’t do things the way “SOTL” pretends they do.

82

First of all, any Robert Altman film. I’ve only seen two, they both put me to sleep.

That stupid movie that got Oscars for Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, and I can’t even remember the title right now. The guy realises that he’ll have to stop insulting blacks, gays, and Jews before people will be nice to him. Who would have guessed?

Gone in 60 Seconds. I saw this movie on an airplane flight. It has every possible action-movie cliche that you can imagine.

83

This was As Good as it Gets, and I hated it too. It just seemed so contriving and manipulative. “Hey–Jack Nicholson gets laughs in the beginning when he’s mean to the dog, but then he wins the audience’s heart over when he’s nice to the dog!”
And is anyone else getting really sick of Helen Hunt?

84

Me! I first saw it dubbed in Italian, and it was even funnier (unusual, I know). They threw in so much pathos and swearing in the voice acting, that it actually improved an already funny flick. Part of the reason why I liked this movie is that it was so unpretentious, yet delivered solid entertainment.

IMO, some bad yet popular films:

GLADIATOR: While Gladiator wasn’t entirely a terrible movie, the hype surrounding it is IMHO completely unjustified. Someone gave me the DVD as a present, and I have to comment on the reconstruction scenes, like the Colosseum: utter crap and fuzzy quality. Those images belong in a computer game, not on a high-budget film. No character with any depth or motivation excepting Maximus, whose only motivation is to kill the emperor. No original story material. Some nice cinematography: cool battles and interesting technique of bashing the camera around, cutting frames out, and speeding up segments of the film during seriously violent scenes, but that’s all. If you want to see an epic, 13th Warrior is more fun because you actually laugh heartily AT the movie while watching it, and you still get plenty of ass kicking for your money. “Gladiator” could have been a lot better.

BLAIR VOMIT PROJECT: good grief. As has been pointed out, the Web site was far far better than the movie. This flick will probably go down in history as an example of a cross-media audience manipulation multimedia experiment, but nothing can disguise what it actually is: cheap regurgitating agent thinly disguised as cinema verite.

TITANIC: contrived vomit. I got the feeling the movie was put together in a couple of days by a chef turned film maker: “Hm, what ingredients will I need to make my very first movie? Special effects. Popular actor to play happy-go-lucky hero. Tormented heroine with evil boyfriend. Flashback, gotta have a flashback, maybe involving a mysterious jewel. Lots of Romance with a bit of Glamorous Sex. I’ll need a dramatic event based on reality to provide frame of reference. Have to decide which hero gets sacrificed to jerk a few tears from audience. Famous shipwreck will add element of impending doom” and so on.

MISSION TO MARS: I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but the movie apparently did quite well and its special effects were touted as fantastic. Obviously its success was driven solely by projectile vomiting, clearly NASA’s next development in propulsion technology if they truly advised on such a bad film (can anyone confirm?). Did anyone notice that in this film about exploration we are not shown a single landing scene on Mars? How many groaned at the Martian Face? Was anyone else induced to gastric turmoil by the lengthy, unnecessary, and unwanted character development? I was ripping my hair off in the space rescue scene where one of the idiots is falling towards the planet and the others attempt a rescue. Newton’s third law and projectile vomit propulsion could easily have saved him, had he been able to view the finished movie.

I have rambled enough. I will add though that it is unfair to criticize “2001: A Space Odyssey” without fully understanding what Kubrick was doing. He purposely avoided human communication/contact and highlighted action in the movie order to focus on a sense of awe and mythos beyond the level of ordinary humanity, while at the same time trying to keep things “realistic”—the long journeys, the silence of vacuum, etc. That is something I have not seen elsewhere in a work of fiction. Certainly the camerawork, special effects, and music in that film were outstanding, but I can completely understand why a narrative technique like 2001 is not well received by everyone, especially audiences who look for action in Sci-fi movies.

85

Dances with Gump.

86

Whoa…when is this happening??? I gotta get me a copy.

For my $0.02, I’d have to say The Phantom Menace.

I never saw Titanic, thankfully. Though I hear the scene at the end with all the frozen people in the water

87

…is good. I hear the scene at the end is good.

[sub]…use the preview button…USE THE PREVIEW BUTTON…[/sub]

88

Titanic

I repeat:

Titanic

Let’s all say it together:

Titanic.

Also:
Dances with Wolves
Gladiator
Dirty Dancing
Jurassic Park
Robin Hood, Prince of Egos

I liked American Beauty, but not enough to spend the effort defending it.

I once rented Bonfire of the Vanities, watched 20 minutes of it, stopped the tape, rewound it, and returned it to the video place immediately. Urgh. But I certainly can’t claim that that was overrated, as the critics and public panned it too.

89

I just have to comment on two of these:

Titanic: It was visually stunning (I was amazed by the shots of the inner workings of the ship). It had some great moments of drama with some of the ship’s passengers. The special effects were outstanding. And those were about the only good parts of this movie. I found the “love triangle” which formed the center of this movie to be boring as hell. Frankly, neither man struck me as a suitable life partner to Rose. For crying out loud, Jack’s a rootless day-to-day vagabond who also has hardly any money. As for Caledon…well, one critic called Billy Zane a “titanically bad actor”, but wish-he-were-silent Cal is so incredibly cardboard that it hardly mattered. After about four minutes of his antics, I became convince that he wasn’t a real person, merely a compliation of various stereotypes. Sheesh.

And the hell of it is that there were more compelling, more dramatic, more intelligent, and just plain BETTER parts of the movie that were sacrificed to make room for the utterly tepid “main plot”. Sheesh. Slightly above average movie, nothing more.

Star Wars original trilogy: Good movies all, but that’s all they were, good, not great, and certainly not what I’d call classics. In particular, it would have greatly benefitted from stronger dialogue and better supporting characters. (What is up with C3PO? Is a protocol droid supposed to whine that goddam much?)

90

Ghost. A good movie, but hardly an outstanding one. Plotholes and inconsistencies abound in this one, people. It was good, but nothing more.

91

Okay, I won’t waste time defending movies I love that have been defamed here–there are too many–so I’ll just answer the OP.
First, those already mentioned:
Yes, definitely “Gone With The Wind”–four hours of confederate propaganda and a spoiled heroine who thinks the world revolves around her. I can only imagine how much more I’d hate it if I were African-American.
“The Wizard of OZ”–assault and battery on a classic book, with a lead actress who is at about ten years too old for the role. Those songs–yecch!–and the cop-out it-was-all-a-dream ending make me ill.

Now I’d like to add a couple of items:
“Ben-Hur”–four hours (but it seemed like more) of Christian propaganda and bad history. Sure, the big chariot race was good–but that’s more to the credit of the stuntmen and the horses–any of whom could act circles around Chuck Heston.
“Five Easy Pieces”–except for the famous “Chicken Sandwich” scene, this was two hours of nothing happening. I fought to keep my eyes on the screen, could recall none of it afterwards.

92

Scream: Oooo, it was so hip and self-referential. Yeah right. What a piece of crap. Just because it’s better than Halloween XVI doesn’t mean it’s a good movie.

Three Kings: Once they were done playing the beach boys song it was worthless. Why couldn’t they have made the movie they showed in the previews? I didn’t even care about any of the characters by the end.

93

Overrated?

As Good As It Gets.

I thought the title was the best description this movie could have. Jack Nicholson is great, but not even he could save that one.

Gladiator.

I just don’t care for Ripley Scott movies in general; I always leave feeling as if I’m missing big chunks of character development. I wanted to like this movie; I tried to like this movie, and just couldn’t.

Out of Africa.

The three droniest hours of a movie I ever was bored through. And it even had Robert Redford. Blechth.

American Beauty.

I didn’t think it was funny; I didn’t think it was clever, I didn’t even think it was sad. I just kept waiting for it to get entertaining and it never got there. 'Nuff said.

In defense of one, however…

Titanic. IMHO, the quality of the production was outstanding. I’m one of those who enjoys looking at lighting, continuity, sets and historical accuracy of costumes, and Cameron did a great job on that. I liked the original soundtrack, too – not the closing song by Celine Dion that I heard on the radio until I was sick of it, but the rest of it. I’m also a romantic; sue me. :smiley:

Okay, so it had its flaws – but god knows it was better than As Good As It Gets, which walked away with half the Oscars that year. Yechth.