Agreed. But isn’t that the case with Oscar almost every year? Some of my faves in the past 20 years (Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Player) all lost out to more saccharine fare. I’m surprised by the backlash at Life is Beautiful. I enjoyed it tremendously, though I don’t imagine that I would like the subtitled version.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
Preview, damn it!
That’s supposed to be the dubbed version.
i get in trouble for disliking Titanic and Lord of the Rings . i think both are visually stunning, but the dialogue in Titanic made me want to wretch and I literally fell asleep (in the theater!) during LOTR.
Cating my vote for Gone With the Wind. Sat down once to finally see the “epic,” and came out of it wondering where I could get my four hours back. Rhett should’ve gotten a clue and dumped Scarlet by the second reel.
The Shawshank Redemption. This is supposed to be good? Yeah, okay, it’s not bad, but what in the world is so special about it? I found it cliché ridden and just plain ridiculous through most of it.
I agree with all those who said The Matrix. I actually like Reloaded, but I don’t understand what people see in the first one at all, or why people seem to think it’s so deep and complex.
Magnolia. I feel like I’m supposed to like this, because everyone talks about how great it is, but I think it’s about an hour and a half longer than it has any right to be, and frankly, I hate watching it. Really hate watching it.
The Shining. This movie just sucks. It’s unintentionally hillarious and not scary in the slightest.
The Godfather. I’ve tried watching it a bunch of times, and I always end up losing interest in it at various points. I liked GoodFellas far, far better.
I’ll take the majority’s word that The Godfather is a great movie. But I personally just don’t like it.
My top five overrated movies:
Apocalypse Now
The Thin Red Line
Shakespeare in Love
Gone with the Wind
Bull Durham
I thought the anime film “SPIRITED AWAY” and “METROPOLIS” was overrated. Beautiful animation but the story seems lacking.
Gangs of New York. I tried THREE times to watch that movie (being a fan of both blood AND guts) but I’ll be damned if got through more than about 20 minutes before my attention wandered to something mundane like cleaning the kitty box.
I love a lot of mafia movies, but the Untouchables was also a big disappointment to me. In addition to being grossly inaccurate (Eliot Ness did not push Frank Nitti off a building, damnit!) it had Kevin Costner in it, and his presence always drags the movie down for me. It was a pleasent flick, but nothing spectacular.
And speaking of Kevin Costner, I never really got why Field of Dreams was supposed to be so great.
The Ring was more confusing than scary to me at least.
But the scene at the very end?..sniff never mind.
Another vote for The Thin Red Line. Wuh duh fuh? Three hours of sheer boredom. Another war movie I like to combat insomnia with is The Deer Hunter.
The Matrix - “What is the Matrix? It’s a collection of segments from older films. Old cliches bundled together with new special effects, mostly.” Consisting of nothing but fights, this movie continues to puzzle me with how many wankers consider it “deep.”
Saving Private Ryan - A collection of sappy old cliches, shoddily stuck together around an action film story. Come on, I can understand a braindead action film, but a war drama?
Titanic - Sappy, cliche, boring. I’ll not go over it again.
The Ring - A shitty Hollywood remake of an actually quite decent Japanese film.
Lord of the Rings - Boring tripe. Constant barraging of me with various annoying CGI characters and little more.
American Beauty - Not “ground-breaking.” For Christ’s sake, indie flicks have covered these subjects for years.
Momento - I hate this rancid piece of cow vomit with a passion. A pretentious piece of shit trying to make off as an intelligent movie, constantly praiseing itself over using a technique used many, many years earlier.
Anything with Adam Sandler - This is humour? I wouldn’t mind if people just watched it when they felt the need for something silly that they didn’t have to think about, but claims of “funniest man ever” (Mel Brooks? Rodney Dangerfield? The Python crew?) really annoys the living hell out of me.
Miller’s Crossing - Oh. My. God. This movie is so goddamn boring I myself can barely believe it. Endless boring conversations that have bugger-all to do with anything.
That concludes my feature: “Shitty Hollywood films”
Stay tuned for “Shitty indie films” which I can’t be bothered typing out at the moment.
The first one that sprang to mind was “Home Alone”. It was a sweet little sitcom of a movie that should have been forgotten two minutes after it was over, but NOOOOOOOOOOO! Let’s talk about it like it was some kind of cinematic masterpiece and go around with our mouths wide open, hands clapped to our cheeks! HAR! Let’s make sequels!:mad:
I found Scarface to be void of a likeable character, and definately not the gritty character exploration it was promoted as being.
Titanic and Blair Witch
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The Blair Witch Project
Goddammit! I want my money back!!!
Honerable mention on Gatopescado’s Shit List:
Saving Private Ryan-- What a bunch of crap
Magnolia–Could put Sominex out of business
Momento-- Hey, lets obfuscate plot holes with confusing scene arrangement!
Lord of the Rings-- Could put Sealy and Nyquil out of business
You have no idea how relieved I am to see that I’m not the only person on the planet that hated LOTR. Yes, great special effects. But boringboringboringboringboring…
Another movie that the planet seems to love but I feel was a huge waste of 2 hours of my life is An American President. How this smear of dogshit came from the same writer as Sports Night and West Wing and A Few Good Men, I’ll never know.
I’ll vote for all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s output. I didn’t hate Boogie Nights, but I wished it was 60 minutes shorter. I turned off Magnolia and I will not try Punch Drunk Love because I learned my lesson (finally), and it has Adam Sandler in it.
I don’t understand the furor over American Beauty, either. Seemed like it was a rehash of lots of other movies, except with nude teen-aged girls in it.
Field of Dreams and Miller’s Crossing are two of my favorite films. 
I agree that Saving Private Ryan was rather ordinary after the first 30 minutes, but those first 30 minutes took my breathe away, and I found it difficult to watch.
RealityChuck, Shakespeare in Love wasn’t bad, but it really didn’t do much for me. And I certainly can’t say its script is better than, for example, Touch of Evil, or The Big Sleep; in fact, I didn’t find the script as clever as the more recent Living in Oblivion. It’s pretty insulting to say that it’s amazingly good “for people with brains”; that’s just codifying your own idiosyncratic tastes and calling anyone with a different opinion stupid.
To enjoy the Matrix, you gotta know what you’re in for: a pile of absurd philosophy and junk science dressed up in pretty black leather and explosions. It’s action porn: you want to fast-forward past the dialogue scenes. The premise of the movie is completely absurd if taken at face value – what, the computers have never heard of the second law of thermodynamics? – but the movie is awful purty to watch.
Overrated? I really wanted to like The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance and It’s a Wonderful Life, but they both left me completely cold.
Daniel
I enjoyed checking out that IMDB top 250 films list that the OP pointed us to. Interesting to see how many are current or very recent. Certainly many of those will drop down or off the list in a few short years. I’ve seen most of the top 100 and probably over half of the next 150 listed and those that disappointed me included
Reservoir Dogs (too uncomfortable for me to appreciate it)
Aliens (the first was a great scary movie, but the second didn’t have nearly the tension);
Full Metal Jacket (a disappointing Kubrick, which I finally rented recently; I’ve seen all of his movies now, I think);
The Killing (another Kubrick; just not worth all the praise it received, though I suppose it was worth something as it opened the doors for him to make a bunch of really spectacular movies later);
Se7en (just too dark for me–didn’t seem to have anything worth thinking about afterwards)
This is Spinal Tap (just didn’t seem worth movie-length treatment)
And two recent musicals that I thought was just so-so:
Moulin Rouge
Chicago (but I absolutely LOVED looking at Catherine Zeta-Jones; made me want to see every movie she’s ever been in)