A few weeks ago I rented Rollerball. The remake, I mean. The original wasn’t great but it sure looks like Citizen Kane next to the dreck that the remake was. I thought that I was going to puke from all the quick cut editing. I ended up quiting after about 30 minutes. It was unwatchable.
I like the original Rollerball. It’s not perfect, but there’s some pretty good social commentary in there that works for me, and the final blurred image of Jonathan E. always sticks with me.
I don’t plan to even see the remake, though. As soon as I saw they gave the main character a full name (Jonathan Cross), I knew they missed the point of the original completely.
As for Attack of the Clones, I agree with much of the earlier criticism of it. The dialogue is Vogon-poetry-bad, the plot moves like an elephant in a china shop, the score is possibly Williams’ worst ever, and the attempts at humor fall flat with a wet thud (though Yoda does get in one funny line… the only one in the whole damn movie). However, if one goes to it expecting basically a dumb but somewhat fun entertainment with lots of pretty lights and great sound, then it’s no disappointment. That’s the attitude I saw Attack with, so I was fairly satisfied by it. It doesn’t go on my favorites list, but nor do I consider it a total failure. It was entertaining. shrug Make of that what you will.
Oh, someone mentioned Crossroads… yeah, that WAS pretty darn bad. My daughters watched it, and even they didn’t like it.
I don’t go to movies very often, so I miss a lot of crap. However, I was told that Signs was scary and a really good movie. It wasn’t. It was boring and predictable and trite and I should have waited for it to show up on cable - then I wouldn’t have felt cheated.
Behind Enemy Lines
There’s no part of it that didn’t suck.
From the horrible camera work to the bizarre casting choices to the absolutely awful acting and directing to the indescribably bad script (both plot and dialogue, neither reached mediocrity). Even the score/soundtrack was bad.
It just kept getting worse.
It did look like the location scout might have done a decent job - but you couldn’t see it with the camera guy doing who knows what (“let’s show his feet running in the upper right corner of the screen, now we’ll put them in the lower left, now the bottom right” why? why just his feet? why am I watching this? are the questions you ask while staring in disbelief at the screen.)
Not worst movie ever seen, but very high up there.
Gotta third Attack of the Clones. Man, that was painful. Has George Lucas ever talked to a woman? “I hate sand. You’re not like sand.” No, I’m not! Now get the hell away from me, you creepy wanna-be Jedi!
Nobody else hated The Sum of all Fears? I thought I strained my eyes after rolling them so much. My brother and I ended up counting the number of times Ben Affleck would have been shot dead in real life. We figured that there were about 4 or 5 times when security/police forces would have been justified in gunning him down. My favourite was when he stormed into the Pentagon with somebody else’s id after a nuclear attack and the (lone??) security guard let him through after no more than a few harsh words.
BTW, I absolutely loved Waking Life, The Limey, and Mulholland Drive. In fact, I mourn the loss of the TV series that Mulholland Drive was originally intended to be. Yes, I’m an art movie snob, and proud of it.
Oh, definately.
Waking the Dead. It was horrible.
That depends on your defination. 
What bugged me most about it was the fact that the “rescue mission”, by any reasonable standard, failed miserably. They set out to rescue three people, and by my count, six people died in the effort to save one. But hey, since it was the protagonist’s sister, that makes it okay, right?
I also saw Waking Life recently. My reaction: what the hell. A series of monologues does not make a movie.
Apart from that, I felt rather ripped off by Signs. And here’s why:
[spoiler]So, it’s a movie about crop circles and aliens. At least, that’s the way they promoted it, and titled it. In reality, it’s about a man losing and regaining faith, with the alien invasion story as a backdrop. And when I say “backdrop”, I mean “barely appears in the movie at all”. Imagine making a movie about an alien invasion, but shooting the entire thing inside a single house, listening to an invasion update on the radio every hour or so. That’s Signs.
Now, I’m not saying that an alien invasion movie has to have a few million bucks worth of special effects to be enjoyable; I’m just saying that, if the movie is called Night of the Bloody Apes, I expect to see some bloody apes.[/spoiler]
There was some silly stuff in there, true. But I liked it. The only really major complaints I had were a) an aircraft carrier steaming all alone and unescorted in the middle of the ocean after a nuke attack, and b) the President getting ready to launch a full-scale nuclear attack without making any contact with the Intelligence people.
But I still enjoyed it.
You know, I have to say that The Sum of All Fears, based on Tom Clancy’s first really shitty novel, surprised me. I expected it to be utter crap, and I’ll be darned if it wasn’t just… silly, in that typically vapid Hollywood style.
Beyond that, I can thank my housemate for turning me on to the wonders of Encino Man, one of the American Pies, Some Other Fucking Movie With Pauly Shore In It, and an oldie but a really baddie, Bugs, all in the past month and a half. I didn’t watch more than ten minutes of any of those, but I’ll never, ever be fairly compensated for the time I spent watching.
Jeppers Creepers was very poorly made and not the least bit scary. And I thought the bad uy sucked. He didn’t even look scary. I fell asleep during A Beautiful Mind.
On the other hand, I thought Goldmember was hilarious and I fully intend to buy it once it comed out on video. And Saving Silverman is my favorite movie of all time and probably the funniest movie I can think of.
Striptease.
Gawd, is that a bad movie. Striptease is probably my favorite of Carl Hiaasen’s novels. So I thought I’d rent the movie. Mistake. The movie had virtually nothing to do with the book. Yeah, I got to see Demi Moore’s huge plastic knockers. Whoop de doo.
Ditto on The Sweetest Thing. Very very bad movie.
Update!! I’ve seen Rollerball, and those of you who remember me rather loudly trumpeting The Other Sister as the worst movie I’ve ever seen from another thread*, will be surprised to find that there is a new winner. This movie is hands-down the worst I’ve ever seen. Worse than Glitter. Worse than Freddie Got Fingered. Worse than Howard the Duck. Worse than Manos: The Hands of Fate. Worse than Baby the Rain Must Fall.
Worst. Movie. Ever. Released. On. Film. I demand that everyone see it, so that you can redefine your sense of movie badness.
*waaay too slow today for me to attempt a search
Fast and the Furious. I knwo it’s an action flic, and whoopdeedoo, but throw me a bone. I think they let a guy named Vic write the script in between shop class and special ed.
Hmm. I’m noticing a trend here- Battlefield Earth, Rollerball, Pluto Nash, Sum of All Fears… Why are so many crappy movies shot in Montreal? Shoddy filmmakers trying to save a buck?
Ha- you actually watched the GOOD part.
Monster’s Ball was absolutely horrible. I stopped it after
Heather Ledger's character shot himself.
It just really freaked me out and I couldn’t watch anymore. And if I’d kept watching, I probably would be having nightmares still. So I guess it’s good that I stopped it then.
Swimfan was just horrific. I wrote an entire column for the school paper about how much I hated it. Was physically ill through most of it. Didn’t help that there were legions of giggling thirteen-year-olds sitting behind me, either.
I really wish you had used spoiler tags for that Giselle. Hint: [ spoiler ] [ /spoiler]
BTW, what’s PHP?