Lot's of hype over "juno" this year- TOTALLY sucked. For real. Marginally funny, at best. Not that well written. Kids were more annoying than witty and different. Women were controlling and annoying. The only sympathetic characters in the entire movie were the three men, and they never did find thier testicular fortitude- except for the Dad - he seemed to have it all along. Jennifer Garner should NEVER have been allowed to adopt- my gawd- what a harpy!


All that "critics raving" about that one- total suckage- it was supposed to be witty and funny- and was niether.

No country for old men- stupid exercise in nothing. Total waste of film and talented actors. Proof that you can have great cinemaphotography, excellent performances by actors, a fairly decent script for 90% of the movie- and still be a totally craptacular movie.

Into the wild- most sucky over-rated film about a poor schizzophrenic boy that was lionized into someone searching for a "spiritual journey"- when he should have been commited for being gravely disabled. I have been to the "bus"- this guy was nothing more than a sad little loon.


What are your picks for most over-rated?

Usually- mine are whatever wins an academy award for best picture. Except in the foriegn film department- those seem great!

Most overrated recent movie:

Once. I fell asleep watching this thing. Twice. The reviews for this were so good, I thought I must have missed the 'good part' so I tried to watch it again. Gah!


Edited to add link to make my post clearer. 97 percent approval for this movie. I must be really out of the mainstream.

Is that some sort of test?

There are lots of movies which are overrated; but there is a fine line between entertaining and "good." The former is entirely subjective. The latter has some objective components. To say that a movie totally sucked just because you didn't enjoy it speaks more to your own frame of mind than the film itself.

Not to pontificate mind you... I enjoyed "No Country for Old Men" tremendously; it was also breathtaking film making. It was not about nothing, it was about brutality, isolation and obsession. Three qualities which are inextricably bound up with the zeitgeist of the American West.

My picks for Most Overrated? I've tried sitting through "The English Patient" on numerous occasions, and I just can't enjoy it for the life of me. "Titanic" is a whole other breed of bad though. This is a movie which not only did I enjoy, but is a lesson in poor film making, one that I can comfortably say sucks. Lots of people have enjoyed it, but the film is littered with bad acting, bad writing, horrible directing and lousy production values. That makes it a bad film (many of which I do enjoy, such as "Strange Brew")... and the fact that ANYONE thinks it's more than a $200 million turd makes it the most overrated film in history, in my humble opinion.

Agreed - I hated every second of Juno. Got dragged there by the GF. Nothing but high school and college chicks there, and the occasional boyfriend (like oh, three of us outa like thirty plus girls).

But ya, Juno was my pick as well.

Of course, I'm eagerly waiting for the new Indiana Jones flick to come out in a few weeks here, and Prince Caspian as well.

Another movie I'm looking forward to is the new Hulk movie. The other one sucked hard - but this one was done entirely by Marvel Studios (aka Marvel Comics) and the trailers I've seen of Ed Norton and Liv Tyler, frankly it's looks a helluva lot better than the other Hulk. This is Marvel Studios first movie, and it looks good.

I'm still undecided on the new Star Wars movie coming out in August though.....

No test- I am no "appreciation of cinema prof" now LOL

I have been asked to explain myself on "no country" before- so this is a bit of a cut and paste - but all mine

it wasn't that it wasn't all tied up neatly, or happy ending or anything like that- in fact, I LOVE the anti-hollywood endings of foriegn films, and tragedy and all that stuff.

It is when it is completely pointless that it bothers me- that has always been a sign of a poorly finished written script, when the ending is "this movie has no point at all"- again, not that it leaves you hanging- but it doesnt' COMMUNICATE.

To me, all art is communication. A form of it anyway. Comedy is usually my medium of taking on painful subjects. It is not that I don't like the other types- it just happens to be one I have a talent for- but you are communicating something anyway. Paintings communicate something- they make you feel a certain way- no matter what the emotion- it evokes feeling. Music- same thing.

In those media, it is almost impossible to evoke nihilism. You don't look at a GOOD painting and say "well, that was pointless to even look at"- do you follow me here?

Music when it is bad- it is pointless and has no emotion but "oh, my ears are bleeding"- the cacophany of musical instruments that have no meaning- so, music is another area where nihilism is nearly impossible.

Only the media of film is it really possible to mass communicate NOTHING.

This is my dislike for this film- it communicating NOTHING. It took fine performances and a fairly decent plot and degenerated into nothing. Zip, nada.

Titanic- I hear you totally!

It is NOT that I don't like a good chick flick to enjoy now and again with my feminine friends and family/wife- but there are a couple that make my list-

the ABSOLUTE WORST of all craptacular but critic acclaimed of that genre' is "Legends of the Fall"- which, I forgive Brad pit for- due to "fight club"- but OMG do I hate that flic!

Oh, and I agree- films that are kind of a parody of being bad- I like- but they aren't usually over-rated like the ones mentioned- Juno is the most over-rated of all I believe. I still can't believe the reviews it got!

While I'm not a huge fan of the horror genre, there's something about zombie flicks I kind of like. I prefer the "fast" zombies of the not-really zombie movies such as 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later and Zack Snyder's precursor to 300, the remake of Dawn of the Dead.

But as far as zombie flicks go The Good Shepherd had to be the dullest movie I've seen in years. I mean it puts the "D" in dull.

How a film goes so wrong with Matt Damon, Angelica Jolie, Robert DeNiro, William Hurt, John Turturro and Joe Pesci is beyond me. Damon plays a upper-crust society type who is present at the creation of the CIA despite apparently being afflicted with paralysis of the facial muscles as he neither ages nor changes expressions for the film's whole 2 hr and 48 minute running time.

I don't even think Damon blinks. He sure looked like a zombie to me, even if he wasn't eating any flesh.

George Romero, the director of the greatest zombie movie of all, Night of the Living Dead, and four progressively less interesting entries about the walking dead doesn't think much of zombies that zip around like they're competing for the Olympics. He prefers the slooooooow, lumbering zombies that you have time to run away from, laughing and throwing rocks at because they're so slow. But I don't know how he could have made The Good Shepherd. Almost three hours long and you don't see ONE SINGLE ZOMBIE the whole time. What do zombies and the CIA have in common anyway? Are they the result of a CIA experiment on humans gone wrong?

Huh? Whaddya mean George Romero didn't direct The Good Shepherd. Robert DeNiro did? No kidding.

Well, Romero should have made The Good Shepherd. Maybe he'll do a sequel where Damon and Jolie do become zombies and feed on the CIA's enemies.

Might be better. Couldn't be worse.

"the good shepard" a zombie flick- now THAT is funny.

Since I am always several years out of the loop, I have just now seen Girl, Interrupted.

Poorly acted, melodramatic, and does a really bad job trying to recreate the 1960's. Jolie's rug-chewing won an Oscar?

Zoom: Academy for Superheroes

When you read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, it sounds like a really good movie. But when you watch it, you find some of the worst acting, and a storyline that's put together so piecemeal as to not make any sense. The new superheroes are a stock, out-of-the-box set of kids. Superheroes? Yawn!

And Tim Allen? Come on. He was completely unconvincing in Galaxy Quest, as a James-Kirk-type captain. Why would anyone think he would do any better as a Superman?

It didn't help that the film was a blatant reaction to Sky High, which was released a year earlier, was very well done, and had a surprising plot twist.

What are your picks for most over-rated?

• Eyes Wide Shut
  Sorry, Tom, but you and Nichole had all the sexual chemistry of... er, you and Katie Holmes. Lose the tall girl fetish, it isn't working for you. (And as for Scientology - well!!). Tom's recent acting performances have never been better than in Collateral, perhaps because he was most often in two-shots when he was sat down, so the most common audience reaction was to the acting and not a distracted "Jeez, he really is that small". And the late Stanley Kubrick made ilms that were sometimes interesting to watch, but did he ever make one that was fun to watch, on any level? (Full Metal Jacket aside, where he gets credit for making East London look like Vietnam.
  
• The Shining
  Jack Nicholson chews scenery. Shelley Duvall exudes mucus and shrieks. It snows. Surprise surprise, another Kubrick film. Twenty or so iconic seconds that were ad-libbed anyway ("Heeeeere's Johnny!"). Then it snows some more and Jack Nicholson freezes to death. The End.
  Audience gets bored waiting for the iconic bit, dubs the entire thing into cod French to point up the exhausting po-facednes of it all, (trust me - La Luminescence is the best film Kubrick never made.) then is laughing so much that they miss the twenty iconic seconds, rewind, wonder what the fuss was about and resume their strangulation of the French language for the rest of the film. (That's what I did the second time I watched it, and it was much better than way than the first time.)
  
• Any Jane Austen adaptation ever made.
  Now look, films (and books) resolutely targeted at males have some redeeming features that can be enjoyed by women. Die Hard Lethal Weapon Bond old and new, etc. But what, pray is someone in the possession of testicles meant to gain by watching four and a half hours of two English roses reporting other people's conversation to one another over their needlepoint? An appreciation of the artistry of drying paint? A photographic memory of their fingernails? What's the bloody point of Jane Austen in print, let alone making films about it?
  
  By the way, I don't like Jane Austen. Did you guess?
  
• The English Patient, There Will Be Blood and any other self-consciously high-brow literary adaptation which makes about two or three good points in two or three good scenes then completely ruins the effect by making exactly the same point over and over and over and bloody over again. (Paul Thomas Anderson - this means you.)
  They are always "literary adaptations", because no screenwriter (except Stanley Kubrick, it seems) would ever come up with an original screenplay that dull and uneventful without getting laughed out of the production office, but for some reason is seen as worthy of attention when it appeared in book form first and got read a lot by self-defined intellectuals (i.e. it doesn't happen much with Harold Robbins).
  It should be noted that other types of literary adaptation - Goodfellas or The Godfather or, for that matter, the Harry Potter films don't get classed as "literary adaptations" because the books they are based on sold too many copies AND too many people enjoyed the films. In Hollywood (and London) "literary adaptations" is shorthand for "films we haven't seen based on books we haven't read, but the reputations of the people involved are such that we feel they deserve some sort of recognition as a consolation for being iterminably dull but worthy."
  There's probably intellectual snobbery that holds literature, as the senior artform, as inherently and invariably superior to film, and unfortunately the Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts both have very bad cases of it.

Those two academies also have a very bad case of another type of intellectual snobbery - big box office films that are enjoyed by many millions can't be any good, because the majority of people are stupid hicks who don't know Great Art from a hole in the ground.

At best, they are allowed to have technical awards (special effects, etc) but on no account are they allowed to feature in acting, directing or overall acheivement categories. Occasionally there is an anomaly - Gladiator is one recent example that springs to mind.

I would agree that it is one of the worst films of all time, that weren't really trying to be that bad, right up there with "plan 9 from outer space" with bigger stars and better cinemaphotography.

AS someoone that works with Borderline personality disorders- they make them WAY too sympathetic of characters, when in real life, after they draw you in, they are so nasty you can't even imagine how bad it can be.

Giving sympathetic treatment in a movie to a borderline is the equivilent of giving Hitler sympathetic treatment in a story about the holocaust.

Are you kidding Julian? 'A Clockwork Orange' is hilarious!

A clockwork orange and Dr Strangelove were Kubricks best pieces- by far.

Those two were great.

I might as well throw in my two cents and say that I am a card-carrying Kubrickophile. As far as I am concerned, the man was incapable of making a movie that wasn't at least very good, and a handful of them are, in my opinion, masterpieces. (2001, A Clockwork Orange, Paths of Glory, and even the much-maligned Barry Lyndon.)

And I quite like Pride and Prejudice as a wonderfully witty bit of social observation.

I'd throw in the first 45 minutes of Full Metal Jacket. Anyone that ever went through basic training can identify with Gunnery Sgt. Hartmann.

2001 is the one of the most overrated movies in history. I've tried to watch it three times and it puts me to sleep each time.

I have the same reaction to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. I know it's a classic. It's just not my idea of a classic.

Juno, Superbad, anything with Jack Black in it without sustaining testicle abuse.

Meet the Browns. Critics said it sucked, but I just wanted to emphasize it. I came out of the theater hating Black people.

Lots of new movies are overrated. I think movies rely more and more on breaking limits, and special effects than story line which can be fun but there is no substitute for a good plot that makes you think.

Take the move My Dinner With Andre, this I believe is one of the greatest movie of all time, yet the entire set takes place in a restaurant where two guys have a dinner conversation about some pretty deep stuff. Thats it, thats the whole movie.

This makes the movie unique in the sense that it abandons what Hollywood perceives as standard for a movie plot, I first saw this on the IFC channel. The two main characters talk about everything from Politics, to love, to the corruption of modern society, they hit just about everything and I thought it was great. I still never spoke to anyone who has actually seen that movie, other than me, and if you need explosions, or action scenes to enjoy a movie this one is certainly not for you.


The two main characters in the film have separate views on the world. One guy (Wally) thinks like I do in the sense that he is a realist, thinks that science is beneficial to man, and believes that having structure in life isn't necessarily bad. (Andre) on the other hand takes a totally different outlook where he thinks we are progressing backwards as a species, because technology and science has disconnected people on a social level. He is generally anti government, and believes that the happiest people on earth are the ones who live off the grid, like tribes in Africa, or hobos that move from town to town and play music and talk about peace.

Both characters make some really interesting arguments, particuarly (Andre) who does the majority of the talking.

Here is a youtube clip of the film with some quotation. Looking at these will either bore you or make you want to watch the movie, I say that because it made my ex girl friend fall asleep, but I loved it, lol



http://youtube.com/watch?v=jOZ0l-uir6s&feature=related

Quotes from the clip above......



Another interesting quote.....



Thought Id use this forum to bring up a movie thats underrated, or perhaps just unnoticed because it was low budget.

Nighttimer...


I didn't quite get to the soundboard. I was marvelling at the possibilities of the comments below the link of people you could call whose phone number is an invitation to call and play the soundboard for:



My favorite one:

Hope y'all don't mind a newbie chiming in here. This is actually a very interesting topic for me as it kinda corresponds with one my hobbies...I write for the College that I'm going to and actually have a newspaper column entitled "Film Geek" in which I pretty much discuss anything to do with movies, heck I even work at a Blockbuster Video. Anyway getting back to which movies were beloved by the critics but despised by me personally...

Aviator-Was always interested in this guy's story and heard nothing but glowing praise for the movie from critics so figured "What the heck"? While DiCaprio did a good job of playing the guy the movie was way...too....long. I kept looking at my watch throughout the entire movie begging for it to finally end.

The Mist(spoilers ahead)-As you can tell from my name, I'm an avid reader, as well as a big movie-watcher. I rather enjoyed Stephen King's book and was really looking forward to the movie, all in all it seemed well-acted in well directed and I was enjoying it as both a monster movie and a look at the monsters within our own souls. Then, however, came the ending. Allow me to assure you that, in the novel at least, the protagonist does NOT blow his own son's head off. In the novel he and his son actually and escape and the last line of the book was him bending over his sleeping son, kissing him on the forehead, and whispering "Hope". Quite honestly, if I was in the guy's position, I'd go ask to borrow a pistol from a soldier then blow my own head off.

A.I.-What in the name of all that is pure and holy was going through Spielbergs mind?! A.I. was one of the longest, overly-convoluted, not to mention most depressing movie I have seen in a very long time. I walked out of that theater feeling both suicidal AND completely confused.

And, if I may add a comment to CR's earlier post...I actually rather enjoyed "Plan 9 from Outer Space". The movie was just so mind-numbingly horrible that it's incredibly fun and actually kind of heart-warming to watch. Ed Wood actually thought it was a good movie and so it really has a sort of geeky charm to it. IF you haven't seen the movie Ed Wood by Tim Burton, I dearly suggest that you check it out. That was a true homage to Ed Wood, one of the best I've ever seen.

I didn't laugh. I thought it was "clever" and I came away impressed, but I didn't have that "I have to talk to someone about this film" sense that I get when I see something that really engages me, either because it's really thought-provoking, or really entertaining. I suspect I may have missed out on the "thought provoking" bit of the Kubrick film because of the passage of time since its release - Kubrick made sure it was not available to see in the UK off that back of a single 1970s copycat crime. It was only released or shown again after his death, and since he died before most Brits had fast broadband, and therefore bittorrent access, the only way to see it was to get hold of it abroad (or on bootleg copies). In this particular case, I think the increased anticipation caused by this ban almost guaranteed an anticlimax for me.



You can have Dr Strangelove That one was really funny as well as the usual Kubrick thought-provoking, though I suspect that - since he displayed no great gift for comedy in his other films - this was lees due to Kubrick and more to Peter Sellers.



I'm with nighttimer on 2001. Again, I can see how clever it is, but I find it all inexpressably dull and slow-moving.
Paths of Glory and Barry Lyndon were okay - I quite enjoyed them (the former more than the latter). But then I did say "And the late Stanley Kubrick made films that were sometimes interesting to watch", I just don't think they were all cinematic gems the way some enthusiasts do, and I especially disliked The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.


That, for me, is part of the problem. I don't want to pay £7 to observe other people observing society. I can do that in any bar coffee shop or bus stop. Maybe it's because I just don't find Jane Austen to be the stellar wit she's made out to be. I'm not averse to period wit - I'm a big Wild fan; I've even been known to laugh out loud at a Shakespeare comedy. Weird, I know. I just don't like Austen much, so any film or TV adaptation leaves me cold.

Enough Kubrickitude for now.

Another colossally over-rated fillum:

Atonement

Ok, the main problem with this film is also the main problem with the novel - that a pubescent upper class English girl in 1930s England would not only recognise *that* word, but know what it meant and that it was about the worst word to use.

And it is beautifully shot and faithfully recreates the time and place. Overall, it did manage to hold my attention all the way through. I saw the ending a mile away, but that's not unique and isn't even, necessarily, a bad thing - sometimes the fun is wondering how you get there (Colombo would never have worked if knowing at the start who the bad guy or gal was, and that he or she would get their just desserts before the closing credits, was always a weakness).

I'm not a fan of Keira Knightley - unlike her more stage-&-TV-honed Brit actor contemporaries, she's not remotely versatile (bird-boned upper-class English gals? Ok. Anything else? Er, no.). And like Kate Moss, she seems me to have very little sex appeal and to have been deemed "beautiful" by other women (especially those working in women's magazines), rather than by men.

That's not to say women's aesthetic judgement of other women is in any way flawed or invalid, it just seems to always produce icons of big-eyed, big-toothed, high-cheekboned (none of these things are bad from a male perspective) androgynous xylophone-ribbed waifs, and all these things are positively unattractive from a male perspective. So I (being fairly typically male) fail to see what all the fuss is about with la Knightley.

All that said - Atonement is not a terrible film. Not by any means.

However, given the fawning film reviews and the high acclaim (multiple BAFTA and several Oscar nominations, along with nods at most of the other awards) it got, I cannot but conclude the film is deeply over-rated. It simply isn't that good.

I've said before and will say again that Bad Santa makes me want to hurt people.

Comedy... funny... there's supposed to be a connection.

I'll add my squeak to the defense A Clockwork Orange, I loved it.

Juno was okay, no award-winner but...

I love the lead characters in There Will be Blood even if when they weren't on the the film dragged and floundered.

I wanted to like Life of Brian, I really did...

What are your picks for most over-rated?

This question always gets me into trouble. And it usually starts with me mentioning the Star Wars movies. All 847 episodes. Hated them. If that doesn't do it, having loathed Se7en usually does. Forrest Gump is another idiotic waste of time that has spawned more than a few arguments.

Unforgiven left me pretty disappointed - it's about the only film directed by Clint Eastwood that I don't really like (except maybe Mystic River - that didn't do much for me either). Other over-hyped films that have ruined relationships for me would include The Exorcist, The Deer Hunter, and Dead Poets Society.

More recently, not having wet myself over Brokeback Mountain, Once, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood has also earned me a bit of enmity.

Other critically acclaimed movies that did nothing for me (except maybe annoy me a lot) seem to occasionally find some who agree with me: Ghost, Dances with Wolves, the colossally bad Titanic, and The Aviator.


I have to admit that I'm also a bit of a Kubrick fan. I didn't particularly care for 2001 or A Clockwork Orange (they were okay), but The Killing, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut are all pretty good, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, and The Shining are brilliant, and Barry Lyndon is one of my favorite films of all time.

What are your picks for most over-rated?

Shawshank Redemption. Annoying as sin. All time worst piece of film I ever had the misfortune of seeing.
Van Helsing, let's take all sub culture goth and mix it into a stew. I took it even less seriously than 3 Ninjas, High Noon at Mega Mountain
Titanic, pretentious but overall mildy annoying
Flight 93, emotional what-if revisionism at its very best
Starwars Episode I, Jar-Jar the most annoying CGI character to ever hit film making.
Batman and Robin, I swear the director didn't care what happened.
Wild Wild West, Wil Smith and spiders, heck of a combo
Freddy Got Fingered, Tom Green doing what he does best, not being funny
Replacing Show Girls is Paris Hilton's masterpiece, The Hottie and the Nottie

I have to agree with Wertz about Dances With Wolves. I found myself spending most of its running time looking at the nice props. Otherwise, I wondered what all the fuss was about. "Best Picture of the Year"?

So many things in it made me go "Huh?" The hero's imitation of Christ during his failed suicide attempt, the completely pointless and weird scene between the hero and the eccentric officer, etc. Even at basic storytelling it failed, in my opinion. When the hero finds the woman covered with blood, I was very confused about what was going on. (And did we really have to have the big romance be between the only two "whites" among the Lakota? That really blunted the film's whole "liberal" message, didn't it?)