Most overrated movies?

[Trenchfriend]

Remember Stir Crazy from 1980 with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor?

This movie was shown very often on german private TV channel, for whatever reason. I watched it several times and always wanted to like it. But BOY, this were so stinky-boring 108 minutes!! I could have fell asleep after the first half.

I would bet, this "comedy" was already smelling dusted on his launch!

 

[Edward]

ANYTHING aside from Indiana Jones that involved Spielberg or Lucas.

Aliens. Alien was a masterwork of creeping, gothic horror. Aliens cheapened the whoel franchise by sinking to an action film. Alien Vs Predator proves that a bad fan fiction idea marrying a good franchise with a rubbish one makes for a bad film.

Top Gun - and anything else with Tom Cruise in it.

All the Beatles films, especially that animated tripe.

The Sound of Music - a film not only boring, but evil. Those grating kids and that awful, warbling ex-nun made me root for the Nazis. Now that's evil.

99.9% of "classic" WW2 films, made in the sixties but still beholden to tedious propaganda.

Pretty much any US-made film about Ireland and Irish politics, where the least of it is that everyone in West Belfast has a Dublin accent....

 

[belfastboy]

ANYTHING aside from Indiana Jones that involved Spielberg or Lucas.

Aliens. Alien was a masterwork of creeping, gothic horror. Aliens cheapened the whoel franchise by sinking to an action film. Alien Vs Predator proves that a bad fan fiction idea marrying a good franchise with a rubbish one makes for a bad film.

Top Gun - and anything else with Tom Cruise in it.

All the Beatles films, especially that animated tripe.

The Sound of Music - a film not only boring, but evil. Those grating kids and that awful, warbling ex-nun made me root for the Nazis. Now that's evil.

99.9% of "classic" WW2 films, made in the sixties but still beholden to tedious propaganda.

Pretty much any US-made film about Ireland and Irish politics, where the least of it is that everyone in West Belfast has a Dublin accent....

We watched 'Island at War' on Masterpiece this week. It struck me that about every WW2 movie depicts the Nazis in the same way....arrogant, sneering, seething cruelty not far below the veneer of sophistication and culture...etc etc. Have you read anything that would verify that portrayal? Or is it how they were first portrayed in the propaganda and that became the accepted narrative

 

[Turnip]

Any sandal movie, the older the worse. Such as Spartacus, Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra...

Only exclusion: Monty Python´s Life Of Brian

Everything with Elizabeth Taylor, Charlton Heston and Errol Flynn.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was about to say The Sound Of Music myself. When we screened it a few years back, it came with what the contract called "compulsory fun bags" that we were required to hand out to the audience. That's all you really need to know about that picture. I love Rodgers and Hart. I loathe Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Anything produced, written, directed, discussed, proposed, or even remotely considered while sitting on the toilet by Terence Malick.

 

[Harp]

You mean to sit there and tell me you haven't seen Father O'Brien
as coach for Notre Dame's Four Horsemen????
Shame on you laddie!

I met the late Notre Dame alum and Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Lattner while waiting for
an appointment at Hines VA Hospital. Quite a guy. He rented out his Heisman Trophy to
various bars around Chicago's Irish southside like Reilly's Daughter.

He told me that when he was at Notre Dame, Korea was hot and Coach Leahey told
the team that if they didn't make grades, their asses were headed for Korea.
Everybody made grades. RIP Johnny.

 

[Harp]

The Sound of Music - a film not only boring, but evil. Those grating kids and that awful, warbling ex-nun made me root for the Nazis. Now that's evil. ...

Syrupy dated kitsch, OK, but evil?
(Sister Mary Therese taught me to read.)

 

[Harp]

Saving Private Ryan

The commanding officer played by Tom Hanks is assigned a mission to find one buck ass private.
He has eight effectives and a clerk translator, a stranger who is a liability to the entire squad.
Hanks has one primary objective, said Private Ryan. There is no secondary objective whatsoever.
Ryan is a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne, dropped behind enemy lines; so the squad must
breech enemy interior lines, which itself is problematic for a host of reasons.

Avoidance of the enemy is paramount; however, Hanks decides to attack a fixed German position,
using precious ammo and getting his medic killed. One of his men is beating a German soldier,
whom he should have killed, and Hanks elects to let the captive go, revealing the American squad
presence inside this area of operation to the enemy. His men have limited ammunition, probably
two hundred rounds per man, and a collective eight-16 quarts of water. The lakes and rivers
inside enemy lines will be more heavily patrolled. Contact, if necessary will be a cold fact to
get canteens filled. Hanks walks his men at nite on hills, silhouetting against the moon.
And, when he finds Ryan, instead of ordering him to accompany the patrol back, Hanks lets
the kid take the squad back to a bridge stand, where the enemy nails most of the squad.
Reinforcements miraculously arrive just in time to save Ryan.

Hanks, that dumbass, lives long enough to piously preach to Ryan; all after the shit hit the fan.
Finis.

 

[belfastboy]

Any sandal movie, the older the worse. Such as Spartacus, Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra...

Only exclusion: Monty Python´s Life Of Brian

Everything with Elizabeth Taylor, Charlton Heston and Errol Flynn.

Liz Taylor was a terrible actress. Her only movie she was not bad was "Cat on a Hot Tin Rood'

 

[belfastboy]

I was about to say The Sound Of Music myself. When we screened it a few years back, it came with what the contract called "compulsory fun bags" that we were required to hand out to the audience. That's all you really need to know about that picture. I love Rodgers and Hart. I loathe Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Anything produced, written, directed, discussed, proposed, or even remotely considered while sitting on the toilet by Terence Malick.

I enjoyed "Thin Red Line"

 

[Trenchfriend]

Saving Private Ryan

All "Tom Hanks movies".

Probably with the one exception Road to perdition, I should finally watch! I still remember how the german critics were surprised.

All "Russel Crowe movies".

All "Mel Gibson movies".

All "Robin Williams movies".

All "Terence Hill movies". (Bud Spencer without him is nice!")

 

[ChazfromCali]

All "Tom Hanks movies".

Probably with the one exception Road to perdition, I should finally watch! I still remember how the german critics were surprised.

All "Russel Crowe movies".

All "Mel Gibson movies".

All "Robin Williams movies".

All "Terence Hill movies". (Bud Spencer without him is nice!")

I watched The Road to Perdition in a theater when it was released. Didn't expect much going in but was getting hopeful as it played, and about halfway into it realized this is bordering on being a great film. Hanks playing against character, i.e. a bad guy. (Well, a hitman for the mob.) Paul Newman as the Patriarch, etc. But the last scene, the anti gun voice-over, OMG! I cringed and said out loud "Noooo." "You ruined it!" There was an actual groan from a lot of the audience. Sucker punched.

Could have been a great movie, less the moralizing at the end.

 

[Edward]

We watched 'Island at War' on Masterpiece this week. It struck me that about every WW2 movie depicts the Nazis in the same way....arrogant, sneering, seething cruelty not far below the veneer of sophistication and culture...etc etc. Have you read anything that would verify that portrayal? Or is it how they were first portrayed in the propaganda and that became the accepted narrative

Well, they were - we know - historically responsible for some very nasty things and they had a nasty ideology.... but yeah, the two dimensional portrayal gets old. I imagine many of the True Believers were more akin to Tarantino's Han Landa than thuggish. David Thewlis plays an SS officer in charge of a death camp in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - a loving, happy, family man.... who just happens to do that for a living. When you dehumanise people to that extent, there's a lot of which an ordinary person is capable. I lean to the view that the propaganda which portrayed the Nazis as inhuman monsters played down the danger of the ideology, the idea it couldn't happen to "ordinary people". The greater sin, in my mind, was painting every last German person, military or otherwise, as a True Nazi, alongside the pretence that there was nothing wrong done ever by anyone on the allied side. We all know of the Nazis as the last word in anti-Semitism, but how many people in allied nations know of the MS St Louis, for instance? Or how many of those who celebrate Jessie Owens giving Hitler's Aryan supermen a well deserved thrashing appreciate the irony that in his own home country he'd never have even been allowed to run on the same track as the white boys? It's that wider notion that one side were all heroes, the other all villains that bothers me. Life isn't that binary, and the real lessons to be learned from history always come from the grey areas. To be fair, I rewatched the Great Escape last night for the first time in a long time, and was struck by how it does buck the general trend in making a clear distinction between the Luftwaffe and the Gestapo, which is interesting. My favourite bit in Band of Brothers is the German officer debriefing his men at the point of surrender - and the 101st recognising what they had in common with the fighting men on the other side. WW2 history has been done a great disservice by cinema over the years for the simple fact even of it being all too slow to recognise just how many men on all sides in that war fought for no reason other than that the conscription papers had hit their doorstep.

I suspect the propaganda fed into audience expectations which then impacted on the movie business. It's hard to fathom at this point in history of course because in decades since, the media has taken on a very different role, independent of government, and coverage of conflicts now is very different than simply towing a party line the way it was. The past is a foreign country, and all that.

I was about to say The Sound Of Music myself. When we screened it a few years back, it came with what the contract called "compulsory fun bags" that we were required to hand out to the audience. That's all you really need to know about that picture. I love Rodgers and Hart. I loathe Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Sounds like you got the Singalonga people. They flogged that to death over here. Used to do Rocky Horror on a Friday night after them way back when it was first a hit, and they always treated us with utter contempt. Never ran to time.... and the worst behaved, most drunken audiences I've ever seen at anything. So many times our get in was delayed because they had to remove and clean up after some "nun", so drunk they were unable to stand to leave, spewing into an overflowing Coke-cup.... If I hadn't hated that film already....

Syrupy dated kitsch, OK, but evil?
(Sister Mary Therese taught me to read.)

Anything that makes you wish the Nazis would come for the protagonists to get it over with can't be anything other than evil!

 

[Harp]

^^^Evil, intrinsic and ubiquitous is a cold blood facet of human nature.
The Third Reich is not so singular and historical an event as might be supposed;
Stalin proved this as did the French Reign of Terror. China and the Taliban are current
actors on the world stage. And Russia. And the Occident needs look at itself for our
own intolerance. The global scale can be tipped so easily least we forget ourselves.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Remember Life is beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997)?

I still can't decide, if this delicate deportation-comedy is masterpiece or bullshit. Hard stuff, of course.

 

[Turnip]

^^^Evil, intrinsic and ubiquitous is a cold blood facet of human nature.
The Third Reich is not so singular and historical an event as might be supposed;
Stalin proved this as did the French Reign of Terror. China and the Taliban are current
actors on the world stage. And Russia. And the Occident needs look at itself for our
own intolerance. The global scale can be tipped so easily least we forget ourselves.

Not to forget how the Americas were won and the whole colonial and slavery complex.

 

[belfastboy]

Remember Life is beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997)?

I still can't decide, if this delicate deportation-comedy is masterpiece or bullshit. Hard stuff, of course.

I voted strongly on the BS side

 

[Harp]

I enjoyed "Thin Red Line"

James Jones was an immensely talented writer but undisciplined and failed to ever learn how
to properly structure a novel. From Here To Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle exemplify
a lack of disciplined focus, and, more properly put, want of purpose. Consequently, while film
adaptation of his canon can be done it often falls far short of the mark. From Here To Eternity
showed a more coherent scripting, but The Thin Red Line frankly is a surreal depiction lacking
adequate script and credible cast.

 

[belfastboy]

James Jones was an immensely talented writer but undisciplined and failed to ever learn how
to properly structure a novel. From Here To Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle exemplify
a lack of disciplined focus, and, more properly put, want of purpose. Consequently, while film
adaptation of his canon can be done it often falls far short of the mark. From Here To Eternity
showed a more coherent scripting, but The Thin Red Line frankly is a surreal depiction lacking
adequate script and credible cast.

And in spite of it alll......I enjoyed it....immensely.

 

[belfastboy]

Not to forget how the Americas were won and the whole colonial and slavery complex.

Yep, the history of mankind is one of conquest, disruption and relocation......it transcends, race, ethnicity and geography.