Bottom 5 Post

[dominoparker]

I couldn't make this post as a comment so here it is.

Bottom 5

1. Boondock Saints - Obvi. It's one of those films that is universally panned for good reasons, but idiot college and high school kids keep it's legacy alive somehow. I will never, never understand how anyone over the age of 23 can list something as insipid as this as their favorite.

Comments

[glazomaniac]

honestly, the shawshank redemption was so ubiquitous, i can no longer muster any derision for anything about it. it's a thing of mild amusement for me, like an annoying kid who eventually becomes a part of the scenery. it's like daytime soaps or vh1 top 100 shows. i don't like them, but i'd feel the world were emptier if they didn't fill up the time i wasn't watching television.

[dominoparker]

I would exclude it from a list like this if I didn't still see it popping out of people's mouths when they talk about "great" movies. I know of at least two major film podcasts who are apologists for the film and it still gets played up as this kind of "guys movie". I mean, here it's got to be like beating a dead horse of course. I guess I couldn't think of anything better to beat up on. Maybe I'll amend this later when I find something more worthy of my ire.

[cut_dead]

I felt like the world was pulling a huge prank on me when I finally sat down to watch Le Samourai. I might've even "got it" on a certain level if there was something aesthetically to grasp to, which as you've said above is nonexistent. I'm too indifferent to it share this level of disdain, but the appeal of this and J.P. Melville in general is a great big "huh?"

I manage to like The Godfather divorced from the uber-canonized context.

[dominoparker]

I find The Godfather impossible to divorce from it's context and that's what has turned me against it. I just see in it every old way of thinking about and contextualizing film. It and Citizen Kane seem to be what the older generation of filmmakers and critics hold up as the galvanization of all of their ideals and principles and everything they enjoy about cinema. That's good enough for them, but I find both so mediocre (not Kane nearly as much as Godfather) and I find myself saying "I hope this kind of cinema is not what my generation is remembered for". Sadly, I feel like we may be remembered for far worse if things keep going the way they are now. I could justifiably replace Shawshank with The Dark Knight Rises. It's a bad movie compounded by dodgy social underpinnings, ham-fisted attempts at commentary, and piggy-backing on the massive success of one of the most glorified sociopath films of the past decade.

The more I write here, the more I'm working a lot of these things out in my head.

[discotarantula]

lost highway
life is beautiful
super 8
last year at marienbad
jeanne dielman

[dominoparker]

I can see the super-sloppy, lazy, Lostness of Super 8 in retrospect, but I still think that those kids were good and they just deserved a better movie around them. And I liked the scene at the beginning where they just show a worker replacing the number of days on the "Days Accident Free" board, and the cut directly to the boy sitting on the swing looking at the ground. It communicated everything with no words and a bare minimum of context. That and the music was really good.

[discotarantula]

for a movie to be truly terrible in my eyes, some parts of it have to be "good," like the potential for a better movie rests underneath, buried deep somewhere. MST3K type stuff, truly awful fare, doesn't get my ire up.

That accident free scene actually gets to a lot of my major complaints with the movie. 1) It's a total Spielberg rip-off (I mean I guess he is sort of ripping off himself here), but that no words, somebody died sequence, was done (and done better) in SPR when the government delivers the letter(s) to Mrs. Ryan. 2) There IS a long monologue about how the mom is dead and how hard it is going to be on the father and son with her gone DIRECTLY after that sequence. It's like JJ Abrams does his visual thing, then assumes the audience is too stupid to get the message the way that he originally intended. And he does this, all throughout the film, visual representation, wordy unnecessary explanation.

[dominoparker]

Yeah, I completely forgot about the monologue (intentionally blocked or just too dull to remember). It's almost like he wanted to make this other movie at some point, but then he thought about getting Spielberg-like box office and started dumbing everything down for mass appeal. You're absolutely right about their being the potential for a much better film here. The explanation parts were probably what felt very Losty to me. I guess that's why I can't really remember any of them.

[bad_juice]

horrible bosses
night watch
weird science
enter the void
american beauty

[bad_juice]

hm: sex and the city (maybe not for reasons people would expect), dogma, piranha, mutant girls squad, terminator 3

[dominoparker]

The Roger Corman Piranha or the more recent one?

I need to adopt your idea of watching movies that I know I will hate every now and again.

[bad_juice]

i could never completely hate a joe dante movie!

yeah sorry i meant to write piranha 3d but spaced it.