"A bit of 'water cooler' discussion from the office has followed me home, and I'm extending it to here. For ... and otherwise lesseing your quality of life. What films would you include? The reasoning behind the decisions could be humorous/edifying."
Ooh what a good question.
I could go on all day with examples, but I'll stop at ten egregious examples. In no particular order:
1) Amistad - Stodgy and insipid enough to kill almost any film, plus itseems like such a complete waste to make a $40 million "message movie" in which the Big Message is (wait for it)... "slavery is wrong". I'll never understand where Spielberg and the boys found the cojones to make such a bold and controversial statement.
Especially emblematic of what's wrong with this movie is the scene where Djimon Hounsou begs the court for his freedom. This might have worked if he had simply stood and said, "Give us free!" once or twice. Instead, the camera just sits on him as he stands, makes his eyes bug out of his head, and generally tries to look as pathetic as possible while exclaiming, "GIVE US US FREE! GIVE US US FREE!" while the John Williams music swells. That bit ought to be in some multimedia dictionary somewhere as an illustration of "driving the point home with a sledgehammer" in motion pictures.
Basically, this picture is everything I hate about prestige movies.
2) Scary Movie - Unfunny, tasteless, and anti-intellectual in a way that'sfar more distasteful that any of the gross-out jokes.
Basically, this picture is everything I hate about "pure entertainment" movies.
3) Atanarjuat - Three hours of badly-made tramping through the snow thatwe're all supposed to love because it's made by real Eskimos and therefore so much more pure than corrupt, evil Hollywood productions.
And look at the kind of attitude that people have about this kind of film:
http://tinyurl.com/ngvbz
Movies like this are the reason that 99% of all independent films don't make any money, and why there are men and women all over the world who have films that they hocked their dogs to make rotting undistributed on a shelf in their garages.
Basically, this picture is everything that I hate about "art" movies.4) The Beyond - Lucio Fulci's "masterpiece", on account of the fact thatit's less of a piece of crap than his other movies. EdWoodian total lack of attention to detail (the infamous "Do Not Entry" sign in a film that's supposed to be set in the U.S., the hero forgetting and remembering at random to shoot the zombies in the head, the "demonically possessed" doggy that has the unmistakable "Can we go play now? Huh?" expression on his furry little face right after he's torn out somebody's throat, etc.), yet without the hysterical overacting and underlying good nature that makes films like Plan 9 from Outer Space so endearing.
To top it off, there's the spider- attack scene with the BLATANT use of fake spiders that's the dead giveaway that this is really a cheap exploitation film, in which nobody really cared about what the audience was going to think. Signor Fulci might well be looking down from Heaven (or up from someplace else :-) ) laughing his head off at all those shmoes over in alt.horror who have been praising him as some kind of unsung genius for years.
5) Zombie - The usual Fulci ineptitude, only this time he's ripping offGeorge A. Romero more brazenly. This one is especially hideous because it features a haggard-looking Richard Johnson as the evil scientist, who once upon a time was Dr. Markway in the original version of The Haunting .
Some films are more fun to see if you're a big horror fan. Some are much more painful.
In the night. In the dark...6) Bloodsucking Freaks - Back in the early 80s, when horror films were bigand a new slasher movie was getting released about once a week, there was a lot of baloney in the press about how evil these movies are and how they were corrupting America's youth. If you actually go back and see these silly things, however ( He Knows You're Alone , The Funhouse , The House on Sorority Row , etc.), you quickly discover that the real problem with these things is not they're nasty.
It's that they're *boring*. Most of them stick to the proven formula (pretty young people, masked killer, stalk and slash, etc.) like a religious ritual, and are about as entertaining. If they actually were evil or sick, they might actually be interesting. Bloodsucking Freaks really *is* sick. In a serious way. All it is is naked women getting brutally killed, sometimes in ways that are supposed to be funny but which are actually quite witless. It's about as fun as putting your arm down a garbage disposal.
I remember catching this on the big screen, giving it my customary half-hour grace period, and then walking out... only to run into none other than Joel M. Reed, the writer/producer/director, who'd showed up for a Q & A. I've been a big movie nerd long enough to meet and shake the hand of many directors and other folks involved with this business, but this is the only time I've run into a director whose film I'd just seen and wanted to walk right up to him and scream in his face, "YOU SICK ! I'D LIKE TO HIT YOU!"
See previous comment about how affinity can work against you. Movies like this give all us horror fans a bad name. I am a man, not a ghoul, thank you very much.
7) Angel Eyes - This movie reminds me of a lot of the scripts I've readby other struggling wannabe screenwriters. My theory is that there's a whole bunch of people out there who think it'd be really K3Wl to be a scriptwriter, but who aren't very talented and who don't even have very much to say. So they wind up basically repeating what little with which they've come up over and over again until it makes feature length.
I remember the exact moment I walked out... the swimming scene where Jennifer Lopez tells Jim Caviezel: "Kiss me someplace I've never been kissed before."
That line is... so unspeakably awful that, at that moment, I thought, "Argh! That does it!" and practically ran out of the theatre.
8) The Man with Bogart's Face - A good example of the one-joke movie whereeven that one joke isn't very good. Robert Sacchi does look almost exactly like Humphrey Bogart, but that gag of him dressing and acting like Bogey in modern-day LA just gets beaten into the ground so quickly. Not even Sybil Danning's striptease is very good.
9) Ginger and Fred - Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina standingaround, and a whole lot of digressions into loud, tasteless commercials and down paths that lead nowhere, including ten minutes or so spent on some guy who does sexual favors for criminals. This is art? What the hell was Fellini thinking?!
10) The Guardian - The 1990 William Friedkin horror film. Its main pointof interest is that it's an unusually... ah... pure film. Not one scary moment. Not one interesting characterization. Not one intriguing idea. Not one clever line of dialogue. It's so rare that a movie manages to be such a complete vacuity.
alt.flame Special Forces
"You know, I go live out in the desert and I see a lot of madness. I see big fat people coming around with guns, shooting lizards, spiders, birds, anything they can get their hands on. They're all programmed to kill." Charles Manson