I liked it, but I’ve been a sucker for Miranda Richardson ever since Queenie. My problem with that film was I couldn’t understand a bloody word Ralph Fiennes said.
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Yep, one great film, and then nothing but dreck. I love Out of Sight. Really like the casting of Michael Keaton in his Jackie Brown role, too.
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you mean J-Lo? Clooney? Soderbergh?
that was so awesome. and I saw both movies with my mom, so we both had that little “fuck yeah” moment to share.
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My latest trick is to get to zero on the movie genesis.
“The Thing from Outer Space” is quainter than “The Thing”, and the new “The Thing” is good, but the first has a more lasting impact on me, although I saw it last. The middle one is excellent, could be updated.
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I hope he don’t mean Clooney. I like him in almost everything he does, dreck or otherwise, but I’d trot out The Descendants as a particularly non-dreck Clooney movie.
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I think it has aged amazingly well. Other than two or three brief stop-motion shots, all the FX still look incredibly good, and the cast, the atmosphere, the suspense, and Lancaster’s script are uniformly excellent.
I guess one could update it, and I’m never averse to somebody trying, but good luck getting a cast as good as that together.
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There isn’t. It’s Ferngully in space, and though the 3D CGI effects are an eyeful, without the bigscreen visual spectacle it’s pretty empty. I’ve never been tempted to see it more than the once, and especially not on a TV screen.
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Fear not, I meant J-Lo.
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I liked both Alien 3 and Resurrection. Alien 3 was a cluster fuck from a production standpoint and it’s a miracle it was as good as it was. Resurrection was by the guy who did City of Lost Children, one of my favorite films of all times, and they share some of the same actors. The bad buy from The Crow was in it!
Sky Captain was some decent eye candy. It also had a bad guy - er gal - from The Crow.
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That’s a nifty chart.
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I think Jurassic Park is worth watching. I mean, it’s no Jaws, but the FX in it are truly excellent for the time, and Neill, Dern, and Goldblum are pretty darned good. If you’re gonna skip a JP movie, make it JP2. That one is genuinely awful. JP3 is fun and blessedly short. Plus it has pterosaurs.
My experience with Twister was kinda funny. When it came out, I was in Colorado working on the TV miniseries version of The Shining. Stephen King was there writing script revisions, and that weekend he took the crew out to see Twister. We thought it was just a nice gesture for us hardworking crewmembers, until we got to the part of the movie when a tornado destroys the drive-in movie screen that’s showing Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining. Man, we laughed our asses off, King louder than any of us.
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I think we’re using overrated and underrated not to mean that thing are rated improperly, but that they are more or less popular than they should be. But they’re really two different things and I think if we look at movies in terms of their actual critical acclaim, it’s much harder to come up with something that it really underrated—almost all “under-rated” movies have strong followings and/or critical acclaim. So while someone might say that Scorsese’s Mean Streets is under-rated, it really not because it gets huge ratings from those who have seen it: it’s just not that popular or widely seen. On the other hand, I think that Kundun is truly under-rated Scorsese, since it’s not that highly regarded even though I think it comes from the same place as Mean Streets. Dead Man might also fit in this category, although if released today it would probably resonate with a lot of hipsters.
I guess there’s also the phenomenon of popular movies that are critically underrated because of their popularity, with movies like Groundhog Day and maybe even North by Northwest finding their way into this category. Even if critics really like these movies, they don’t push for them the same way they do for lesser-seen films that they believe are in greater need of publicity.
Tarantino post-Pulp Fiction, Vertigo, Brazil, Metropolis, and The Red Shoes all seem really over-rated to me. Wes Anderson post-Rushmore has been disappointing, but hopefully Moonlight Kingdom augers a return to form.
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I was finishing up university in Ames when they were filming Twister. In general, it was a total pain in the ass. You never want to be living in a town that small when a major Hollywood production rolls in. It’s been less painful more recently with movies being shot around Ann Arbor. Bigger town, ample hotel space because The Big House holds more football fans than live in town, and the cast members have done a great job interacting with the community (not to mention making a point of spending money here).
I like your story better than all the filthy details of mine, which I’m not ever going to share in a written format. 
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I was going to suggest Five Easy Pieces as an underrated film. The commentary on creativity and culture seems very deep and strikes me as a ‘personal’ film.
I remember reading somewhere that the title of the film is taken from an old instruction booklet on how to learn to play the guitar in ‘five easy pieces’ and wonder if the film isn’t also some kind of instructional instrument.
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Under-rated:
- Starship Troopers. Because.
- Stalker. Dense and in Russian and if you think you understand it, you are wrong.
- The Fountain. Best thing Aronofsky has done, yet seems to be inveterately misunderstood. It’s the same bloody guy!
Over-rated:
- Star Trek Reboot. Even the mighty Cumberbatch couldn’t save that god awful disaster.
- The Hurt Locker. Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me. (?)
- The English Patient!
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Classic.
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I couldn’t believe how good that movie was. I was totally blown away. people don’t seem to like it, and I’ll never understand why.
I took a walk in the park to clear my head after watching it that night and one of the big trees had been chopped down. it was fucking traumatizing, yo.
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I am constantly incensed by the dumb-ass and impotent readings I hear of that film.
The story transcends the plot and the cinematography inhabits the subtext.
It’s fucking amazing and if you (dear reader) happen not to be fascinated by it’s limpid depths, you are missing a piece of yourself.
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I saw Stranger than Fiction in the theater when it was released. About half the audience came expecting some Will Ferrell prop falling type comedy and spent the whole time checking their phones for texts. It’s one of the few films where people actually left the theater hissing in disgust. I, of course, love it and my daughter has become such a fan that she suggested we show it at a spend the night party with her smart teenage friends. I suggested otherwise; seems to best viewed as a private pleasure.
The Matrix - I thought that movie would hold up so well but re-watching it recently, I noticed just how much of the futuristic plot hinged on the land line phone system. Ma Bell pay phones seemed like such a strange backbone for the future now that they are obsolete.
Agreed - Lost in Translation. Agreed - Wes Anderson.
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“Apocalypse Z”. Funny to say, but it’s much, much worse than the appalling “World War Z”.
I knew it would be bad, but I’m a bad movie buff, but it was like … bad. Execrable.
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