Quote:
Originally Posted by jaxontwinz
What about Lawrence of Arabia? I never saw what other people did in that film.
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I can tell you what most reasonable people saw in that film: a perfect sleep aid. Great premise, boring movie.
A few other overrated films, in nobody's view but mine:
The whole damn
Star Wars franchise.
Damn near everything with Woody Allen's name attached to it. (How many times can you watch the same self-possessed neurotic
schlep character without wanting to barf?)
Anything with
Rocky in the title other than the first film.
The Crying Game---I still can't believe everyone got so worked up trying to find new ways to praise a lame espionage story whose sole distinguishing feature was a transvestite shocking the gullible when she/he showed his actual or alleged swinging death. (I'm
still convinced the Best Supporting Actor award was intended
for the gonad, not for the actor attached to it.)
Gandhi
The Piano
Funny Girl (Sorry, but there's
still a good film to be made about Fanny Brice, though I'll give Blabra Streisand credit where due: she did her damndest making a silk purse out of that sow's ear of a script.)
Erin Brockovich (
The New York Times's critic had it right: Julia Roberts
did spend the first forty minutes proving she was a great actress and the last ninety proving she was happy being a mere movie star, and all on behalf of a film that played a little too loose with the facts, but then Hollywood never has been shy about keeping facts from butting in on a good story.)
The Pride of the Yankees (See
Erin Brockovich, sort of---in this case, the absolute bowdlerisation of Lou Gehrig's actual farewell speech---which was so famous even at the time the film was made that it was inexcusable not to get the actual text of what Gehrig actually said---absolutely destroyed the film, which up until then was a quite harmless exercise in stretchers and a few tall tales; and to those who say "it's only a movie," well, if you're basing it on facts or on history, then facts and history have their legitimate claims, too.)
Quiz Show (Actually, this was excellent filmmaking of a badly bowdlerised story, and the bowdlerising only begins with portraying Charles Van Doren as a highbrow version of a swinging bachelor. It continues with completely ignoring the incident that finally provoked the idea that Herb Stempel wasn't just whistling in the wind when he began blowing the whistle on quiz show fixing: the
Dotto incident, in which one contestant found another's notebook full of advance questions and answers, tried to blackmail the show's producer over it, and provoked an immediate internal probe by that show's sponsor and network and---while it was yet the blockbuster quiz hit of its inaugural summer---its swift cancellation, leading to the moves that finally put
Twenty-One on a kind of trial. It continues further with the misplacement of Richard Goodwin in the quiz show investigations---he wasn't even close to being the lead digger in that scandal, he actually came in toward the climax of the probes, though the film would obviously have you believe otherwise. And, when all is said and done, the film is really a diatribe against television itself, not that television is immune to criticism but Robert Redford seems to have started with an attitude toward spanking television and
then proceeded to make a history-based film without knowing or caring about certain critical details of that history. Trivia: Charles Van Doren broke his long silence about his role in the
Twenty-One fixing a few years ago, in a
New Yorker article. He was quite sober about the entire thing. But he also admitted having a great laugh when he saw the film and caught the script having Herb Stempel refer to him as "Charles Van ****ing Doren" and "Charles Van Moron.")
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