2001: A Space Odyssey is 100x better after you read the book.
- chicago
Or if you see the quite enjoyable but unambiguous sequel,
2010 (1984).
Most of the movies people are mentioning here are either Oscar bait or film geek movies.
There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece, but if you're not familiar with the type of filmmaking--Altman films, 1970s westerns and history epics--then it merely seems slow and unbalanced because it's an old-fashioned type of movie for an audience that has a taste for variety beyond just being entertained. The audience that liked The English Patient? Most of them were, again, film geeks and international audiences, which have a different expectation of film content. This is why a lot of Best Foreign Films are boring as shit because there's a level of art aesthetics incorporated into it--literature, painting, etc.--that those audiences are used to but most American audiences are not. Filmmakers usually make films for 1 of 2 audiences: 1) people who wanna have fun and 2) people who know the medium and its principles. You can rarely satisfy both at the same time, but when you do, the work is usually legendary (
The Godfather,
The Shawshank Redemption,
Back to the Future, etc.) and often impossible to replicate.
The Oscar bait is a mixture of both because there's not just film-geek appeal, but artistic pretension to it as well. The Academy likes to pick movies--especially foreign movies--that feel important and pregnant with significance, but aren't particularly enjoyable. It's the Western idea that good things are bad for you and bad things are good for you because pleasure can be deceptive but pain never lies. That's why you can't really trust Oscar nominations because there's more politics and elitism in it than actual comprehension of what makes a good film.
MY PICS
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
I get gaping jaw-drops for this because lots of geeks consider this his best film. I find it to be a mixture of Hitchcock's best craft with his worst indulgences: blondes, Freudian sexual metaphors, and caricaturized obsession (post-War James Stewart did anger well; insanity, not so much) with a threadbare mystery that is positively ludicrous and has a preposterous ending. He did better many times before and after.
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
I consider Anderson the best American director living, but just like
Vertigo, this is just a giant masturbatory monument of personal indulgence; in this case, of 90s indie-filmmaking quirkiness-as-cleverness tropes. Cross-cutting parallel storylines, powerful overwrought performances about meager sentiments, and the hyperkinetic photography designed to emphasize the hackneyed concept of coincidence all make this a big clusterfuck of ideas and cliches that Anderson thought went well together. It may be his most personal work, but I consider
There Will Be Blood to be his
magnus opus. Robert Altman did the same thing but better (
Short Cuts, 1992) and he did it without the raining frogs.
Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002)
It takes a lot to make me walk out of a movie, but watching Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere ham up a hackneyed melodrama about a Depression-era hoofer trying to game the system to get out of prison had what it took. I tend to dislike musicals in general because they tend to substitute theatrics for exposition rather than the expression of emotions, but the juxtaposition of non-singing with singing segments really rattles me: I feel like I have to wait until the music is over before I can get my brain back into paying attention. But the artifice of this just rattled me and I had enough, walking out at the halfway point. To this day, I could not give a shit about how it ended.
Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990)
I will defend Gary Marshall's right to make mawkish, melodramatic, cliched pap to the death, but you can't make me defend it as anything other than "pure shit." What was originally a damn-near Cassavetes-level dark script about a strung-out hooker shacking up with a rich client to make enough capital in a weekend to finance a trip to Disneyland became a Hollywood-ized "Hooker meets Cinderella" story that inexplicably made Julia Roberts palatable to goddamn near all of America and, along with
When Harry Met Sally, revitalized the romantic comedy industry and made the 1990s a wasteland of Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts "ain't she cute?" doggerel. I found the concept and execution so fucking artificial that I turned it off halfway through and never picked it up again. I still have no intention of doing so.
Requiem For a Dream (2000, Darren Aronofsky)
Despite his knack for churning out predictable Oscar-baiting cliche textbooks (
Black Swan, anybody?) in the last few years, Aronofsky is still a favorite of mine. That said, this hyper-stylized depiction of heroin junkies trying to maintain and score during a heroin drought is so stylized that it gets in the way of the misery its supposed to depict. While virtually everyone I know who's seen it talks about how bleak it is, I find that it's not so much bleak as much as it is blunt: the 9th-circle denouement in which everyone hits rock bottom is so overwrought that it feels forced and overdone, and lacks the simplicity that makes horror so powerful. That said, it boasts strong performances from the always-stellar Ellen Burstyn and the surprisingly effective Marlon Wayans.
Scent of a Woman (Martin Brest, 1992)
In 1992, Al Pacino made two films. One was a blistering powerhouse of acting and writing that made for some of the best filmmaking in the entire decade; the other was this piece of troped-out shit that featured Pacino playing a (rare for the time) scenery-chewing blind ex-soldier named Slade (really?) who is intent on one last romp before killing himself and taking a neurotic prep school delinquent (a loose term at that) as his seeing eye dog. In the movie, he gets laid with a beautiful woman he identifies by scent (hence the title), fucks with his family at dinner, and drives a car by the waterfront, somehow managing to fake out a cop who finds nothing suspicious about a man who's eyes don't move. Pacino makes a spectacle out of himself in a way that most Academy-hunting actors do: over-the-top and histrionic almost devoid of sufficient motivation. The concept is ludicrous and the logic it follows to the end is insulting. BTW, that first movie was
Glengarry Glen Ross, which is worth ten times the Oscars that
Scent took home.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
This by-the-numbers Oscar baiting depiction of Hollywood mental illness swept the Oscars clean and pretty much established the foundation of depictions of the mentally ill in films ever since. It was also the start of Jack Nicholson's tenure as iconic maniac that he played much better in
The Shining 5 years later and
The Last Detail 2 years earlier. There's nothing so much wrong with the performances, but the story, which--to be fair--takes place prior to the cultural revolution and its ensuing pharmaceuticals of the 1960s, is quite predictable and skull-bashingly obvious in its destination and use of metaphor. It's saved by its willingness to go dark in the end, but it's not enough to really salvage the concept from its maudlin trappings.
The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)
I like Nolan, but sometimes he's too clever for his own good. I find that most people like this movie because it's non-linear narrative is SO disjointed that they can't piece it together all the way and think they've been truth-bombed by a movie that's smarter than they are. In reality, the plot of two competing magicians in the 19th century is simple and overdone. The "truth" about Christian Bale's character is obvious before the 1st Act is over, and the idea that Tesla creates an actual cloning device by accident is a shoddy way to use cliche to fix a plot hole (Fincher did it with
Fight Club, but that film was never supposed to be taken seriously). I like the style of the film, but when you look at it, this is a revenge film where the vengeful party is truly wronged and has a pretty damn good reason for doing what he does; I just think that over-editing the film like a magic trick to flesh out the story was the wrong way to do it.
Underworld (Len Wiseman, 2003)
Saving the worst for last, this film catapulted the emo aesthetic into the genre film where it stayed throughout the '00s until
Twilight finally burned it out. A product of
Blade and
Blade II, this Euro-Techno-influenced movie about the war between vampires and werewolves is basically a music video made by a film student who only watches John Woo and Kurt Wimmer movies. The entire cast lives in Hot Topic clothing and PVC (in a world where everybody else seems to wear trench coats and goth-rave gear) and proceeds to out-shoot
The Matrix in terms of firing guns and looking cool, and saving a chosen one who will change the future of the war. I still to this day cannot believe I watched not only this movie but also the first sequel.
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