Posted on 09/28/2005 9:11:34 AM PDT by pabianice
Movie theater revenues are down 10% in the past three years because of home video technology and because movie quality has objectively continued to decline. We Freepers occasionally review a movie here for fun and to warn others not to waste their money.
So, for a change of pace, let's discuss really bad movies we've seen for one reason or another. I propose three classes of bad movie:
Class 1. A bad movie you sit through because of peer pressure
Class 2. A really bad movie you force yourself to watch because, darn it, you paid for it!
Class 3. Horrifyingly bad movies you simply leave, dragging yourself up the aisle with your arms because your legs have gone numb from shock.
Examples:
Class 1: "The Incredible Lightness of Being" -- stupifyingly bad writing and performances, polished off by a plot involving a serial adulterer physician ruining the lives of all around him for his own sexual gratification – won numerous awards in Europe
Class 2: "The Strawberry Statement" -- I still remember the poster: "The Vibes Were Good, but the Times Were Bad" -- horrifyingly bad performances around a story of beautiful, gentle hippies going to college in San Francisco and lovingly protesting the Vietnam War, only to have the experience ruined by Cylon-like police in riot gear gassing and clubbing them to death during a sit-in for peace; also includes some of the worst dehumanization of women ever portrayed on the screen
"Coming Home" -- what can you say about a movie with Jane Fonda that tells the tale of a maimed vet coming home from the Illegal Vietnam War on Terror to win the heart of a military officer's wife who realizes that her Marine husband is actually a monster (who's also lousy in bed, of course) and so leaves him for the maimed (but good in bed despite the loss of most of his appendages) and virtuous war-protesting vet; movie ends with Marine drowning self by walking into the ocean to atone for his evil acts of national defense
“War of the Worlds” (2005) – This is one big mess of a movie; Aliens have already visited Earth in the distant past to leave their Tripods but then wait until we have atomic weapons and armies before they decide to come back and wipe us out; they arrive at nearly the speed of light in capsules that burrow underground and would be instantly vaporized by the impact; they need human blood to fertilize their Martian Kudzu (“Soilent Red is People!”); it never occurs to the Martians that they need to get flu shots before invading another planet; as the aliens sicken, they conveniently lower their shields so as to be suddenly defenseless against anti-tank rockets; the list is almost endless; the 1954 movie was far superior
"Getting Straight" -- yet another Vietnam vet comes home to attend college and is faced with a school faculty who are all repressed homosexuals and psychotics who determine to drive him out of college; he's saved by heroine who encourages him to Stiock it To the Man!; story ends with the vet kissing his male teacher on the mouth, creating a riot on campus, and then having sex with the heroine on the staircase as the riot and tear gas swill about them in a wonderful collage of color and self-congratulation -- ah!
Class 3: "The Happy Hooker" -- no plot, no production, no acting, but lots of frontal nudity and smashed beds
"Darling" -- critically acclaimed piece of crap about a beautiful, talented, rich woman with the IQ of an end table struggling to make her way in a world of rich men who throw themselves at her feet and take her to fabulous vacation spots
Special Category – What Would Have Been Good Movies But Ruined by One Bad Scene: “A Few Good Men” – Very entertaining story about good and evil in uniform ruined in the courtroom climax, when LTJG Caffee says to the colonel: “I’m a Navy officer, and you are under arrest, you son of a bitch!” Those last five gratuitous words by a screenwriter clueless about the military instantly makes Caffee guilty of disrespect towards a superior officer (a court martial offense) and lower him to Jessup’s level
"I'd have to add one to the list, the volcano movie with Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche - yetch! what crap."
I laugh every time I watch the part where there is molten lava moving through the streets of LA, and there's firefighters spraying water on flaming palm trees. Riigghht.
Actually, I only watch it UP to that point, and then I turn it off.
On the flip side, there's Pay It Forward, where the long, over-drawn-out ending makes you want to scream "please make it stop!!!"
I really liked unbreakable and just like the sixth sense it was the last scene that made the movie..
Exactly, the biggest problem for me with WOTW, is the premise of the movie that aliens have already visited Earth a million years ago to leave their Tripod war machines. Which begs the immediate question: Why didn't they just populate the Earth at that time?
This was not in the book as I recall.
I walked out of AI after maybe 20-30 minutes. it was lousy. somehow I had convinced myself that since Spielberg directed it, it would be good (although I can't think of another Speilberg film I'm a fan of - I think I just wanted an excuse to see it and hoped it would be good.)
the "signs of a bad movie" I noticed within the first half-hour:
1. the conference of software or computer-graphics designers smirking with superiority and laughing at "Pong" or other primitive computer games.
- while the general public may laugh at old technology, those in the field have respect for the pioneers and wouldn't laugh. today's computer-gaming designers continually deal with getting the most out of their current hardware, and they know how limited early computers were.
here's an analogy - maybe the general public might laugh at a film of old Model-T cars or Wright-brothers type planes, but professional car-designers or plane-designers never would.
2. the "gratuitous" pulling the arm off the female "robot." - not necessary. just a shock-value thing.
3. portraying the robot comany guys as one-dimentional stereotypical cartoon-villian bad guys.
- that's just bad writing and directing, and juvenille story-telling.
4. the woman freaking out because her robot kid walks in when she's sitting on the toilet.
- come or she knows he's a robot, and besides that he's just a kid. her over-reaction doesn't make sense. most people would have just laughed and told the kid to go away.
5. (this is when I decided to leave) the kid walks down the hall with his toy that defies gravity - an obvious computer-generated image.
-- computer-generated graphics should not be the focus of attention if they bring the viewer "out of the movie." the gravity-defying toy just makes the viewer think, "computer-graphic thing there."
"Who is Merritt Stone???"
Always fast forward that episode just to see that segment.
My most frequent comment after seeing a generally good movie is, "But why did they have to put THAT in?" So many movies are ruined by Hollywood taking a basically good story and sticking in something "quirky" or something that "pushes the envelope" (which is a laugh, because the one thing Hollywood rarely does is push the envelope).
Two movies come to mind: Mystery, Alaska, ruined by a ridiculous teenage sex scene, and Home for the Holidays, which, except for the de rigueur "I'm a downtrodden homosexual" garbage from a grotesquely hyperactive Robert Downey, was a little gem of a Thanksgiving movie.
MRXL! MRXL! MRXL! Do you have more MRXL than us? I don't think so!
ASH!!!!
The book, written by Wells in 1898, had the Martians arriving by spaceships.
Oddly enough, the two movies I hated as a kid, but liked as an adult, and yet are rarely on TV, are "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" and "Mary Poppins". As a kid, they were wierd. As an adult, they are fun.
LOL!!
I'll never hear "Stuck in the Middle With You" quite the same way ever again.
Sounds like 'Mission to Mars' with Tim Robbins & Gary Sinise. Crappy movie with ridiculous violations of inertia.
If that comes on the car radio, my wife will make me change it. It's indelibly burned into her brain.
SD
He's an English guy, who came to fight the Turkish!
How about when NewBomb sings Volare?
The one armed violinist, Sasha!
Newbomb Turks Pie wagon and who can forget Mrs. Friedman. The tramp that she was.
The Day After Tomorrow fills that bill.
The only reson I didn't crawl out of the theater on my elbows was because I refused to see it at the Dollar Theater and instead watched it on HBO - where I could instead crawl on my elbows to bed, thereby avoiding the popcorn burns and empty candy wrappers!
Exactly, if they had been advanced enough to have pre-positioned war machines on the Earth a million years before mankind, why would they just have not populated the Earth for themselves at that time?
I found "Shakespeare in Love" mildly entertaining.
But better than "Saving Private Ryan" that year for Best Picture? Not in a gazillion years.
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