Most Overrated Film Director (Sacred Cow Tipping)

I nominate the following: they make or made movies that are/were cool as hell to look at, but fail to make me care.

Sorry if I got the spelling wrong. Everything he produces is yellow. I mean it....yellow tinged.

I heard him tell a story about how he once had to explain something to Maria Callas because she wasn't able to figure it out on her own. I pictured her, standing there and letting the idiot run on, so that she could get back to her work.

1. What he did to The Shining
2. Put me to sleep in Full Metal Jacket AND Dr. Strangelove both.
3. Eyes Wide Shut - goofy orgy scene

You fell asleep during Dr. Strangelove? Personally, I consider Strangelove the best comedy ever filmed, and possibly the best film ever filmed. I'm sorry you didn't get the pleasure out of it that I--and a whole lot of people--do.

The Shining is, imo, one of the few instances (The Horse Whisperer is another) where the film is better than the book.

I thought Kubrick's ending was far superior to King's kinda silly happy-style ending.

I of course, disagree with you on Dr. Strangelove (one of the greatest films ever) and FMJ.

Plus I don't think it's possible to be overrated when you've made 2001.

david

Kucinich 2004

Arianna YES
Recall No

I think many of Kubrick's films made people care. David Lynch is at least interesting. Many of the others are making films primarily for children or adults who have not had much experience with film, so it is difficult to care about their work (ET phone home?). More serious filmmakers that I think are overrated are Scorsese and Tarantino. Their films might make us care, but often about the wrong things. They don't help us make sense of the human condition, they lead us to make false assumptions about the world. George Gerbner has studied TV viewers maybe more than anyone and found that they have very unrealistic views of the world and the causes of human behavior, and that their political views tend to be conservative, though they are unaware of it.

Lucas to Wes "never got over Salinger" Anderson, but my vote went to, of course, Spielberg

The only reason I didn't vote Spielberg is because of the Indiana Jones movies. When he does serious films, I dunno. Seems like he's trying too hard to be clinical and remove himself.

Without the writers...they have nada.

Are you a writer?

*ducks*

but I think directors are given waaaaay too much credit.

David Lynch doesn't seem to understand the basics of coherent storytelling. All that crap about his 'symbolism' and 'depth' is just people who don't want to admit he's full of shit.

It was a very different kind of movie for Lynch.

UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!

Lynch can do no wrong after "Eraserhead."

that one gives him a "get out of cinematic jail" pass for LIFE. He can direct stovetop stuffing commercials and I'll defend them with what's left of my blood.

but the rest, ahhhhh - just the Angelo Badalamenti scores alone redeem 'em. That and Twin Peaks.

Oh, and any given John Nance appearance.

shit, I'm far too partisan for this.

n/t

make of it what you will. You don't have to like it, you don't even have to try to understand it (and it may well be un-understandable), but that doesn't mean it's pointless.

No man who brought us Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me (a hugely *UNDERRATED* movie) can be considered a hack.

That said, Dune was one of the worst movies EVER, *EVER*, even though I thought the production and the (here I go again) atmosphere were perfect, the writing and especially the acting was horrific. Still the production almost salvages it. Almost!

david

Kucinich 2004

though he's a worse writer than director. The man should be barred for life from writing and directing. By all means, let him produce, but keep him away from the actors!

one trick pony that hasn't done the trick in 20 years.

whose directing is just abysmal. He's got some great stories, but if you look no further than The Empire Strikes Back, you can see what a story of his in competent directing hands can do.

I think it helps that he didn't write that one, either.

He was, as you said, just competent. The only other well-known films Irvin Kershner have done are Never Say Never Again and RoboCop 2 (which isn't that well-known I suppose).

Lucas was a great writer, just keep him away from the set and his movies will be all right.

cold. cold. cold. No heart, all style and his need to DP his own stuff makes it all look like crap.

Granted, sex, lies, and videotape was interesting, but it's been all downhill from there. His way of handling actors strikes me as a virtual definition of "heavy-handed," there's something about his visual style that I find really irritating (a "I want to get out of the theater now" factor) -- and the notion of being "innovative" in Traffic by simply using a yellow filter for all the Mexico scenes and a blue one for all the D.C. scenes is just plain cheesy, if you ask me.

makes me want to sob into my hankie!!

I don't know if I'd vote for him. My main reason for nominating him is that I don't know if his movies are about anything but movies and "coolness." If they're about "loyalty" or anything more profound, those subjects have been more thoughtfully covered by other directors, like Coppola and Scorcese. But I'll conced that QT's movies are entertaining.

when I originally cast my anti-Tarentino vote. From Dusk til Dawn was the worst!! But then I don't tend to like anything with Clooney in it even though I like him when he runs his mouth about Bush!

He has just about cornered the market on CGI moneyholes and manages to get the worst performances out of his actors (worst case: Jodie Foster).

Cartoon plots, cartoon characters, one dimensional films. Spare me.

no need to debate this further.

david

Kucinich 2004

Coppola makes better war movies than Platoon (Patton (screenwriter) and Apocalypse Now.)

Alan J. Pakula made better political movies than JFK or Nixon (All the President's Men and Parallax View)

Scorsese makes better pop culture movies than The Doors (The Last Waltz and Woodstock (Editor))

I'll agree on the war movies, though the films are generally totally different. AN might be comparable to Platoon (and I agree AN is much better, but Platoon is mostly just an autobiographical account of Oly's work). I didn't realize that Coppola wrote Patton.

But films like Born on the 4th and Heaven and Earth aren't in the same category as AN or Patton, I don't think.

I disagree on the political films, but again, I think they're very different. I think JFK (my favorite film) and Nixon (which is actually a better movie, I think) are masterpieces. But I think All the President's Men is as well (Haven't seen Parallax View, but I'll put it at the top of my Netflix list now that you mention it!).

I loved The Doors and (shamefacedly) haven't seen the Last Waltz yet. Woodstock was a great film, though, and musta been insanely difficult to edit.

Anyway, I agree that he may not be the best at everything, but he's definitely got a consistent feel, and I think he's a master at what he does. I'm particularly impressed with what he can do with crappy actors. People who had previously (and some who currently) couldn't act to save their lives end up giving phenomenal performances in his movies. The only really poor acting jobs I can think of in any of his movies are Jim Belushi in "Salvador" and Daryl Hannah in "Wall Street".

I will give you that he's more than a bit full of himself though. I remember an interview that Sean Penn had on Letterman or Leno. He was asked what it was like to work with Oliver Stone. He said he'd rather not talk about it, but he'd sum up by saying that he prefers not to work with pigs.

david

Kucinich 2004

("NOW a warning"?)

Enjoy "Parallax View" but immerse yourself in its early 70's context.

There are a couple of jarring anachronisms (total lack of airline security being one of them) but I think it still holds up pretty well. Be interested to know what you think...

... All the President's Men looks very dated too, somehow beyond the obvious reasons, but still holds up.

Looking forward to watching it!

david

Kucinich 2004

I slept through Bottle Rocket, and aside from the soundtrack and Bill Murray, I hated Rushmore. I know a lot of idiot indie kids who talk about it like it's fucking Citizen Kane, but that's nowhere near as annoying as the love my drama major friends have for Paul Thomas Anderson. Magnolia sucked, kids.

Honorable mention: Darren Aronofsky for that overdone afterschool special "Requiem For A Dream". DRUGS BAD! TRENDY CAMERA TRICKS GOOD!

God DAMN do his movies fucking suck.

The only thing worse is the idea that people actually pay to see them.

Is this the same director who gave us: one of the greatest horror films of all time, JAWS; one of the greatest science fiction films ever made, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND; the greatest adventure film ever made, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK; one of the greatest war films ever made, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN; one of the greatest dramas ever made, SCHINDLER'S LIST; and one of the greatest family films ever made, E.T.?

There is not one other American director, not Welles, Hawkes, Wilder, Scorcese, or Coppola, who can juggle so many disparate genres so efficiently.

35% of posters are either delusional, or pretentious film snobs who can't admit that there exists a director who can merrily destroy the line which supposedly separates true art from that which appeases the masses.

Everything he's made since has sucked mightily.

If you disagree, I got two letters for you:

A friggin' I.

It wouldn't have been quite as bad if it wasn't for the last half hour of happy hollywood ending riveted on it.

I'll take Spielberg's lush fairy tale over the Wachowski brothers' pretentious, inhuman The Matrix any day of the week.

What the hell was up with the ending? Completely diffent than the first hour and a half or so.

How Sir Stevie constantly gets a pass on this shit amazes me.

For me, anyway.

Spielberg does GREAT popcorn movies, and there's nothing wrong with that. Watching those movies, you get the feeling he had a great time making them and put a lotta love into it. When he tries to do a serious film, he becomes very clinical.

I think E.T. is vastly overrated. I never saw what was in it. But to deny Spielberg's importance and vision in such masterpieces like Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and Jaws, to the ultimate adventure fantasy in Indiana Jones, to CGI-fests that still entertain like Jurassic Park, he's a great director. Oh yeah, Minority Report was great as well.

I thought that Speilberg lost focus on that film -- he couldn't decide whether to tell the specific story of how Oskar Schindler saved several hundred Jewish workers from the Nazis (a new and interesting story few had heard of), or the generic story of how the Jews suffered under the Nazis (which, while compelling, is something virtually everyone had heard about long before -- and had seen, over and over, in films and television miniseries for decades before Speilberg started on his project).

This loss of focus damaged the eventual film in two ways:

1) It padded it out with far too many scenes of innocent Jews being mowed down by SS troops (when the initial massacre would have been enough to get the point across), the whole bit with the sadistic Nazi kommandant straight out of central casting, the "train accidentally sent to Auschwitz" subplot (which would have been more dramatically coherent with the rest of the story if it had centered on Schindler's attempts to save them, rather than being told entirely from the Jewish workers point-of-view, where suddenly they're not gassed as they, and the audience, were expecting). This made the film very, very long and meandering, and, worse:

2) It undercut the whole point of the actual story. Once you've been bludgeoned with scene after scene of innocent Jewish suffering, you're so numbed that, at least for me, when Schindler breaks down at the end and laments on how he could have saved more, I was tending to agree with him. Basically, I couldn't help thinking, "Damn right you could have done more. What you achieved was only a meaningless drop in a bucket. You should have used your money and influence to try to overthrow Hitler, or help out the resistance, or whatever. But what you did was, relatively speaking, nothing. So why should it mean anything to me? And why was watching your story anything but a waste of time?"

Spielberg's desire to stick with Kubrick's vision... Therefore, the problem with AI was Kubrick not Spielberg. I voted for Kubrick because I have never (well, except for maybe The Shining) made it through any of his movies on the first pass. I was asleep by the end of all of the films, and thought Eyes Wide Shut was the most horrible waste of celluloid. Kubrick: Not one film good!

... scenes of people looking!

Speilberg is a mediocre director. Raiders, yes, very good. SPR was a reasonable action film, but the ending, sticky bombs and all, destroyed any hope it had of being anything very meaningful (though the carnage of the Normandy invasion was pretty impressive, if that's the right word. Schindler's list was pretty good. Amistad, hmmmmmmmm. Jurrasic park, gimme a break. Indy 3 - a movie of chase scenes (and a few good other ones).

E.T. great feel good film. Close Encounters and Jaws, sure, sure.

Huge budget helps make things a bit easier, but the repetitive feel goodedness gets old.

Anyway, so-so. Lucas is a horrific director: Witness Attack of the Clones and the greatest disappointment of the 20th Century: The Phantom Menace. Remember that he's only directed, what, 5 feature films: Star Wars (great/phenomenon), THX (gotta admit I've never seen it all the way through), TPM (Worst movie EVER), Attack of the Clones, Gah! Only saving grace is that it wasn't as bad as TPM. Wasn't there one more?

Anyway, back to scenes of people looking...

david

P.S. and YES I'm a film snob!

pretty cool film,as I remember, though it's been years since I've seen it, and I may have a different take on it now.

Lucas is a producer, much more than a director.

He's not a bad producer, not even a bad story-man/SFX guru, forward thinker visually, but as a director, he's pretty darn bad.

I knew I was forgetting something, AG.

Just look at the instant improvement between Star Wars and Empire. Star Wars is fun and original (kinda), but Empire is (IMO at least) a truly great film. It has a far more consistent and interesting atmosphere and seems overall more coherent.

Some Speilberg retracting forthcoming...

david

That's a pretty good film.

The Color Purple was a *GREAT* film. It was so good, I had forgotten it was a Speilberg movie!

Okay, I'll give him marks for high highs, large middles and low lows.

I do think he's growing, though. I think he pushed his familiar formulas with "Minority Report", and he did a pretty reasonable job of emulating Kubrick in parts of A.I.

But he's easy to say "overrated" to because he's probably the director with the greatest popularity in the world. Thus if he's not, IMO, the greatest director (which he's not!), then he's overrated.

But points well taken, and I give the man credit, he did give us some great movies.

david

Kucinich 2004

He managed to get great performances out of every one of the actors.

He might have made good movies and i agree, close encounters, jaws were great, but now he thinks hes somekind of godsent director.. i mean ok the start of saving private ryan was great but the rest of that movie wasnt great, AI?? it sucked A**!!! I am sure he destroyed kubricks initial vision. And just WHAT is the deal with replacing the GUNS in E.T. with walkie talkies !!??!

Amistad was a godamm JOKE. "set me free blabla" He has become somekind of happy ending hollywood childrens movie uncle

No Spielberg might have been great but he is too pc, too predictable now.

I got one word for yall "HOOK"


About G.Lucas, i didnt vote for him because frankly i dont think ppl actually considers him a great director. People mostly think of him as a script writer imo.

Thin body of work (as a director) and most of it is grossly overrated. "Star Wars" wasn't even the best science fiction movie to come out in 1977, that was "Close Encounters".

I thought about Speilberg, but he has made too many gems to go along with some stuff I consider average.

Lucas is way over-rated IMO. Star Wars was a good film, but its not real SF (again IMO) its really fantasy, good fantasy that combines Samuri movies with 1930s radio serials, but still fantasy. Close Encounters was a good real SF movie. People dump in Spielberg too much I think. Jaws was a genre inventing classic. Of course its easy to critisize the "summer blockbuster" genre it spawned but iots is still a classic movie.

Personally I really like Rushmore. It would be wrong to put the film down just because "Indie wannabes" talk it up. I enjoy indie movies and "foreign" flicks a great deal but I'm no snob (see above I'll watch Jaws over much of the pretentions shit out there) but I do think Rushmore is a film that doesn't insult the audience's intelligence, doesn't take itself too seriously and is just very well made on every level.

Howard Stern (gulp) said it best: his movies look like they were made by a non-too-talented film student.

and personally I like student films.

But Malcolm X, one of the best films ever made, with one of the top 3 performances of all time. Overrated?? No, I don't think so.

Mo Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Clockers, He Got Game, Summer of Sam? Sure maybe not always the best films ever, but they look like student films?

Feh.

david

Kucinich 2004

A few of his movies have been good and yes he is unique. However most of his movies are just boring and self absorbed..... kind of like him!

My grief at not getting the Woody Allen scoop is offset by my satisfaction of knowing I am not alone.

it's a beautiful world we live in....

the only thing more stunning than the people that think his movies are great are the actors in them that say he is great.

I think he gives the chance to be as self indulgent as he is, actors love that.

Most of David Lynch's filmography is a bit on the unwatchable side ("Blue Velvet" is the video version of swallowing 15 shots of espresso, especially the scene in which Isabella Rossellini is wandering through the neighbor's yard, nude, complete with visible bite marks...) I believe, however, that "The Straight Story" is one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Whatever David Lynch's previous missteps, it's a gorgeous, touching film, and he managed to coax amazing performances out of the characters within.

Julie

There are so few people here who agree with me......sob :cry:

Seriously, welcome, glad to have you here.

One can only watch so many movies about neurotic, whiny New Yorkers before one gets sick of it. That is to say, one movie is too many.

Victor Fleming gets the director's credit for Gone with the Wind, easily the most overrated film of all time. For this, he was given an Oscar. Actually, he was only one of five directors on the film. One of the others was George Cukor.

Not a bad one-two punch for 1939.

The facts on Oz, and the irony of Victor Fleming having his name on two of the most famous movies of all time:

The original director was Richard Thorpe. However, things went badly from the start, and Thorpe was fired within weeks. The production basically shut down while George Cukor was brought in to "revision" the whole film. If you watch the documentary on the DVD, you'll see that the changes that Cukor made to the film's design were major, and really gave it the look it wound up having.

I don't know how much of the film Cukor shot. (IMDb doesn't credit him as a director, the documentary seems to imply he did film part of it.) However, Selznick eventually "called in the loan" of Cukor to MGM so that he could direct Gone With The Wind. Upon his departure, Victor Fleming (who was known mainly as a director of adventure films such as Treasure Island and Captains Courageous) was brought in to direct, and shot most of it.

Then, over at Selznick, Clark Gable eventually got upset at having to work with a "women's director" (translation: gay), and got Cukor fired after he had completed a significant portion of GWTW. His replacement, as dictated by Gable, was none other than Victor Fleming, who quit Wizard to take over. (It appears that, even after being fired, Cukor continued on salary for GWTW, and wound up secretly rehearsing many of the other actors before each day's shoot, as few besides Gable had much confidence in Fleming as a director of actors.)

So, now, with Wizard mostly completed, except for the black-and-white Kansas scenes, it was again without a director. MGM then made an unconventional, but brilliant, choice, and brought in King Vidor, a famous director of gritty, realistic works (The Big Parade, The Crowd, Street Scene) to finish the film as an uncredited director. He chose to shoot the Kansas scenes with much the same look as John Ford brought to The Grapes Of Wrath, and that was diametrically opposed to the fairy-tale quality of the rest of the movie. He appears to have also made one of the biggest contributions to the success of Wizard, not to mention to American popular culture, when he convinced the producers not to drop "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" from the film before it could be shot (the producers thought it would make the opening drag).

So, in other words, although Fleming is credited as the "director" of these two works, and received an Oscar for GWTW, he was really more of a case of being in the right place at the right time. Although it would be foolish to say that he had no contribution to two of the most famous American films of all time, one could well argue that he was only, at most, a co-director, and that Cukor (and, in the case of Wizard, Vidor) had more of a contribution in making them what they became.

Along with Kubrick, he is one of the greatest!!

Also, I don't understand why all the negative against Spielberg -
maybe some of his recent stuff, but, but, but, "Jaws" is one of the best in filmmaking

I can't believe what an underrated film it is, in my book. Everyone hates it. I thought it was brilliant, and a perfect piece in the Twin Peaks puzzle. I still love it. The Bar scene in particular is one of the most interesting and original I've ever seen.

Anyway, just curious.

david

Spielburg and Lucas aren't overrated, because no one is rating them that high. I mean, yeah, people love their shit, but no one is rushing out to give Minority Report or Send in the Clones Best Picture. When they make a decent film (A New Hope, Schindler's List), they get duly honored by the 'decent film' awards, the Oscars, but as far as popular film directors are, they're above and just slightly below par for the course.

Now, someone truly overrated, to me, has to be someone whom critics jump on like a tricycle and ride all day long as some great director whose work deserves to be in the film canon, and there are a few who immediately stand out as not deserving such treatment:

1. Stanley Kubrick - a film student's wet dream, but why? Kubrick made three and a half human movies in his life (Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork Orange, 2001 and the first half of Full Metal Jacket) and the rest is interminable misanthropic fatalistic nonsense. Yes, Kubrick figured out how to get people to watch movies which used Brechtian detachment (which, by the way, he took from 3rd world cinema and avant garde cinema), but if you compare his works as studies in human detachment to the late 60s works of Godard, there's no comparison.

2. DW Griffith - No, Birth of a Nation was not revolutionary for its time. Neither, really, was Intolerance. Both had been preceded for about four years by even more technically complex short films Griffith and others had done. Birth of a Nation was, is, and always will be a shrill reactionary racist piece of crap.

3. Luis Bunuel - Yeah, yeah. I love Un Chien Andalou, too. But if I have to sit through Discreet Charm or Exterminating Angel, I want to kill myself.

4. David Cronenberg - How can people sit through this hack's movies?

5. Jean-Luc Godard - Just kidding. Truffaut, Godard's biggest rival, was right in saying that there have only been two eras in cinema, before Godard and after Godard.

please don't hit me!

HA!

I forget what it's called, but the teaser looked a lot like Pulp Fiction.

Tarantino is my hands-down choice for most over-rated director. I have yet to sit through the entire Pulp Fiction without falling asleep. A lot of folks say Spielberg or Lucas, but there are a lot of folks who really hate those guys, so they can't possibly be over-rated. George Lucas captured lightning in a bottle ONE TIME in 1977. That's it. People know it, too.

Spielberg, OTOH, is one of the most UNDERrated directors out there, IMO. He's not consistently good, but who is? I thought Artificial Intelligence was one of his best films, although there are a lot of people who had SEVERELY negative reactions to it, including my wife. That doesn't make it a bad movie; just one that really pisses you off because you don't believe ordinary middle-class Americans can be that...just plain evil (read Romans sometime, or any book about how the Nazis came to power). If it weren't for that, Osment could have won Best Actor. He was clearly head and shoulders above anyone else in the biz in 2001, IMO.

Like Spielberg, he makes entertaining movies. Also like Spielberg, they're ultimately pretty vacant.

I've hated everything I've ever seen by him. A Hitchcock rip-off without the class or talent.

If you've never seen "Carrie" you should give that a try. If you've already seen it...well, never mind.

Sorry, but his stuff is garbage that is weird for the sake of being weird. He absolutely ruined Dune, and I thought "Twin Peaks" was idiotic nonsense.

St. Lynch fans, flame away.

And did I mention Steven Spielberg? :mad:

The guy who brought us all the "Conan" flicks?
He should take soem of the blame for "Candidate AHH-Nuld"..

("I told you not to mention Poseidon Adventure!")

...is a producer, not a director.

However, it was hard to keep a straight face seeing him get an "honorary life achievement Oscar" a couple of years ago, particulary when they credited him with working with many notable directors, including Robert Altman. I guess they were hoping that people would forget that Dino had fired Altman from Ragtime, a script that would have been perfect for him, and replaced him with Milos Forman who, although a talented director in his own right, was completely unsuited to the material and wound up embalming it. Altman, too, was never the same after losing Ragtime, even if he did wind up making a comeback later in life.

Ugh. Facile, sentimentalist crap. Up there with Zemeckis' Forrest Gump and Cast Away for prefab mythological Americana.

His technical skills as a director are barely there -- very early on he may have been able to use what he does have to good effect ("American Graffiti", "Star Wars") but his long absence from behind the camera and obsession with special effects has left him slack and out of touch with the vernacular of filmmaking.

The others listed can at least cut a film together -- whether you like how they do it or not, they at least have the basics together.

like looking at the rambling mind of an insane man on heavy downers. His movies may be convuluted but they are very very boring.