ComputerMKII
Banned
According to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10767345/10-most-overrated-films-of-all-time.html
Do you agree with that list?
Do you agree with that list?
- Skyfall (2012)
What They Said
“One of the best Bonds ever. This is a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Awards
Winner of Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the Baftas, and Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music. Nominated for six other Baftas, and five Oscars, of which it won two (for Original Song and Sound Editing).
What We Say
Gulp. Let's first admit that Javier Bardem has three great scenes in Skyfall, before the film decides that Silva, his magnificently creepy-camp villain, wants nothing more than to chase Judi Dench up to the Highlands and bombard Bond’s ancestral pile with a Merlin helicopter. This is his masterplan? In the plus column, it may be the best-looking Bond film ever made – high-five there for Roger Deakins – but it’s nowhere near as sure of itself, or sure where Bond should be going this decade, as evangelists on its release liked to think. Awkward in shape and thrilling only periodically, the film’s a fraught salvage job for which Sam Mendes got far too much of the credit.
Look closer and the scars of indecision are painfully obvious, especially in that third act. Ben Whishaw’s Q allows the MI6 server to be hacked by… plugging a pair of ethernet cables into Silva’s laptop? The tube crash is a shambles. The disposal of Severine, after Bond has had his wicked way with this maltreated sex slave, is brutally callous. Daniel Craig seems hardened, waxy, and humourless, with no gift for floating a weak punchline, and the uninspired script (“Got into some deep water”, anyone?) gives him a morass of them. The drift of the movie is interestingly reactionary – it’s about reverting to old certainties, like having men in charge, in a confusing new world (and a world which hated Quantum of Solace). But we’d prefer the old certainty of a Bond movie that’s light on its feet, satisfying right to the end, and puts more than the security services in brief jeopardy. It’s the biggest hit in British box office history, to which we say, with apologies: better luck next time.
See instead… The Living Daylights (1987), Timothy Dalton’s gritty debut as Bond, which still feels like one of the most underregarded in the series, and has that ridiculously good stunt sequence dangling out the back of a Soviet cargo plane.
- Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)
What They Said
“Outrageous… brilliantly, cruelly funny, a topical American comedy that confirms Paddy Chayeskfy’s position as a major new American satirist” – Vincent Canby, New York Times
Awards
Winner of four Oscars for Actor (Peter Finch), Actress (Faye Dunaway), Supporting Actress (Beatrice Straight) and Original Screenplay. Nominated for six other Oscars including Picture and Director. Won four Golden Globes.
What We Say
At an age when articulate-sounding despair, voraciously mannered acting from half the cast, and Faye Dunaway were all recommendations in themselves, Network was very appealing. Going back to it, Paddy Chayefsky's script, very often referred to as one of the sharpest achievements in 1970s Hollywood screenwriting, sounds pretty bad. It’s a self-righteous screed against TV as an institution, dripping with contempt for the braindead masses who watch it, and casting those responsible for churning it out as almost uniformly soulless ratings-obsessed automata.
What's really death to the movie is how shrill and monotonous Chayefsky's characterisations are; Dunaway's Diana begins and ends it as exactly the same (non) person, and she's not progressively revealed as "television incarnate" so much as a walking target straight off for the excoriation she gets slapped with at the end. When everyone up and down the land goes gaga for Howard Beale's "mad as hell" speech, the movie wants to score its big coup in a very obvious satirical way by resorting to dim-bulb crowd behaviour, without realising how floridly condescending its message is. Over time, it has only seemed more hectoring, and also more ineffectual – there’s a lot more to hold against TV networks these days than just a bit of amoral ratings-grabbing.
See instead… Bamboozled (2000), Spike Lee’s angry, abrasive and underseen satire about the media representation of African-Americans, which bites off more than it can chew, but makes a lot of urgent points without ever clapping itself on the back.
- Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2011)
What They Said
“A sublime brain-twister of a movie” – Lou Lumenick, New York Post
Awards
Winner of four Oscars (Cinematography, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Visual Effects), and nominated for four others, including Best Picture and Original Screenplay.
What We Say
On release, Inception was a must-see that dwarfed reservations. Expressions of disappointment seemed irrelevant – “See it anyway” was the general chorus. It was a monster hit that got more credit as brainy spectacle than it deserved, by quite a huge factor, but at least it prompted discussion – reams and reams of it, from already-obsessive fans to scathing refuseniks, and everyone in between. It’s pretty clear by now that the edifice of the film was awe-inspiring but essentially hollow. Put another way, the script fixated on internal logic at the expense of, well, the external kind – why should any of this matter? What’s it really about?
It’s a criminal failing of the movie that it purports to be about people’s dreams being invaded, but demonstrates no instinct at all for what a dream has ever felt like, and no flair for making us feel like we’re in one, at any point. The stern, poker-faced sexlessness of Nolan’s universe has never been more of a hindrance. What we get is more like a series of computer games being invaded, or set pieces from Bond movies. The layering is virtuosic and often thunderously impressive – like playing three or four such games in perfect tandem – but there’s a vital core missing. Nolan conceived of a brilliant central idea, but then got so carried away with trying to explore it in an architecturally clever way, he lost his grip.
See instead… Paprika (2006), the beguiling final film of late Japanese animation hero Satoshi Kon, which has a comparable plot about “dream therapy” and does more vivid justice to how dreams actually work.
- Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)
What They Said
“Fellini is so bountiful with incident and observation that he makes most other filmmakers seem stingy” – Jay Cocks, TIME
Awards
Nominated for Best Director and Original Screenplay Oscars and won Best Foreign Film Oscar.
What We Say
Boobs. We all know Fellini was a fan. And there’s nothing wrong with boobs. They’re easy things to appreciate. Still, watching Amarcord, his celebrated account of life in a provincial coastal village under Mussolini, it’s easy to get distracted by all the whopping great mammaries, and indeed becomes oddly difficult to focus on anything else. Is there a great deal of any substance going on, behind the jiggling and swimsuits? Fellini was long-established by this point as a peerless observer and satirist of Italian foibles, sex, class, art and politics, but his sensibility had coarsened dramatically as the years went on. The ripeness of La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963), even as you watch them, threatens to tip over into overblown, pungent excess. By now, it had.
The amateur ticket-queue critic in Annie Hall, complaining of “indulgence”, may have been thinking of this, unless it was Casanova (1976). He could also have mentioned that the row of boys masturbating at the front of a local cinema provides an uncomfortably apt image for the whole movie, so much so that you can well imagine the director giving them detailed instructions on technique. We get a passing show with melancholic undercurrents, but it’s also the movie equivalent of getting your rocks off with a saucy seaside postcard.
See instead… I Vitelloni (1953), Fellini’s wondrous early comedy-drama about five young men in a provincial Adriatic town. Fresh and precisely observed, blending bawdiness and melancholy.
- Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004)
What They Said
“A relic that dazzles you with its footwork, daring and class” – Richard Corliss, TIME
Awards
Nominated for seven Oscars and won four: Picture, Director, Actress (Hilary Swank), Supporting Actor (Morgan Freeman). Won Golden Globes for Director and Actress.
What We Say
Some films – the Argos of this world – come at the right time, surge through awards season, and look a little less credible every time you think back. Doesn’t Argo feel like awfully old news, or a film that could have been made in the late 1990s? Others – I’m thinking about Million Dollar Baby – are critical darlings that actually age quite well. Relics on purpose. It’s possible to have made peace with this one, particularly for those of us who were scratching our heads the second we saw it – who couldn’t jive to the mixture of solemnity, heart-wringing and obvious calculation. It’s too glum a film to be accused of truly gross sentimentality, too painfully earnest to feel like a barefaced lie. Still, it’s a strange artefact.
Paul Haggis’s script is often a liability, particularly when it hands a rumbling payload of voiceover to Morgan Freeman’s character, or wheels on Maggie’s dreadful, grasping family at the end to reinforce the Eastwood-Swank alliance. No film with characters called ‘Eddie Scrap-Iron Dupris’ or ‘Danger Barch’ is shy of archetypes, and it’s nothing if not vintage Eastwood in that sense. Uncork it now and it may even have improved, mellowed, a decade after Oscar glory. But there’s something about it that still feels like emotional blackmail, or a fixed fight.
See instead… Fat City (1972), John Huston’s perilously neglected, whisky-sodden drama about two boxers (Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges) locked in a desperate fight for the upper hand.
- Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
What They Said
“A heartbreaking masterwork from Kurosawa with nary a samurai in sight” – Jeffrey M Anderson, San Francisco Examiner
Awards
Special Prize of the Senate of Berlin, Berlin Film Festival
What We Say
It’s a critical truism that Ikiru, whose English translation is “To Live”, is Kurosawa’s “real” masterpiece, an impeccable work of contemporary humanism and rare compassion, from a director more regularly associated with blood and thunder, samurai intrigue, Shakespeare interpretations and period garb. It gets praised for its philosophical grace and subtlety. Let’s examine this last claim. It’s about an underappreciated middle-aged Tokyo bureaucrat dying of stomach cancer, who decides to accomplish one last feat to give his life meaning, and breaks through red tape to get a children’s playground built where there was once a cesspool. He sings “Life is Short” while crying into the camera. The famous last shot has his ghost on a swing, gazing raptly upon what he has created.
It’s loosely based on Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – much more harshly, less sentimentally adapted by Bernard Rose in 2000’s ivansxtc. Nor is the delicacy of an Ozu truly within Kurosawa’s repertoire of effects. Everything we’re meant to feel here is bluntly dictated by the script and delivered with unambiguous, button-pushing direction – it’s impossible to miss. So if the word 'subtle' applies to this film, just because no one gets decapitated by a sword and because it doesn’t contain a ranting Toshiro Mifune, you’re pretty much welcome to apply it to anything. Of course, there’s no need to damn art just for being emotionally forthright. It’s an immensely well-meaning piece of work, and at times a very affecting one. But let’s call a spade a spade: it’s about as subtle as Stepmom.
See instead… The Ballad of Narayama (1983), Shohei Imamura’s uncompromising vision of this mortal coil, in which the hero’s ageing mother uses her last year to improve life in their village.
- Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)
What They Said
“The film equivalent of Usain Bolt’s performance at the Olympics: funny, shocking, spectacularly turbo-charged” – Sukdhev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph
Awards
Nominated for 10 Oscars and won eight (Film, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, Cinematography, Original Score, Original Song, Sound Mixing). Won four Golden Globes (Film, Director, Screenplay, Score) and seven Baftas (Film, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Music, Cinematography, Editing, Sound).
What We Say
Where to start? The performances veer from the gormless (Dev Patel) to the insufferable (Anil Kapoor), via the emptily eye-catching (Freida Pinto). But this isn’t really about people. Or Bombay. Or India, at all. Or some lame tale about a TV quiz. It’s about a British triumph, an underdog story sweeping the Oscars. It’s about Danny Boyle and his tireless energy and enthusiasm and all the good things he’s done for British film. We really won’t hear a word said against him – and we couldn’t, in the din of the film’s absurdly hyped reception, which, rather in the manner of The King’s Speech, made you feel like a traitor to the national spirit if you weren’t on board.
Is it time to admit that it’s Boyle’s worst film? That the script is an idiotic confection with no characters of any plausibility or substance? That the dazzling, Oscar-winning cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle is all very dazzling and Oscar-winning, but makes extreme poverty in Bombay’s slums seem like a frisky exercise in knockabout sensation? A fun romp, so long as you’re watching from a distance? Do we even mention the plunge into excrement, and how many other stunts the movie pulls in the name of dubious hyper-reality? Maybe we should just keep schtum, and apologise for not having the slightest clue what the fuss was all about.
See instead… Om Shanti Om (2007), a giddy, silly, infectiously enjoyable Shah Rukh Khan vehicle, which won over this Bollywood-sceptic viewer and leaves nothing but a sweet taste in the mouth.
- The Double Life of Véronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
What They Said
“A mesmerising poetic work composed in an eerie minor key” – Hal Hinson, Washington Post
Awards
Best Actress (Irène Jacob) and FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes Film Festival
What We Say
There are two Véroniques, or rather, a Véronique and a Weronika, both played by award-winning Irène Jacob – one a French music teacher, the other a Polish soprano. The connection between them becomes clear, or clear-ish, after one dies. Depending on your point of view, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s enigmatic doppelgänger drama is either a resonant inquiry into identity, fate, and the cosmic joke of existence, or a tiresomely extended, almost self-parodic example of an early-1990s Euro-art movie, whose obsession with doubling is wafty, incorrigibly studenty, and gets us nowhere.
Jacob, as celebratory writing about this film tends to insist, has an unearthly beauty, but she’s forced to act a conceit rather than a pair of recognisable people. Meanwhile, the sickly cinematography by overcelebrated DP Slawomir Idziak gets so monotonous that a critic-friend dubbed this “One Colour: Yellow” – a cheap shot that it nonetheless wholly deserves.
See instead… Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch’s astonishing and frightening assault on identity, which breaks out of a concept-y thesis to make visceral demands on the viewer.
- Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)
What They Said
“David Cronenberg’s first masterpiece” – Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Reverse Shot
Awards
Genie Award for Best Director
What We Say
Rated? Yes, Videodrome is very highly rated indeed by David Cronenberg’s fans, who point to it as one of his most sophisticated early works, representing an evolutionary leap in his imagery and ideas. I yield to no one in my admiration for Cronenberg. Crash is an astonishing piece of work. This, though, is half-formed. It has brilliantly icky sequences and an outstanding James Woods performance. But it’s a sketch for a film, a storyboard. It doesn’t get anywhere. Roger Ebert called it “one of the least entertaining films ever made”, and though he had yet to see Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven when making this assessment, he had half a point. It’s a series of state-of-the-future concepts and squirmy images in serious need of urgent momentum, a destination that works.
Cronenberg himself admits that he was very indecisive about what the ending should be. It failed to satisfy his fans at the time, and flopped dismally. It may well be that accepting a studio assignment on his next movie, The Dead Zone (1983), helped sharpen the director’s story instincts, not just his commercial ones. By the time we reach The Fly (1986), he’s working at full tilt, fashioning a film that’s acutely disturbing, moving, joltingly funny, and still wholly his own. Videodrome is much-championed as Cronenberg’s misunderstood child, a film too brave, or difficult, for its moment, or whatever, but every time I see it, I’m unconvinced.
See instead… Naked Lunch (1991), Cronenberg’s archly unsettling stab at William Burroughs, which marshals its imagery more ingeniously and coheres more credibly.
- The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)
What They Said
“The screenplay, by William Monahan, is simply sensational. Scenes play brilliantly. Feelings flow like molten lava. The dialogue overflows with edgy wit and acidulous arias of imprecation.” – Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
Awards
Nominated for five Oscars and won four (Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Editing), and won Golden Globe for Best Director.
What We Say
The Departed is fun Scorsese, but is it great Scorsese? It feels like the film arrived buoyed up by the hope Marty might finally win some Oscars, and reviewers gave it a helping hand. It has excellent qualities – one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s two or three best performances, a knockout supporting cast, an often biting script by William Monahan. But it’s also heartless, messy and self-indulgent. The neat symmetry of the premise – built around the chiastic conceit of two undercover agents working on either sides of the law, who could rumble each other at any moment – worked better in the Hong Kong source picture, Infernal Affairs, which was sturdy and more economical.
Scorsese lets an alarmingly hammy Jack Nicholson barge his way into the movie and mangle its shape. When Gimme Shelter kicks in over the first bit of bad-Boston-drawl Nicholson voiceover, the director already feels like he’s copying himself, falling back on bad habits. What should have been a crackerjack crime thriller, with the best cast in town, ends up succumbing to self-important bloat.
See instead… We Own the Night (2007), James Gray’s punchy and elegant period crime drama, which has all the emotional clout and organisational discipline this lacks.
