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Monday, January 18, 2010
A Fun Controversy
NSFW:
My nomination in the Foreign category. Lina Wertmuller.
A clip from the worst 'serious' movie I've ever seen, the original
Swept Away, a remake of a Brit comedy, The Admirable Crichton,
transformed into a ridiculous communist manifesto. Even worse
than the Madonna remake that won her a Razzie and offered the
saving grace of finishing off her so-called acting career for good.
A clip from the worst 'serious' movie I've ever seen, the original
Swept Away, a remake of a Brit comedy, The Admirable Crichton,
transformed into a ridiculous communist manifesto. Even worse
than the Madonna remake that won her a Razzie and offered the
saving grace of finishing off her so-called acting career for good.
FOR MOVIE FANS ONLY. Ben Shapiro is an enfant terrible of conservative stripe who has, apparently out of the blue, produced a list of the most overrated movie directors.
Here are excerpts from his screed I almost completely agree with. There's this:
It is one of the great travesties of
artistic justice that no one remembers the writers of great movies –
nobody knows Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, for example, but
everyone remembers Frank Capra. Together, those three wrote It’s
a Wonderful Life. (Together, Goodrich and Hackett also worked on
The Diary of Anne Frank, The Thin Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,
and Father of the Bride.)
Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong. There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.
Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong. There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.
And this:
David Lynch: Pure and absolute
suckage, with the exception of The Elephant Man. Lynch is one of
those annoyingly “deep” directors we’re all supposed to puzzle
over. Forget it. There’s nothing worth puzzling. He’s
as empty as they come, and he makes up for it with graphic sex scenes...
And this:
Woody Allen: He’s pretentious and
unbearable. His movies are like nails screeching on a chalkboard,
only with less humor. He is as nerdy as Peter Orszag, but he acts
out his fantasies and illuminates his insecurities in film and expects
us all to watch. It’s okay for a director to be self-centered –
Orson Welles was famously self-centered. But you actually have to
be an interesting person in order to spend that much time focusing on
yourself. Allen isn’t. He’s a whiny narcissist with sexual
inferiority issues. And no one except for him cares about the
status of his penis. As a side note, he made Diane Keaton into a
“legitimate actress,” which alone should qualify him for the Seventh
Circle of Hell.
And definitely this:
Martin Scorsese... His films are
entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters. They
are cold and calculating and ruthless – and boring. Nobody cares
what happens to Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed (in fact, in one
screening I saw, people cheered when he got it in the head). The
Aviator takes as long to tell as Howard Hughes did to live. Gangs
of New York featured a brilliant performance from Daniel Day Lewis, and
not much else (on a side note, there is no excuse for killing Liam
Neeson in the first ten minutes of a film). Casino is nasty,
brutish, and long... Raging Bull is gross. Mean Streets is gross
and soporific. Taxi Driver is perhaps the most overrated film in
Hollywood history — dreary, grungy, and subzero. Scorsese has
never seen a main character he liked, a villain he hated, or a pair of
editing scissors.
I disagree with some entries and we can get to that if you're interested after you read the whole list. The comments on it at Big Hollywood are just as much fun. It's great to read how people react when their sacred cows are smacked suddenly across the face. They're so incredulous they can't even respond coherently.
What do you guys think of Shapiro's list? And who would be on your list and why? Be as voluble and provocative as you want. We could all use a diversion from the news...
