Just for fun, I'm going to limit my list to Oscar nominees:

-Babel
-Crash
-The Aviator
-A Beautiful Mind
-Titanic
-The English Patient

Oh wow. The worst movie of all time for me was PRACTICAL MAGIC. It's been so long since I watched it that one time, but I remember the experience being painfully tedious. I have watched a few recently that have dark memories for me, such as THE FOUNTAIN and NUMBER 23. You know a movie is bad when you turn on the lights and start doing other things in your living room while the movie is getting into its 3rd Act climax.

-The Rock (any part of the story does not takes place on Alcatraz)
-Battlefield Earth
-The Craft (Pagan and laughing my ass off)
-The Shadow
-Anything made in the past 4 years

A History of Violence.

By far the dumbest, stupidest, wholly unsatisfactory movie I have seen in the last couple of years. Crap movies are okay, you know they are crap, I know they are crap but at least we can sit back and laugh at them.

However a History of Violence was marked by masturbatory levels of press coverage, citing that it dared to be different and cover violence in new and surprising ways. What a crock of shit that was, I was more disgusted by the sheer adulation lauded on the film by critics, I wondered if they and I watched the same damn movie. All I saw was some poorly constructed 'man-living-another-life' story, that somehow leads him to kill a bunch of people and then kill a bunch more and turns out he was actually what he was. Oh wow!

Its telling that years later the movie still pisses me off.

Can't agree with you about "The Fountain" Blankfist; it's my favorite movie of all time now (bumping "Run Lola Run" and "Jacob's Ladder" out of their tied place)

>> ^smibbo:
Can't agree with you about "The Fountain" Blankfist; it's my favorite movie of all time now (bumping "Run Lola Run" and "Jacob's Ladder" out of their tied place)


Wow, really? The Fountain? Well, I do love Jacob's Ladder. That's a great movie, and in fact I just watched it the other day.

>> ^Farhad2000:
A History of Violence. By far the dumbest, stupidest, wholly unsatisfactory movie I have seen in the last couple of years.


I can only say "wow" again. Not my favorite film of all time, but certainly a well done one, in my opinion. Maybe I don't embody the filmic vox populi of the Sift.

It's pretty easy to avoid bad movies these days, once you square up your own personal taste with rottentomatoes or MetaCritic. I skipped The Fountain, but thought A History Of Violence was decent. It did come from a graphic novel, where extreme violence is commonplace. I also liked The Rock.

I'm happy to say that I've missed all of the other bad movies discussed.

Three more stinkers: Devil's Rejects, Lady in the Water and Life as a House.

oh GAWD "Devil's Rejects" was SUCH a disappointment!!

I liked "Lady in the Water" myself....

Scrunts and Narfs? Torturing your critics on screen? Casting yourself as Jesus Christ? The ridiculously insulting Asian characters? At least he had some Cibo Matto in the soundtrack.

I thought it was one of those so bad it was good kind of movies. The last MNS movie I liked was The 6th Sense.

The Rob Zombie movie was just plain boring. How is it possible for such a violent film to be boring. The slow-mo 'Freebird' finale were the longest 7 minutes of my life. He just seems to care way too much about his poorly conceived characters. How does such an unremarkable artist succeed in two separate fields. It just ain't fair.

I gave up on M.Night right after the aliens invade earth but are defeat by water bullshit. That was horrible, I could just imagine him sitting in his office "I want to craft a revival of faith in a pastor who has lost it... I know lets add Aliens!". Aliens who travelled light years with advanced technology yet suffer problems opening doors, also picking a planet about as suitable for them as us landing on the goddamn Sun. Imagine if it rained. The whole movie premise is ruined.

I enjoyed The Devil's Rejects. But then I like Rob Zombie in general, it was much better the House of the Dead though, which was really a long music video. I also grew up watching 80s horror movies like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Stephen King's It and so on.

I have a serious dislike of new shock horror films though, which just rely on conveying large suffering. Saw was good but its sequels were terrible. Hostel is utter shite.

I'm with you on 80's horror and I'm a huge horror fan in general. I just really didn't like Devil's Rejects. He tried hard to disturb in the same way that Wes Craven did in 'Last House on the Left', but it just felt boring and contrived to me. I actually liked 1000 Corpses a bit better. It was a shitty movie, and the MTV style cuts were annoying, but I did like the imagery in the final section, with Dr. Satan and the long hallway of dead bodies.

I miss the cathartic revenge of the victim in Zombie's movies. He clearly wants us to empathize with the killers, which is a nice idea in theory, but I never do end up caring about anyone in his films.

I missed all the Saw sequels and thought Hostel was a creepy premise, but I agree that torture just doesn't do it for me.

>> ^Farhad2000:
Aliens who travelled light years with advanced technology yet suffer problems opening doors, also picking a planet about as suitable for them as us landing on the goddamn Sun. Imagine if it rained. The whole movie premise is ruined.

Ha! Great point! I never thought about it raining. Wow, all this time and I don't think I ever even considered the rain. Talk about a crater sized plot hole. Still, I've got a soft spot in my heart for M. Night. I loved 6th Sense, and I also liked Signs a lot. I don't care much for Lady in the Water, and Village has a great first two Acts! The 3rd? Meh.

Dark City
the life aquatic with steve zissou (which the MPAA nabbed me for)

Anything put out by an MPAA studio since my MPAA extortion incident

dghandi, do tell more!

Titanic

my review: "i was rooting for the iceberg."

yes dghandi, tell us your story.

No one wants to defend the Oscar noms?

>> ^blankfist:
dghandi, do tell more!


I just sat down and wrote a nice long explanation, but I don't think my settlement with the MPAA will allow me to post it without risking everything I own, or will ever own. I'll go dig out the settlement papers and see what I am allowed to say.

Edit:
It's kinda long and off topic, so I dropped it in sifttalk Here

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
No one wants to defend the Oscar noms?

Hmmm, well since no one else will do it, I guess I'll have to.

-Babel

While this was almost certainly Alejandro González Iñárritu's weakest film, considering the fact that I find Amores Perros and 21 Grams to be near-masterpieces (Amores Perros in particular), that was pretty much a forgone conclusion. The stories don't tie together quite as nicely as you'd hope, and it felt a tad long long, but it was really well made and superbly acted.

-Crash

Yes, it's heavy-handed; there's no denying that subtlety isn't a word in this film's vocabulary. But there were some surprisingly powerful moments, and it featured (mostly) very good performances.

-The Aviator

This was definitely one of Scorsese's weaker films, but there were a lot of things I liked about it. I liked the visual style, and how it tried to mimic the look of movies of the various eras. Cate Blanchett was really good. Ummm... well look, it wasn't a great film, but it certainly wasn't so bad as to be a waste of celluloid.

-A Beautiful Mind

Again, not great, but not awful, either. It was a competently made, entertaining Hollywood film. No more, no less.

-Titanic

I'm going to admit that I really liked this one. Though this isn't exactly the kind of thing James Cameron became famous for, I still think he's at his best here. This film manages to be a very good romance, and a good disaster movie, without one element ever eclipsing the other. Yes, it is schmaltzy, but I think an unabashed romance like this is allowed to have a bit of schmaltz. I still remember seeing this opening weekend, when the only buzz around it was "how hard is this film going to FLOP??" and walking out completely stunned. I know it isn't "cool" to like this film because of the way it was embraced by teenage girls, but you know what? I don't care. I think it's great, old-fashioned movie-making. Also: if you can remain dry-eyed during the sequence in which the string quartet plays while various passengers make their final preparations, then you sir are made of stone.

-The English Patient

I can't defend this one too vigourously, as I thought it was horribly overrated, but I will admit that it wasn't terrible. I honestly don't remember much about it... Ralph Fiennes was very good, though, as he always is (and go see In Bruges if you want to see a very different, and very hilarious, performance from him).

With the exception of The Aviator and A Beautiful Mind which I thought were both worthless, I agree with you Sarzy, and I do appreciate you playing my juvenile iconoclast games.

As far as James Cameron goes, I was recently shocked to find that Aliens and T2 didn't live up to my childhood memories. All those cool lines by Bill Paxton just made me cringe and T2 was nothing more than a bunch of (now dated) action scenes with very little in the way of an interesting plot. T1 still holds up as far as I'm concerned. Most people I know either love or at least liked the Titanic, so I'm basically just being an ass by bashing it.

What comes to my mind..

In total
-The House on the Haunted Hill (remake)
-Blairwitch Project 2
-and loads of action/horror B movies, too much to mention.

For 90%
-Austin Powers series
-Men in Black II



BTW: I think The Fountain, History of Violence, Babel, Crash are decent films.