Sometimes movies hit a sweet spot in our cultural consciousness. It could be a gooey sensibility that appeals to our national pride, it could be a sugary flavor that stimulates our sentimental guts, or it could be mad special effects that blow our minds – at least until the next $500 million sci-fi epic rolls around.
But sometimes, these movies aren’t so great upon re-watching. Perhaps they’ve aged particularly badly, or they were up against a lousy bunch of Best Picture nominees the year they were released, or perhaps many of us just had a severe case of the Emperor’s New Clothes when we watched them in the first place. Be honest: when you told your friend that you really enjoyed a Little Miss Sunshine or a Juno, did it taste a little... bitter?
Here’s a list of movies that people generally loved, but have somewhere along the line been blown out of proportion and are now held in esteem far above their modest qualities. These aren't bad films, just over-applauded.
And if you like 'em... why, that's just fine.
This list is a companion piece to Ten Movies People Hated… and Why They’re Not That Bad, is purely subjective and contains mild spoilers.
Paul Haggis’ 2005 meditation on race-relations took away the Best Picture Academy Award that year, performed well critically (well-ish, 76% on Rotten Tomatoes), and made more than seven times its budget at the box office. But does anyone really remember it?
We all recall its Oscar running mate, Brokeback Mountain, and while this could be put down to Mountain’s audacious subject matter, it's more likely that Brokeback is a stronger film - Crash still feels too manufactured to be distinctive. Haggis’ Los Angeles is a horrific melting pot of racism, but his characters' racist attitudes are written upon them, engulfing any semblance of character and giving the whole affair an aura of unreality. Weakened further by a series of unlikely narrative turns (they were blank bullets? Gimme a freakin' break!) Crash misses its mark, despite any admirable intentions behind it.
Despite an engrossing central performance from Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind was another topical film elevated into the stratosphere by a Best Picture Academy Award. The embodiment of the term ‘Oscar-bait,’ A Beautiful Mind appears to tell a story of mental illness in earnest, but is bogged down by a script that descends into easy melodrama, feeble supporting characterisation – Jennifer Connolly deserved much better than this one-dimensional-put-upon-housewife, despite her Oscar win - and absolutely nothing to distinguish itself from a ‘movie-of-the-week’ on the same subject.
To rub salt in the wound, this ‘true story’ of the schizophrenic Professor John Nash eschews pivotal facts about the real Nash, including his homosexuality. Director Ron Howard, while generally reliable, if not remarkable, is painting-by-numbers.
Overexposure can be a terrible fate for mega-successful movies; look at the backlash against Titanic and Avatar. But it's not a fate that has befallen the mighty Forrest Gump. The feelgood drama still holds a warm place in our hearts, even in the face of our rampant Internet-bred-cynicism.
This is weird, because Forrest Gump shares much with the Cameron blockbusters, insofar as it's a remarkable technical revolution with a story batting above its weight. The principle problem with Forrest Gump is Forrest himself - who is, in fact, a one-note 'holy fool', untouchable to the sinful masses (e.g., the rest of us, and poor slutty Jenny who embraced the 'alternative lifestyle'). This would be palatable if his simple virtue was not presented to us as quite so inspirational by director Robert Zemeckis. Consider the message behind the death of Jenny, who bucked against the status quo, while Forrest continues through life immoveable and unquestioning. It's a dodgy conservatism that washes over us like hyper-coloured baby barf, mixed up with a magnificent soundtrack.
2004's Garden State is another of those beloved indie dramadies that sits quite comfortably with fellow upstarts Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. While credit must unquestionably be given to creator Zach Braff – who made this in his twenties – Garden State is nonetheless too threadbare to justify the (principally Gen Y) love heaped upon it.
In 2004 the term ‘manic pixie dream girl’ did not exist yet (it was coined by a critic the following year), but the narrative formula associated with the archetype is pitch perfect here. Zach’s Braph’s paper thin ‘emotionally-repressed young dude’ meets impossibly kooky Sam (Portman), a charming cipher who eventually ‘rescues’ him by bringing him out of his shell. Set to a soundtrack dominated by indie darlings The Shins and featuring enough wacky moments to sink a polka dot tugboat full of Zooey Deschanels, it’s no wonder people loved this. It’s just without substance; a rom-com in skinny jeans.
There should be a support group for those who didn’t love Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. We generally find ourselves in the minority, and act like overexcited lunatics whenever we meet someone else who suggests hey, I didn’t think it was that great either.
It’s not that Pilgrim is a bad movie – in fact it's very clever – but it lacks the emotional weight to elevate it beyond a very smart in-joke. Much of the problem lies with its ambition to stuff a series of graphic novels into a single film, rather than spreading them across multiple; we are whisked from one irony-encrusted encounter to the next before catching our breath. The characters consequently get very little time in which to be anything but super cool, super confident quip-machines - and when everyone is just so unruffled, why give a damn?
The Hurt Locker, which sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and won six Oscars at the 2009 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, is a satisfying war thriller, yet a curiously indistinct one. Perhaps this is because The Hurt Locker is, in fact, just a satisfying war thriller, despite being sold to us as something more authentic; a mirror held up to reality without Hollywood’s dusting of sugar.
It was, after all, based on the accounts of freelance journalist Mark Boal, stationed in Iraq for two weeks in 2004, and its themes of ‘war addiction’ evoke the grimy realism of classic war flicks The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now et al. But instead of the kitchen sink, we get an entertaining war flick, albeit one peppered with as many hackneyed quips and manufactured narrative turns as the next (Staff Sergeant William James’ personal revenge mission still rings false upon re-watching). Director Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break) is great at capturing muscular action in a cinematic bottle – but this time, that’s all she’s captured.
If one thought Frank Darabont’s ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ erred on over sentimental, one could sure as hell never admit it out loud; it would be akin to killing a puppy. While Darabont did indeed tread a fine line between sentimentality and sensitivity in 1994’s prison drama classic, he leaped over it into a bottle of syrup in his 1999 prison drama ‘classic’, The Green Mile.
On paper, the movie hits all the high-notes for weighty Hollywood drama, yet onscreen it drowns in its own sappiness, over-simplifying the roles of the good guys and bad guys into perfect saints and wicked sinners, battering us across the face with Disnefied messages of hope and the power of miracles. This didn’t stop it from being nominated for a handful of Oscars; perhaps its heady cocktail of Tom Hanks, race-relations, and dramatic Stephen King source material (which takes much of the blame here) was too much for the Academy to resist. Suckers.
Mike Nichols’ heavy ‘war of the sexes’ drama Closer certainly has its detractors, but chances are you still know someone who thinks it’s the best thing since Citizen Kane for its uncompromising bleakness and single-minded determination to ‘go there.'
Adapted from a wordy play script by dialogue wizard Patrick Marber, Closer the movie occasionally sings in isolated pockets of verbal warfare -“have you ever seen a human heart?! It looks like a fist wrapped in blood” - but eventually buckles under its own ultra-serious weight. The four leads – gamely played by Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Jude Law and Natalie Portman – are all cruel urbanites whose only redeemable collective feature is an ostentatious physical attractiveness, lending their poetry all the weight of a bit of dead skin floating up an air vent. Could Closer have had more of an emotional punch if Nichols had pared down Marber’s script, focusing on quiet, reflective moments that could potentially have redeemed some of its humanity? Possibly, but maybe the source material was too damned contemptuous to be adapted to film in the first place.
American Beauty teetered on universal praise when it was released in 1999. Funny and dark, it was a surprisingly anarchic Hollywood drama, an attempt to sardonically lift the veil on the white middle class and flip the bird to the faceless ‘Man’.
And while American Beauty gives it an admirable shot, it falls short of revealing our deep, dark realities. It presents to us, instead, a caricature of them, our desires in hyper-coloured strokes. Col. Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) as a brutish Nazi sympathizer and closet homosexual is handled loudly and, arguably, crassly - consider the film’s ending, which, while moving, rings like an easy out, rather than the shockingly revealing blow the filmmakers intended. Wes Bentley’s ‘weirdo’ Ricky Fitts also comes off the rent-a-character shelf, quirky enough to provide contrast to the shrieking suburbanites but nothing more than a hastily sketched idea. Broad strokes would be forgivable if this was satire, but American Beauty is not. It presents us with shocking scenarios intended to move us to reflection, to 'look closer,' but in fact it’s a well-acted, often titillating flirtation with a more brutal truth.
The winner of Best Original Screenplay at the 2007 Academy Awards, Little Miss Sunshine was a true crowd pleaser. It was also a critical darling (91% on Rotten Tomatoes), praised for an unusual emotional intelligence in the well-trodden dysfunctional middle-class family yarn. Alan Arkin snorting heroin and Steve Carrell attempting suicide? Daringly dark stuff.
But instead it’s a wholesome optimism that laces itself through Little Miss Sunshine’s bones, and the characters, pitched as ‘you and I’, ultimately reveal themselves to be delivery boys for the screenwriter’s alarmingly virtuous messages. Along the way, their complicated issues are packaged into a single convenient box labelled FAMILY IS IMPORTANT, while the film’s ending dissolves into nauseating sap (they were going for heartwarming, we got ipecac instead.) This would all be fine of course, if we hadn’t been lead to believe there was going to be some pluck here. A little bit more of that promised indie edginess would have gone a long way.
Agree? Disagree? What movies do you think are overrated? Let us know in the comments.
Lucy O'Brien is Assistant Editor at IGN AU. You should talk to her about games, horror movies and the TV show Freaks & Geeks on IGN here or find her and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.
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