5 Grossly Overrated Films (Plus Some Post-Election Musings)

Whew, it's been a while!  Good to be back on the blog.  It's been an exciting few months off (not that I've ever posted with any great regularity).  I'm back living in Colorado Springs, teaching middle school, and my writing has had to take a backseat to things like lesson planning.  Whatever.

As I write this, it is November 10th, and the presidential election has been over for four days that already seem like an eternity.  I think it's infuriating and hilarious by turns that the overwhelming reaction by my Republican friends and coworkers has been one of indignation, disbelief, and moral outrage.  Conversely, I have managed not to gloat, mostly because if you believe in facts and numbers (like me), Obama's reelection really came as no surprise.  The wizards at FiveThirtyEight straight-up called this election exactly, and the head pollmaster there, Nate Silver, has now correctly predicted 101 of 102 states in the last two elections (including D.C., which is sort of a gimme).  Does no one read that blog?  If not... why?  It gives much better coverage and information than any of the "news" networks, so why not read it?

Anyway, I haven't actually seen a new movie in a while, so today's blog is actually just something I've wanted to write for a while.  I've noticed that frequently, my overall enjoyment of a film either increases or decreases on repeat watches, and that sometimes I notice things on the second or third watch that make it hard to enjoy the film.  Conversely, some movies (I'm looking at you, Shawshank) seem immune to this effect, and remain in the pantheon of movies I would describe as "great."  Today I want to look at five of the former: films that betrayed my initial enjoyment of them by revealing themselves as being hopelessly overrated.  My one qualifier here is that just because a movie is on this list, I'm not calling it bad; it's just not as good as it's made out to be.  I would like to point out that there is a comments section at the bottom and you are encouraged to respond - your feedback helps me write better articles.


5. The Dark Knight (2008)

Now I have your attention.

Quick - think of your favorite scene in The Dark Knight.  Got it?  Good.  The vast majority of you just thought of a scene featuring Heath Ledger as The Joker (as you should have).  The rest of you are lying.  This preference for Mr. J is fine as far as it goes, but the unfortunate reality of the second Christopher Nolan Batman is precisely that the relative performances of the actors are simply too disparate.  Don't get me wrong; I think the ensemble of TDK does a great job, and it makes for a really good film, but Ledger's performance is simply too other-worldly to exist in the universe created by the film.  The Joker is an esoteric, spectral, malevolent force of nature, but the rest of the characters are forced to play by the laws of physics.  Ledger simply upstages them.

It's really too bad.  I own this film, and I enjoy watching it, but I find myself now skipping to the Joker's scenes, because they are quite frankly just better than anything else the movie has to offer.

Interestingly, Javier Bardem's performance in No Country for Old Men could have fallen into this same trap for me, but that movie does a much better job of balancing out the performances.  I would give Nolan some slack for directing a comic book movie, but I've read enough Batman to know that that's really no excuse in this case.

4. The Boondock Saints (1999)

This is about as subtle as it gets.

Can we just take a moment to reflect on how little fucking sense this movie makes?  Two Irish brothers who say they're Catholic but seem to have missed the whole point of it discover that they're really good at killing people and decide to do it professionally, except they never get to collect any money because first they feel it necessary to off more or less anyone who has ever called them names.  Oh, and as far as we can tell, they live in an apartment with no furniture because they're poor because the only job they can get is at a meat packing plant, which is weird, because they both speak about twelve languages fluently and you'd think they could get a job translating, if nothing else, although I admit they may be too mentally unbalanced for that.

Other oddities include:

• A bartender who has Tourette Syndrome for no reason, and whom the main characters just refer to as "Fuckass";
• Literally the worst detective of all time, played by Willem Dafoe, who is a good enough actor to know better than to be in this film (well, maybe - he was in Daybreakers, after all);
• Ron Jeremy not having sex, and therefore not using the one skill he has been honing for decades;
• Gunfights that escalate in ridiculousness to the point that I'm not sure why there's no video game of this movie;
•  The most persuasive cinematic argument of why it's okay to kill people since A Time to Kill, only with worse acting and less circumspection.

Seriously, this movie sucks.  The best part is the opening credit music.

3. Fight Club (1999)

In the context of the movie, I'm not sure if what follows this moment is fighting or really violent masturbation.

If I had to take a guess, this is probably the one film on this list that I'll get the most push-back on, because this movie has so much potential to be great, and then ends up sucking something terrible.  But a lot of people don't think that.  So let me explain why I'm right and you're wrong.

The first half hour or so of Fight Club is incredibly promising.  I totally get that the Narrator feels caged in his mundane life, and that his masculine aggression - his manliness, as it were - is near boiling over, and he and Tyler find an outlet in the fight club, and the cinematic twists and turns (I'll try not to spoil anything there) are cutesy film-school stuff, but also both true to the book and well-done, so I'm okay with it.

Then, about a third of the way through the movie, the movie falls off the tracks a bit.  Suddenly, the Narrator is part of a vast, secret anarchic conspiracy, with grand designs to overthrow the world's banking system, destroy civilization as we know it, and start from scratch.  Um... first off, that's a lot of pent-up testosterone, apparently; and second, fucking why?  Tyler never really gives a good reason for a lot of things that happen in this film.  Why make the soap with human fat?  Because it's more effective, apparently, but that's not really a good reason, Tyler.

Like Boondock, my takeaway from this film is that death and wanton destruction are permissible, with one small difference: Fight Club clearly does not give two shits about the well-being of civilization, whereas the characters in TBS do struggle morally with what they are doing (and then do it anyway).  Tyler and the Narrator are making decisions that will impact literally billions of lives, and they rationalize it by... I dunno, assuming that they are smarter than everyone else on the goddamn planet, I suppose?  In the words of critic Roger Ebert, "Fight Club is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish."  He gave it two stars out of four.  High praise indeed.

This might be the poli sci in me, but fascism sounds like a serious mistake.  I'm not sure how much of that is the fault of the filmmakers and how much of that is author Chuck Palahniuk being a horrible person, but either way, it turns into a movie that somehow confuses me and makes me uncomfortable, all at the same time.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Go ahead.  Have a staring contest with the HAL 9000.

Let me start off this way: 2001 is an incredible movie.  But I do have some major problems with it.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I concede that I watched the 160-minute version of it, not the usual 141-minute version, so take what I am about to say with a grain of salt.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a boring movie.  There, I said it.

Not all of it is, I suppose.  But the first two segments (there are four) are among the most insipid pieces of film I have ever watched.  I admire Kubrick's filmmaking, I admire the cinematography, but when a film starts with half an hour of monkeys (actually midgets in costumes) smacking each other with bones, even I get a little antsy.  Then we go from that to a segment about which I can tell you nothing except that I fell asleep the first time and had to skip back to the monkeys and start the section over.  By the time we got to HAL and Dave duking it out, I was unable to fully enjoy the last two sections, which is too bad because they really are quite breathtaking.

Again, I know Kubrick could make films to make your heart race - I've seen The Shining.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

Joseph Cotten looks like a confused penguin.

Often called "The Greatest Film of All Time" by three types of people: morons, people who haven't seen it, and pretentious critics (more pretentious than me, anyway).

I agree that Kane is an absurdly genius film, that the technical ability needed to make it is remarkable, that it is innovative, and that Orson Welles was an amazing actor and filmmaker.  However, after watching this film a few times (four or five, over a period of years), I am still at a loss to explain why it receives such enthusiastic praise.  The story is good-but-not-great, and the cultural sensation that it caused with regards to William Randolph Hearst is largely if not wholly a thing of the past.

Simply put, I do not enjoy watching this movie; it is a chore for me to do so, even though in it Welles created a wide range of innovations and experimented with a huge array of film technique.  I can appreciate it, but there are other, later films that can teach me the same things that also frankly grab my attention better.

Monkey's out of the bottle, man.  It's the goddamn sled.