In Academy of the Overrated, Lance Mannion provoked a fun discussion about overrated films.
Lance set out some ground rules:
So you don’t want to pick mediocre or bad movies that were inexplicably big hits. (The Star Wars movies get excluded from the discussion on this ground.) You want to pick movies that a lot of people whose taste and intelligence you respect loved but which you weren’t quite as enthused about or which left you a little cold or which you hated and despised and would like to see burned along with all the negatives and the director banned from ever working in Hollywood again.
[snip] My other rule is that Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and the first two Godfather movies are also out of bounds, because, as great as they all are, no work of human hands can be as good as years of general adoration have given these films a reputation for being. They are over-rated, but in the way calling a hero a god on earth over-rates him.
My own list of overrated films, with an emphasis on recent ones, includes Vera Drake, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Sideways, Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Love Actually, Donnie Darko, American Beauty, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Matrix, Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, Monster’s Ball, Mikey and Nicky, and Duck Soup.
After I posted that list in his comments, Lance picked up on the Duck Soup mention:
Lance is obviously not alone in loving Duck Soup — AFI lists it as the fifth best comedy of all time.
Similar praise drove me to see Mikey and Nicky. On Fresh Air, I heard film critic John Powers proclaim that Elaine May’s film was an overlooked masterpiece. “Mikey and Nicky is one of the best American movies of the last forty years,” Powers said.
I liked Mikey and Nicky, but it comes nowhere near the top of my own list of the best American films of the last forty years. Not even close, even though I did enjoy its look back at the mean streets of 70s-era Philly.
The question is whether any movie could live up the kind of hype surrounding Duck Soup or Mikey and Nicky.
I haven’t been able to get out to the movie theatre much lately, but based on reviews in The New York Times, I’m anxious to see 2046 (”an unqualified triumph” and “a means for transcendence,” according to critic Manohla Dargis) and The Aristocrats (”. . . an essay film, a work of painstaking and penetrating scholarship, and, as such, one of the most original and rigorous pieces of criticism in any medium I have encountered in quite some time,” according to A.O. Scott).
Can either film live up to the sky-high expectations I now have of them? I have a feeling that they might (Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels is one of my favorites, and praise for The Aristocrats has been almost universal). But they’re starting out with an awful lot of expectations to fill.
Back when I used to review movies regularly, I sometimes wondered if the kindest thing I could do for a movie I loved was to dampen expectations for it (to say I decided against doing that would be putting it mildly). When you expect something to be great, any minor fault that you find could make you feel disappointed. Conversely, if you have low expectations, you’re likely to overlook minor flaws.
After all, even George W. Bush can look good in a debate if the expectations are set low enough.
I’m interested in hearing your thoughts not only about what movies you think are overrated, but what you think the role of the critic should be in all of this. How does he or she navigate the minefield of praise and disdain that will shape the expectations of readers? How can a critic best praise a film without over-praising it? And what is a critic supposed to do when he or she truly feels that a given film is worthy of the highest possible praise?
7 Comments on "Great Expectations"
zach:
I’ve always felt The Conversation is a terribly overrated movie. I must have seen it 4 times, and every time I can’t wait for the end to come. Jesus. So boring. There. I said it.
Zach
Jim Groom:
I think everything that Zach recommends I see is unbelievably overrated …
also, my pet peeve is Stalag 17. I was told this film is genius, one of the best comedies of the 50s. Upon watching it I thought that William Holden was solid, but the comic relief goofballs and the nazi war camp setting (even if only for American soldiers) was an extremely forced and uncharacteristically discomforting comedic combination for the great Wilder.
somegirl:
duck soup was on tcm last week and i watched it for the umpteenth time…well, till i fell asleep anyway. did you know that it was such a box office flop it almost bankrupted the studio?
i pretty much love any movie made between ‘31 and ‘39. just the look of them soothes my brain.
most overrated movie of all time? the searchers?
most underrated? anything bowery boys, but this one especially.
http://www.vintagelibrary.com/pd.cfm?&pcode=dvd223
zach:
Everything!?! Pshaw.
Lance Mannion:
I think all movie comedies tend to get over-rated, because people underestimate the collective experience of watching them—that is they forget the part of the movie that includes the 200 or more other people in the room laughing along with them. Laughter is contagious.
Sell a friend on a movie comedy you saw in a full house on a Saturday night and if they go see it in a half or near empty theater on a week night, odds are that friend is going to feel cheated.
But I think most people undevalue or even unconsciously discount the collective experience of movie going and how much being part of the crowd contributes to their enjoyment of a movie—and I think that’s the toughest part of being a film critic. Critics rarely see movies the way the rest of us do. They go to special screenings, in the middle of the day, in theaters full of other critics or specially picked audiences who are there for one business purpose or another. I’m not sure if this makes their assessment of a movie more “objective.” But it makes it more their own.
I don’t think this makes them more likely to “know” when a movie’s really good, but it makes them more likely not to like a movie for being a crowd pleaser, which puts them at odds with their readers. Some critics like that opposition. Some critics don’t and over-compensate and try to identify with a crowd they weren’t part of.
I’d rather be a drama critic. In fact, once upon a time I was. You go with the crowd, you are part of the audience, it’s like being a real person. I was never carried away by the rest of the audience’s reaction to the point of liking something I normally would have hated. But I did “like” some plays better because I knew how well they’d pleased the audience, and my job was at bottom to tell readers whether or not a play was worth their time and money to go see.
Plus, there’s the excitement of having to write your review immediately afterwards, sometimes with only 20 minutes till deadline. Some of my best reviews were the ones I had to bang out in a rush.
Some time on my own page I’ll tell the story of how I got fired from the gig because I hated a play the audience loved—I hated it for the ways it made the audience loved it and I was right. The damn piece of tripe got to Broadway and the New York Critics killed it!
Mikhail:
Hear hear on Mystic River. I’d even say that that ALL of Clint Eastwood’s directorial bids are overrated.
Matt:
Zach: I wonder how much of the critical response to The Conversation has to do with the cult of Coppola…
Jim: I’ve never seen Stalag 17. . . do others have thoughts on this?
somegirl: The Searchers is a perfect overrated movie, I think. And a lot of that has to do with the cult of Ford and the cult of Wayne.
Lance: great comment — and I’m looking forward to your post. I think you’re right that the actual viewing experience, in addition to the expectations one has before watching a film, has a lot to do with one’s reaction to it.
Your comment is especially germane these days, when fewer people are watching movies in theatres. Although I suppose that in some ways, the experience of watching a movie at home on a DVD player comes closer to the critic’s experience of watching it in a mostly-empty theatre…
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize that the hardest movie to make is a good comedy — especially one that, like Blazing Saddles, Modern Times, and Sullivan’s Travels, combines social commentary with belly laughs.
Mikhail: Yeah, I have to say that I think Mystic River was probably the most overrated movie I’ve seen in the past few years. But I know that some people loved it.
Comments