THE 10 WORST OVERRATED, OVER-APPRECIATED MOVIES OF ALL TIME

THE 10 WORST OVERRATED, OVER-APPRECIATED MOVIES OF ALL TIME

We Need a New Rating System that Will Take Film Snobbery and
a Reverence for the Past Out of the Equation

Examine almost any list of four-star movies from cinema’s ancient and not so ancient past and you will discover astonishing discrepancies in critical taste. To a certain extent this is to be expected. Production values such as photography, set design, acting talent, film editing and script writing, have made tremendous strides in recent years, rendering everything before a bit seedy and visually anemic. Still, there are some amazingly bad four-star movies out there that were considered masterpieces in their time (and ours). The following list highlights ten of the most egregious.

1. Julia ****
Critics: Swooned.
Audience: Obediently reverential.
Reality Check: Without a doubt the most pretentious, sanctimonious piece of propagandist drivel to ever come out of Hollywood, a true indictment of the critical community that fell all over itself praising it.

2. Notorious ****
Critics: Servile. Called it one of Hitchcock’s best, a masterpiece (gasp!).
Audience: Properly and sheepishly appreciative. After all, this is a movie you are ‘supposed to’ like.
Reality Check: There are better B movie thrillers. Charlie Chan where are you when we need you?

3. Ninotchka ****
Critics: One of the great all time movie classics, a favorite of film snobs.
Audience: You sat through this creaking gallimaufry just to hear Garbo laugh?
Reality Check: An interesting but glacially paced farce. There's nothing here remotely resembling cinematic ‘art.’

4. Saving Private Ryan ****
Critics: When have they ever knocked a ‘serious’ Spielberg project?
Audience: Marched in lock-step to theaters to be spattered with patriotic gore.
Reality Check: Brilliant special effects, particularly in the opening scenes of the D-Day landing, but plagued by amateurish film-school plotting and melodrama with enough cornbread to supply a Fourth of July barbeque.

5. The Gangs of New York ****
Critics: Martin Scorsese, usually astute, goes nuts. He spent so much money on this piece of historical rubbish film reviewers had to throw him a sop.
Audience: Bemused.
Reality Check: Such a mess one hardly knows where to begin. Let’s start with baby-face Leo’s lead-footed acting. Or let’s not. This movie simply isn’t worth the trouble.

6. La Grande Illusion ****
Critics: This is one of those static and ponderous fairy-tale classics from the early days of filmdom with a theme so noble only a cheap sneak would sneer.
Audience: Clearly a flick for the masochistic art house crowd.
Reality Check: Did anything happen while I was in the loo?

7. The Lord of the Rings ****
Critics: Mixed reviews. Some actually expressed doubt about Jackson’s dramatic credentials.
Audience: Very forgiving, considering the absence of any compelling human drama.
Reality Check: Jackson didn’t do badly considering the material (even J.R.R. Tolkien expressed misgivings about the popularity of his Hobbit series). Epic action sequences of great power, but the dramatis personae who populate this cinematic hat trick are dreary clichés and entirely too happy to be in one another’s company.

8. The Bridge on the River Kwai ****
Critics: This is another one of those movies the critics love to force down our throats because the subject is so noble—courageous allied troops enjoying the amenities of a Japanese POW camp in the steamy jungles of Thailand and Burma. (No, Virginia. 'Seriousness' and high moral purpose alone are not enough to garner four stars.)
Audience: Well, at least they had William Holden to console them.
Reality Check: Ah, sweet irony! An American demolition commando confronts a British regimental commander who tries to prevent him from the destroying the bridge! It’s not so much that this is a bad movie; it’s that there are so many other POW movies that are manifestly superior, including King Rat and The Hill. Now those were great movies. What possessed David Lean, who had directed so many marvelous black and white films like Brief Encounter, to make such a bloated technicolor spectacle? It appears he owed Inland Revenue a lot of money.

9. Modern Times ****
Critics: First a confession: I am not a silent film fan; nor do I consider the silent era artistically significant. When James Agee says of all comedians Chaplin 'worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against,' my eyes glaze over. Frankly I've had my fill of pretentious pundits who say cinema is art. Watching films shouldn't be a civic duty, it should be fun.
Audience: Here’s a two-part test of a good movie: (1) did you sit through it until the end? and (2) were you thinking about it the next day? Did anyone ever sit through a silent Charlie Chaplin film to the end? I wonder about that. That charmingly jaunty walk of his (which is entirely due to different film speed) and those shuffles and wiggles the critics find so endearing wear out it welcome early. Okay, you stayed in your seat to impress your date, but you were thinking about pizza.
Reality Check: A sense of history is never to be discouraged, but the history of film is for film school students and cinema buffs. The rest of us pay $8 to be entertained.

10. Ran ****
Critics: Kursosawa is a revered director, so reviews are boffo, even when he nods.
Audience: Perplexed but willing to be instructed.
Reality Check: Sunday supplement color, ragged narrative, back-on-the-ranch scene cuts and editing, this movie was a thudding bore. Like Peter Sellers and David Lean, Akira Kursosawa did his best work in his early black and white films, which did not announce themselves as epics. His later color productions have been puzzling disasters. (One wonders whether Kurosawa, like David Lean, was forced to make these awful color spectacles because he owed back taxes.)