Monday, March 12, 2012

Fifty most hated movies???

SamuraiFrog posted this list of "Fifty Most Hated Movies", with comment, and damned if I'm not going to do the same. I'll only bold the ones that I've actually seen, though.

50. Daredevil

49. Superman Returns

I didn't hate this movie, but it deserves quite a bit of its bad press. I actually liked the cast, but the movie was a bit too open about its reverence for the first Superman movie, and yet, it somehow seemed to take place in an alternate universe, at the same time, by seeming to refer to the original without actually doing so, by giving us a Metropolis that was a generic cityscape instead of being clearly New York with the names filed off, and so on. I remember someone on Aint It Cool News or someplace like that writing, "This movie doesn't just pay homage to the original Superman -- it calls the older movie up and breathes heavily into the phone when it answers."

48. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

47. Terminator: Salvation

For me, the Terminator story begins with the first movie and ends with the second. Never saw this one.

46. Exorcist II: The Heretic

45. Halloween (2007)

44. Fantastic Four (2005)

Didn't bother, because the trailers looked awful. But then, I was never a FF fan even when I read comics regularly.

43. Resident Evil

42. Jersey Girl (2004)

One of these years I'll get myself caught up on Kevin Smith's movies.

41. Constantine

40. Swept Away (2002)

39. Epic Movie

38. Clash of the Titans (2010)

37. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

36. The Matrix Reloaded/The Matrix Revolutions

I know, I'm bolding it, but I've only seen the first half hour or forty minutes of Reloaded. I've mentioned it in the past, but the movie literally bored me to the point that I dosed off. So when I awoke I turned it off and never went back to the Matrix franchise. I loved the first one when I saw it, but each viewing after that made me like it a little bit less.

35. Godzilla (1998)

I thought this might be epically fun...and instead it was bad, bad, bad, with a Godzilla whose size seems to change from scene to scene, with making Jean Reno play second fiddle to Matthew F***ing Broderick (sorry, but I can't stand the guy), and the supreme idiocy of Devlin and Emmerich using this film to strike back at Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. This movie is terrible.

34. Van Helsing

33. The Spirit

32. Crash (2005)

I can't even imagine myself wanting to see this movie.

31. Sucker Punch

30. Alien Resurrection

Never bothered, having hated the first Alien movie (and still do -- sorry, fans, but the Freudian horror for me basically boils down to Attack of the Killer Space Vaginas), not much liking the second movie (slickly made, but predictable as hell), and loathing the third, from the opening moments of "Hey, remember all the crap those people went through to survive the last one? They all died anyway. Sorry." And now they're making Alien prequels or some such? Count me out. I hate this franchise.

29. Spider-Man 3

I do not hate this movie; in fact, I find it highly watchable and even entertaining, despite the fact that it makes one wrong turn after another and starts to commit the crime of betraying its source material. I hate that a much better movie was going to be made before some asshole exec stuck his nose in and forced changes that harmed the film, and I really hate that the result was so much a mishmash that it doomed the existing efforts and triggered a pointless reboot movie that, when I finally do see it (almost certainly on DVD), I'll watch it with an enormous chip on my shoulder because it's so unnecessary. Ugh. I don't hate Spidey 3, but I feel like I should.

28. Sex and the City 2

27. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

I love this movie and despite some of its meandering and plot holes, I think it's terribly underrated. I'm a big fan of the whole franchise.

26. Planet of the Apes (2001)

25. The Avengers

24. Pearl Harbor

I've seen parts of it. I don't hate it, but man, is it bad.

23. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

22. Battlefield Earth

21. The Wicker Man (2006)

20. X-Men: The Last Stand

I refuse to watch this.

19. Aliens vs Predator

Never bothered. See above: F*** Alien.

18. Highlander 2: The Quickening

Oddly, I did not hate this one, because I expected it to utterly, completely suck, so I cheerfully munched my popcorn and laughed at it. I'd already hated the first one -- one of the dumbest things I've ever seen, a movie whose popularity eternally mystifies me -- so I expected nothing from this one. And hey, Michael Ironside. I paid to see H2 in a theater and had a good time, which is a lot more than I can say for the original, which I watched for free and hated.

17. Love Actually

People who hate this movie are like people who hate kittens: I know they're out there, but they are almost certainly a mutation of some sort.

16. Hulk

15. Catwoman

14. Avatar

I love this one! No, I don't think it's got one original thing in it, but so what? I liked the cast, I loved the effects, I love the pace at which Cameron allows the story to unfold. It's beautiful and I found it fun.

13. Lady in the Water

12. The Happening

11. The Last Airbender

I haven't seen a Shyamalan movie since Signs, which I liked. From what I hear, I have missed nothing.

10. Die Another Day

This movie actually has an awful lot of good stuff in it, but that all ends with the arrival at the villain's Giant Ice Cave or whatever. Don't hate it...but on balance, it's pretty weak.

9. House of the Dead

8. Titanic (1997)

I still love this movie, and I find the backlash against it really reflective of a cultural mean-spiritedness that always saddens me when I see it in action.

7. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

I refuse to watch any of these.

6. Batman and Robin

It stinks, but I still found it fun to watch. Oh well.

5. Psycho (1998)

I can't imagine why this movie got made in the first place.

4. Twilight

I refuse to see this movie. I want nothing to do with this whole awful, stinking, fetid excuse for a story franchise. The book was so achingly bad that any notion that I should go see the movie makes me wretch. (And as to that, again let me raise my objection to anyone who tries telling me that well, I can't really understand the book since I was never a teenage girl with raging hormones. It's the writer's job to make me understand things I've never done. I'm not going to do the writer's homework for her. I have no idea what it was like to experience love and loss in the backdrop of the French Revolution, but Charles Dickens did the heavy lifting for me.)

3. Forrest Gump

I don't hate it. I've never hated it. In fact, I still like it. But I do find its messages confounding, even if I don't totally buy the usual criticism that it's "Right wing values good, counterculture bad".

2. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Yeah, right. Defending this movie, and its two follow-ups, may well be my main reason for living. I still love it, to this day. (All together now, class: F*** Red Letter Media!)

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Nope, don't hate this one, either...although it really could have used one more pass through the rewrite phase. I'm not bothered in the least by the "Aliens" thing. The first three were based on the serial adventure flicks of the 1930s; seems perfectly reasonable to me that if we're going to move Indy into the 1950s, then paranoid science fiction needs to be the order of the day. If anything, I don't think the movie played this angle up nearly as well as it should have.

Here are some movies that I genuinely cannot stand, that didn't make the list:

Live and Let Die
The Usual Suspects
City of Angels
Wedding Crashers
Scream

1 comment:

Mimi said...

My Dh is a Kevin Smith fan, and I've seen all of his movies (except Dogma, which even though he assures me I'd love it, I just don't want to see) and I liked "Jersey Girl" - I didn't love it, but it was sweet, like Kevin Smith does sweet.

Anyway, I was a teenage girl, and I thought the book was horrifically bad.