[ARTICLE] Variety: The 10 Most Overrated Films of the Decade

[Your Name]

Not a very believable list ... for a start there's no mention of any of
JarJar Abrams' disgustingly bad Star Trek or Star Wars messes. :-\



From Variety.com ...


The 10 Most Overrated Films of the Decade
-----------------------------------------
It's a sure bet that one reviewer's high praise is another
reviewer's overpraise. So I fully own the subjective nature
of this list. Nevertheless, as a film critic who sort of
believes in objective reality (it's a hard job to do if you
don't), I compiled this roster of movies I think got far
too much love from my critical colleagues because,
I suspect, I may not be alone. The films, by definition of
their being here, have their avid fans and defenders. But
maybe they've got their detractors, too. At any rate,
they've certainly had their praises sung, so I figured it
was time to toss a few rasberries into the bouquet of
hosannas.


1. "The Master" (2012)
Movie fanatics, including this one, bow down at the
altar of certain directors. But where does reverence
leave off and cult worship begin? To say that Paul
Thomas Anderson is the most revered filmmaker of his
generation would be an understatement - he's the Gen-X
genius who can do no wrong. I myself was once a true
believer (I've seen "Boogie Nights" 50 times and love
"Magnolia"). But as Anderson's career went on, his
free-flowing human touch began to leak away, only to
be replaced by a fixation on toxic male monomaniacs
that's a tad unsettling and - mostly - baffling. And
"The Master," without a doubt, is Anderson's most
insanely acclaimed head-scratcher. For a while,
there's undeniable intrigue in its tale of a slippery
and tormented World War II veteran (Joaquin Phoenix)
who becomes the discipline of a cracked religious
huckster-guru (Philip Seymour Hoffman) modeled on
L. Ron Hubbard. Yet the more the movie goes on, the
less it adds up; its enigmas come to seem like tricks
that Anderson is playing on you. For members of the
Church of PTA, "The Master" has often been cited as
his crowning masterpiece. For those of us who escaped
the cult, it's the most potent sign yet of a film
artist who lost touch with his greatness.


2. "Paddington 2" (2017)
What is it with high-end film critics and Paddington?
If you listen to the ecstatic reviews of this sequel
to the equally fawned-over "Paddington," you might go
into the movie thinking you're about to experience the
second coming of E.B. White's "Stuart Little," George
Orwell's "Animal Farm," or some other incandescently
charming piece of talking-animal artistry. Surprise!
"Paddington 2" is a benign entertainment, but I'm
sorry, it's just a friggin' animatronic slapstick-bear
comedy, no more and no less. To freight it with this
much refined humanity is really just a
passive-aggressive way of taking a swipe at countless
more deserving mainstream films.


3. "The Act of Killing" (2012)
Each year, there are dozens of extraordinary
documentaries, and critics do a fine job of getting
the word out about them. But the praise for this one
went off the rails, because it's a classic case of a
movie that sets out to do something it then fails to
do. The heart of it consists of interviews with men
who participated in the genocidal killings of
Communists in Indonesia during the mid-1960s. As they
act out the atrocities in often grisly detail, even
pantomiming them within film genres, we're supposed
to be looking into the face of the banality of evil
- except that there isn't a moment when any of the
men describe what actually went on inside them during
these monstrous misdeeds. "The Act of Killing" is
horrifying, all right, but not in the way it wants to
be. In locking us outside the soul of murder, it's a
movie that makes evil monotonous.


4. "Skyfall" (2012)
What will be the legacy of Daniel Craig as James Bond?
"Casino Royale," the 2006 film that introduced Craig
as an 007 with a gruff sandpaper surface and a hidden
streak of romance, was the greatest Bond adventure
since the early Sean Connery classics. (If you forget
the nostalgia factor that's part of what sustains our
affection for those, it might be the greatest, period.)
Yet the movies that came after "Casino Royale" haven't
lived up to its promise - and yes, I include Sam
Mendes' competent but conventional seat-filler of a
Bond spectacular, which has a villain, played by Javier
Bardem, whose ugly bark (and mangled face) proves to be
more dramatic than his bite. It also has a Freudian
action climax that may be the worst case of giving a
mythic badass a "vulnerable" backstory since Thomas
Harris sketched in Hannibal Lecter's childhood escape
from the Nazis in Lithuania. Yet critics thought this
Bond was the bees' knees. Here's hoping that "No Time
to Die" is good enough to remind us why they were
wrong.


5. "Under the Skin" (2014)
This eerie but aimless poetic parable about a roving
sci-fi femme fatale would have been perfect if it had
been half an hour long. For a while, it generates
creepy suspense to see Scarlett Johansson get her
seductive alien freak on as an extraterrestrial in
human form who skulks around Scotland, picking up
strangers she winds up submerging in some sort of
cosmic void. There's one nightmarishly unsettling
sequence (when the audience feels like it's being
submerged), but most of the movie is directed, by
Jonathan Glazer ("Sexy Beast"), with a twilight
portentousness that's at once draggy and repetitive.
Then again, it's that very quality that turned "Under
the Skin" into catnip for art-heads.


6. "Magic Mike XXL" (2015)
Steven Soderbergh's "Magic Mike" was a perfect movie,
one that caught the pleasures and perils of the
male-strip-club demimonde with a sleazy yet breezy
authenticity, turning Channing Tatum's sullen beefcake
hero into a loser-stud worthy of comparison to Tony
Manero in "Saturday Night Fever." The sequel is a
genial mess - a what-do-we-do-now? ramble that takes
the Kings of Tampa on a slow ride to Myrtle Beach yet
never figures out how to reset the stakes for its
characters. And so it turns them into saintly stud
therapists in leather jockstraps. The film's winking
point, made over and over again, is that they're
self-esteem boosters for hire, purveyors of
entertainment so wholesomely uplifting that it no
longer carries a glint of anything unseemly. Yet
critics, astonishingly, fell for this pious, slipshod
rehash of "Magic Mike" to the point that they declared
it superior to the first film. Sorry, but it was
sloppy seconds.


7. "Ad Astra" (2019)
When it comes to sheer shining-eyed fervor, the cult
of James Gray may not quite match the cult of Paul
Thomas Anderson, but it's like a kid-brother knockoff.
Gray, too, is a director of undeniable talent, yet he
works in a way that's naggingly derivative - of '70s
movies (which he seems to remember as being more
sodden than they were), or simply of films by his
idols, as in this meandering amalgam of "2001: A Space
Odyssey" and "Apocalypse Now," with Brad Pitt as a
lonely astronaut who voyages across a river of
space-time to deal with his daddy issues. The movie,
in its watchable way, is so clearly mediocre that
I was sure even the Gray cultists who gushed over
"The Immigrant" and "The Lost City of Z" would roll
their eyes at it. But no! Way too many critics went
for it, proving that auteurist absolutism is the new
good taste.


8. "Support the Girls" (2018)
If you sought this movie out after learning that
Regina Hall was voted best actress by the New York
Film Critics Circle for her work in it, you'd see
that she delivers a gutsy, lived-in performance as
the general manager of a restaurant called Double
Whammies - and that Haley Lu Richardson also excels
as the most devil-may-care of the waitresses. Yet the
movie, directed by Andrew Bujalski, looks like what
would have happened if Jonathan Demme had been the
showrunner of an '80s sitcom. The
local-tavern-version-of-Hooters setting is never
convincing (it's "Cheers" with a pinch of downscale
desperation), and though critics praised the sisterly
solidarity of it, the filmmaking is too ramshackle to
lend the empowerment much power.


9. "Inception" (2018)
I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, but if you read the
rave reviews of Christopher Nolan's convoluted
head-trip fantasy about dream warriors who enter into
and travel around the subconscious the way your
average thriller character occupies the site of a
heist, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the movie
makes sense. It does not. Trying to parse the assorted
"levels" of dreaming will tie your brain in knots,
because the logic has been worked out only in the most
superficial way. Yet "Inception," for all the
confounding holes in the story it's telling, had enough
eye-bending effects, totemic motifs (that spinning
top!), and sheer blockbuster momentum to qualify as a
major ride. The mistake of the critics was hailing it
as a great ride.


10. "Margaret" (2011) 
Do you want to hear an amazing story? Then gather
around and behold the saga of Kenneth Lonergan's
"Margaret." No, I don't mean the story of Lisa (Anna
Paquin), a precocious and high-strung 17-year-old from
the Upper West Side who witnesses a bus accident
caused, in part, by her flirtation with the driver.
That story is by turns intriguing, engrossing,
discursive, impassioned, indulgent, and rambling. I'm
talking about the story of how "Margaret" became the
movie that the Man didn't want you to see - at least
not in its original, three-hour form. Lonergan,
directing his second feature (which was actually shot
in 2005), fell so in love with his extended cut that he
refused to, you know, cut it. But those enemies of the
people known as Fox Searchlight refused to release his
version. Many lawsuits and one fabled behind-the-scenes
endorsement by Martin Scorsese later, the film was
released, in 2011, in a two-and-a-half-hour version, at
which point it became a cause célèbre. It was also
hailed as a lost masterpiece, to the point that it
practically got turned into the "Greed" of American
indie cinema. But if you watch the three-hour version,
you'll see that "Margaret" is a perfectly interesting
movie, yet far from a masterpiece. The main problem with
it? It's too damn long. But don't tell that to the
cinema-equals-the-director's-cut bohemian purity
brigade.


<https://variety.com/2019/film/columns/the-10-most-overrated-films-of-the-decade-the-master-skyfall-1203452706/>

[moviePig]

On 12/28/2019 3:52 PM, Your Name wrote:
>
> Not a very believable list ... for a start there's no mention of any of
> JarJar Abrams' disgustingly bad Star Trek or Star Wars messes.   :-\
>

> ...

I think I disagree. I see no flicks on there that I'd sing high praises
for, and I'll take Variety's word for it that, for each, many did.

[Your Name]

The list definitely has garbage movies, but not including any of JarJar
Abram's hopeless movies also makes it less useful.

[moviePig]

On 12/28/2019 6:12 PM, Your Name wrote:
> On 2019-12-28 21:08:02 +0000, moviePig said:
>> On 12/28/2019 3:52 PM, Your Name wrote:
>>>
>>> Not a very believable list ... for a start there's no mention of any

>>> of JarJar Abrams' disgustingly bad Star Trek or Star Wars messes. Â

>>> :-\
>>>
>>  > ...
>>
>> I think I disagree.  I see no flicks on there that I'd sing high
>> praises for, and I'll take Variety's word for it that, for each, many
>> did.
>
> The list definitely has garbage movies, but not including any of JarJar
> Abram's hopeless movies also makes it less useful.

Variety would say, though, that nobody (who's anybody) ever claimed
elite status for those flicks ...whereas, e.g., I became convinced that
only seeing THE MASTER at my earliest opportunity would avert great
cinematic injustice. (I found it a mostly impenetrable slog...)

[Flasherly]

On Sun, 29 Dec 2019 09:52:11 +1300, Your Name <Your...@YourISP.com>
wrote:

5. "Under the Skin" (2014)
This eerie but aimless poetic parable about a roving
sci-fi femme fatale would have been perfect if it had
been half an hour long. For a while, it generates
creepy suspense to see Scarlett Johansson get her
seductive alien freak on as an extraterrestrial in
human form who skulks around Scotland, picking up
strangers she winds up submerging in some sort of
cosmic void. There's one nightmarishly unsettling
sequence (when the audience feels like it's being
submerged), but most of the movie is directed, by
Jonathan Glazer ("Sexy Beast"), with a twilight
portentousness that's at once draggy and repetitive.
Then again, it's that very quality that turned "Under
the Skin" into catnip for art-heads.

>

It's a story someone in Europe has written who mentions various
aspects of his marriage, interaction and relationship, as an outgrowth
and discovery to the realization of that aim. Set to Northern England
in overcast parts and pieces of a moody atmospheric blend in
low-technology approaches to fictionalised aspects of an alien
imposter. A surprising overlap exists to understanding what is being
said, as not, at times in heavily accented British dialects, about
what prompts men to follow their engorged penis, once artificiality
and form are juxtaposed upon the primordial urge to satiate oneself.

At some time from and since the writer first discussed his urge to
transform his feelings to such sequences, and no matter what else he
may have said during an interview, Scarlett's baring her denuded form
is at dissonant discord from an ample gracefulness she given, being
other than woman, possessive of recognizable intelligence to
assimilate characteristic humanly qualities for potential exposition,
while in contrast to an implicit sense of harm, others of her kind did
not intent of her as her primary objective: To reduce and subsume man
for his inability, not to follow his dick, as an alien form and
transition accomplished apart from negated man among the world of men.

Still, it's not all catnip, not quite, if to recall an half-shrouded
face of the Elephant Man, the horror furtively in a disfigured face
glancing aside;- She, unknowingly yet no less so distanced, after
having left him to wander naked in a field, stupefied before a
quandary then herself she fell into;- A vast crevasse had opened
before her, precariously revealed upon gradients for simply following
one's dick into a life of endlessly recycling rejection and social
ineptitude, one after another.

-
"The place, however much he had studied it, however much he had
rehearsed his part in it, was so incredibly alien — the feeling, now
the he could feel — the feeling was overpowering. He lay down in the
grass and became very sick.”

-The Man Who Fell to Earth

[RichA]

Skyfall is the biggest example here. A second-rate Bond.

[TT]

RichA kirjoitti 29.12.2019 klo 4:06:
> Skyfall is the biggest example here. A second-rate Bond.
>

And Bond has no charm and looks like a Russian guy. Doesn't compare to
Connery/Moore. There, I said it.

As for Under the Skin, totally hated it, thought it was rubbish... and
agree it was incredibly overrated. However, I think it might not be so
bad as I thought the first time around - may have to watch it again
sometime, despite my stellar rating of 2/10... :)

Inception was overrated yes. Not bad but overrated.

Not sure if anyone rates Paddington 2 highly. Not to mention 'Magic Mike
XXL', which I didn't even know existed...

[moviePig]

On 12/30/2019 8:21 AM, super70s wrote:
>> (I've seen "Boogie Nights" 50 times and love "Magnolia"). But
>> as Anderson's career went on, his free-flowing human touch
>> began to leak away, only to be replaced by a fixation on toxic
>> male monomaniacs that's a tad unsettling and - mostly -
>> baffling. And "The Master," without a doubt, is Anderson's most
>> insanely acclaimed head-scratcher.
>

> Hard to take anything he says seriously after this, I'd rather watch The
> Master any day than Magnolia (frogs raining from the sky, seriously?).

Well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals