What Dreams May Come

Bwah ha ha! In my case, it's usually whatever I watched last. For today that would be Bryan Loves You, truly one of the worst DVD releases this year.

Some of you are going to be irrate, but that Bruce Willis movie - Unbreakable. I keep reading how many of you love it, which makes me wonder if I didn't miss something and need to go back and watch it again???
Some Jeff Goldblum movie, I think it was called Mr. Freeze. Oh my goodness, 2 hours of my life I will never get back.

It was one of those where I just turned it off when it was over and was like, "ugh." It's been a while, and I've tried not to think about it, but I'll do my best to remember plot points and explain as best I can.

First, I felt the ending was done very poorly. I thought it was rushed, I didn't quite understand it, and as much as it tried, it wasn't suspenseful.

Second, the utter lack of redemption was so disappointing, because the movie had me really liking Viggo Mortensen's character at first. I ended up hating him. The fact that he had this dark past was one thing, but the fact that he turned back to it at the end, without remorse, and seemingly without moral conflict was a real turn-off to me.

Third, the whole sex (rape?) on the stairs thing was totally gratuitous, thrown in for shock-value, did nothing for character development and did nothing to advance the plot. It was really hard for me to like it after that.

I went in with high expectations, but just came out feeling cheated of 9 bucks.

It's been a while, and I'm probably missing some key element to understanding it, but that's what I remember.

And GinH,

Your comment made me cry a little.

Shark Boy and Lava Girl?
Nightmare #3?
Killer Tomatoes #2?

Take care & God bless
WF

Definitely, Maybe (Does it count, if after the first 15 minutes, you get up, eject the DVD and put it back in its envelope without having seen the whole thing?)

Define "seen". :)

"Nicolas Cage as a vampire" movie. Yipes.

Face/Off

The Holiday (with Jack Black, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, not to be confused with Queen Latifah's pretty decent movie, Last Holiday)

What Dreams May Come

City of Angels

Hook

Ok, I wish someone had warned me about The Happening BEFORE I got cozy in the airplane three weeks ago and thought it might be a good one to watch. By then it was too late to switch over to Iron Man!

In my opinion, AI was HORRIBLE! Some friends and I went on my birthday whenever it came out and we were speechless at the end. The only thing one of us managed to say was, "That's the weirdest movie I've ever seen in my LIFE!"

Oh, and Hook would have been better had it not starred Robin Williams.

I knew I liked you, BN. :-)

I admit I've never seen good will hunting.

Actually, I thought the premise was pretty good. :-)

Even you don't like the execution, don't you find the idea of someone who has to woo the person he loves all over again from scratch every day fairly charming?

I even used this premise as an illustration once, talking about how we must have the gospel preached to us every day in some form b/c every day we wake up having "forgotten" it and ready to worship ourselves all over again.

That's the execution.
Is the idea itself of someone's significant other losing their memory every day repulsive?

Bill,

Didn't we walk out of Ferngully when I was like 4 because I hated it?

Stargate
Highlander 2

Oh, one more:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I knew I was in trouble when the opening train scene reminded me of The Apple Dumpling Gang robberies.
Our family and extended family went and exit reviews became so heated we had to draw an imaginary line on the lobby carpet and people took a side.

Andrew - yes

Michele - I disagree on Dark Knight but THANK YOU for reminding me . . . the worst three movies EVER made, when it comes to tossing away the potential they had to be awesome: Star Wars Episode 1 (passable), Star Wars Episode 2 (ridiculous. It grated, like sand. Not like Padme's skin, which is smooth. Like sand, in your underwear). Star Wars Episode 3 (TERRIBLE! It defined terrible. Worst movie ever, and 3 1/2 hours long to boot. AWFUL. Stinkomatic.).

"Is the idea itself of someone's significant other losing their memory every day repulsive?"

No, that would be sweet. What movie are we talking about? FFD was about a stranger losing her memory, and the amoral cipher who decided "hey, maybe she'll have sex with me if I keep manipulating her every day". Of course, we walked out of it in the middle so I might have missed all the good parts.

A similar (somewhat) movie that was SO much better - Groundhog Day.

The singularly worst film I've ever seen is Blue Lagoon. It is with great pride that I can say that I didn't have to pay a red cent to see it.

I would equate Blue Lagoon with torture.

I also walked out of a Monty Python movie but I don't remember the title.

British Nathan---Cameron Diaz was so awful in The Holiday that nothing can redeem it in my view. She is completely overrated in any film, but especially bad here. I love the rest of the cast---all consistently talented. She drags them down. I really wanted to like it, but I hated it. Surprised me.

Ella Enchanted

The Bow (Korean movie)

Pretty Woman

that one with Harry Connick Junior as a serial killer (which was so yucky I'm not even going to bother Googling the name)

any Star Wars movie starring Hayden Christiansen

and the winner...
Se7en (it was well made, but without question the most horrible, why-in-the-world-did-I-ever-sit-through-this, make-me-want-to-die movie I've ever seen)

I'm sure it was mostly because I don't like to think about Harry being that kind of guy.

Yes, nhe, if only Jackson and not Disney had gotten a hold of the Narnia books first, oh if only!
And I still hope that Steven Speilberg will find a copy of The Hiding Place, read it and make a great movie. What a story that needs to be told again and again.
Oh yeah, another stinker that is supposed to be significant, but nobody got:
Pi
and the one with Bjorn, I think it was called "Dancer in the Dark" or something. I thought something was wrong with her, like she was mentally retarded, truly, until the end. But, when they hung her I knew she must just be wierd.
"What About Bob" is the only one I don't agree with so far.

Bill,
We saw 50 first dates...the whole thing. I hated it too. But I'm with Jared. It was the execution, not the premise. It was the premise that made me see it in spite of your warnings.

The gutter humor was horrible, and totally ruined it for me. The "sleeping with her" thing stops pretty quickly. He falls in love with her, and just tries to win her heart every day. It's pretty cool. I hate the movie mostly because of it's wasted potential. It could have been awesome.

If Jackson had done the Narnia films, I think we'd have movies that were better cinematically but the stories would be even more stripped of Christian content and reinterpreted to fit the mores and worldview of Jackson and his writers.

Listening to the director's and writers' commentary on the LOTR DVD's it's pretty clear PJ and the writers just don't "get" JRRT's worldview and felt pretty free to reinterpret the story and the characters when their worldview clashed with JRRT's.

I strongly disagree Karl......I know that Jackson is not a Christian, but I thought he did a great job with the gospel elements in the LOTR films AND King Kong. IMHO, image bearers who do not know Christ have made some very redemptive films - see Durabont/King in Shawshank and Green Mile.

There are small moments of gospel/redemptive brilliance in the LOTR films that Jackson CHOSE to put in (I could be specific, but that's for another thread). Now, did he know those were "gospel" moments? - nah, but he sees what good storytelling is - the gospel is the greatest story of all - and any great story has gospel elements......and the wonderful thing in God's economy is, you don't have to be regenerated to see it or appreciate it.

Worst movie I've ever seen: Johnny Memonic (SP). I'm pretty sure I spelled that wrong, but too lazy to look it up. Anyway, horrible movie.
Also, Clockwork Orange. There I am, walking around blockbuster with a good friend, trying to find something to rent. We can't find anything good that we both like. We come across Clockwork Orange. Neither of us know ANYTHING about the movie, other than it is a well-known "classic", in a sense. So we figure, what the heck.
Yeah, um...won't make that mistake again. Geez.

Blair Witch Project- I kept yelling "Just shut up and walk!" I wanted to kill them with sharp pointy sticks.

I think they made two of those things.

We'll probably have to agree to disagree nhe. But a couple of points:

In the context of discussing what Jackson would do with Narnia I think you have to distinguish "redemptive films" from the specifically Christian worldview in Narnia and, to a more muted extent, in LOTR. Where a theme is generally "redemptive" the secular director might be all for it. Where it is uniquely Christian, the moveimaker tends to balk. Even the Disney makers of Narnia changed/muted a few things in that vein, and I think PJ would have done even more.

I am in complete agreement with the idea that pagan film makers might - and often do - make redemptive films that have gospel echoes or implications. And I'd agree even that the LOTR films have a good many of such moments - just fewer than the books did. Because PJ and his writers changed some aspects of JRRT's stories and characterizations when their worldview clashed with that of JRRT. Have you listened to their commentary on the DVD's? It's entertaining and insightful and they're brilliant and made a great trilogy of movies, but at times they just totally miss Tolkien, or else they get him but don't like what he's saying and decided to substitute their own worldview.

Jared, I missed the first review of The Happening, but I read the second one . . . about a week too late! Oh well. We all make mistakes in life, yeah?

Before I ever saw Narnia, a friend of mine in his late 40's was describing it to me. He said, in all seriousness and without (intentional) irony: "You should go see it. It's like The Passion of The Christ: The Animal Version"

I'll go ahead and be the jerk who points out that the Left Behind movie sucked. But saying that kind of feels like beating up a dog with one leg. Too easy, and somehow lacking in pity.

So my wife and I go to a movie with another couple, thinking we're going to see the Crowe & DiCaprio movie. But no: we wind up watching

Fireproof.

Saw it last weekend and felt like I needed a shower when I walked out. It was like I was watching porn (not that I'm an expert on that), only the acting wasn't as good. Just some bad notions about what the Christian life is like.

And who was the guy playing Little Kirkie's Dad? Unbelievably horrible. I wondered if Kirk didn't intentionally surround himself with actors worse than himself so he could look good.

$7 and 2 hours I'll never get back.

Wait, wait, Jackson really messed up some scenes -- and I think intentionally messed them up when they had elements he recognized as spiritual. Elrond healing Frodo at Rivendell? Looked like a shaman. The Exorcism of Saruman from King Theoden? Campy as Benny Hinn.

And then one of the writers was fighting back and tried to put overt Christianity into the scenes she helped write (Arwen's explicit reference to 'grace' after crossing the ford and ditching the Nazgul) -- Tolkien had consciously rewritten LOTR so that the spiritual references were never so explicit.

Jackson did ok with the parts you could hardly get rid of: the taming of Smeagol, Sam's steadfastness, the "wise v. foolish" contrasts of Saruman and Gandalf.

But if the spirituality was of the type he could recognize and detect as spirituality, he made the scene lame, and I suspect deliberately lame.

Or was I the only one who thought that the Elrond/shaman bit and the Exorcism of Saruman were badly done?

LOL, don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the Rings movies, & own extended editions of all 3 of them. I think Jackson was truest to Tolkien's vision in the first movie -- he seemed to understand what Tolkien was doing with hobbits.

The battles ... on the one hand, Jackson's are the best battle scenes I've seen, bar none. On the other hand, he did let them take over the film at some point, and to Tolkien the war was never the point. In fact, for Tolkien, part of the point was that while war may become necessary, it can never be enough; in some ways you can hardly tell the difference between Gondor and Mordor (hence the deliberately over-similar names) at some points.

Take care & God bless
Anne / WF

I'm late to this party, but after reading through the comments I can't believe noone mentioned Cocktail! And for my foreign film nomination - My Life as a Dog.