Worst films by good directors

[Felicity, I guess so]

A sub-set of the long-running 'worst films' thread.

We took some dvds away for the recent wet and windy half-term weekend, as the accommodation was advertised as having a machine to play them on.

I'd never seen this particular Hitchcock and set it up for our saturday night treat....laydeez n gennelmen I bring you:

Hitchcock's 'Topaz'

what a crock of poorly acted, clunkily scripted, red-baiting, predictable, suspense-free bollox that was.

[Ek weet nie]

Worst films by good directors

I'll get the obvious one in with Showgirls.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Worst films by good directors

One From The Heart (Coppola)
Munich (Spielberg)
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick)

Talking of Hitchcock, Frenzy was pretty duff. Great period shots of London though.

[Incandenza]

Worst films by good directors

One From the Heart has a lot more to offer it than Jack, which I was going to post about.

Woody Allen - any number of his late 90s-early 00s output, but I'd have to say The Curse of the Jade Scorpion was especially dismal.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Worst films by good directors

I can remember turning a dvd of 'Jade Scorpion' off half way thru, so you've got that one nailed, Inc

[ian.64]

Worst films by good directors

Munich (Spielberg)

Haven't seen that, but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull takes the lead for me, so far. It's an amazingly lax and lazy work considering the talents involved.

[evilC]

Worst films by good directors

David Lynch - 'Dune'

[Guest]

Worst films by good directors

Frenzy is tremendous.

Spike Lee - Bamboozled. Overlong, joyless and incredibly heavy-handed.

[Taylor]

Worst films by good directors

Yeah, Frenzy's great - it was just incredibly dated even when it came out.

Topaz, on the other hand, is the worst thing he ever put his name to. Worse than Waltzes From Vienna.

[Wyatt Earp]

Worst films by good directors

Munich's far from being Spielberg's worst, surely? 1942 is worse, as is 95% of Saving Private Ryan. And I can't stand ET, but that may just be me.

[Guest]

Worst films by good directors

None of those can be worse than AI, surely.

[Wyatt Earp]

Worst films by good directors

Not sinnit.

[Guest]

Worst films by good directors

Oh.

[garcia]

Worst films by good directors

i've never seen 1941, but nothing can be worse than indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull.

[Tony C]

Worst films by good directors

Sidney Lumet - 'The Wiz'.

[ian.64]

Worst films by good directors

Hitchcock's 'Topaz'

what a crock of poorly acted, clunkily scripted, red-baiting, predictable, suspense-free bollox that was.

I remeber seeing that and thinking 'is this an old TV movie'?

[Guest]

Worst films by good directors

Atom Egoyan is one of my favourite directors, but Felicia's Journey is just so horrible and awful and bad.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Worst films by good directors

Kubrick — Barry Lyndon

Coppola — Jack

Scorsese — New York, New York

Godard — La Chinoise

Bertolucci — Little Buddha

[ian.64]

Worst films by good directors

Kubrick — Barry Lyndon

It's one of the most visually stunning films I've ever seen, but you might as well have put shop-window dummies in place of the actors on show. As empty as a glass after last orders.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Worst films by good directors

Godard has made far worse than 'La Chinoise'. It has some rather charming moments, I think.

[garcia]

Worst films by good directors

i really enjoyed barry lyndon, maybe because i'm a sucker for 18th century period stuff. but i admit it did have a faintly parodic feel. something about that voiceover...

[Amor de Cosmos]

Worst films by good directors

Context and expectation are always huge when "Best/Worst" questions come up. Barry Lyndon came after a run of gobsmackingly brilliant films, maybe unsurpassed in modern cinema, and a four year wait. Added to that — in my case — was a serious hard-on for Thackeray novels. Disappointment was almost inevitable and arrived with a full retinue of poorly lit scenes on grainy film stock and actors who didn't appear to have a clue what they were supposed to be doing.

The situation with La Chinoise was similar, in an opposite sort of way. Godard had been turning out a film a month — or so it seemed. It was a breathtaking juggling act. You sensed he was going to drop the balls eventually but they kept coming: Masculin Féminin, Two or Three Things I Knew About Her, Made in USA, One Plus One capped by the magnificent Week End. Then La Chinoise, talking heads against a blank wall reciting political polemic. It all vanished like Gitane smoke in a breeze. It very likely wasn't his worst film but it was the worst one I saw, because I didn't watch another for twenty years.

[ursus arctos]

Worst films by good directors

Barry Lyndon also deserves derision for ruining a perfectly good Haydn Sarabande and Mozart Piano Concerto.

[Incandenza]

Worst films by good directors

Amor de Cosmos wrote:

You sensed he was going to drop the balls eventually but they kept coming: Masculin Féminin, Two or Three Things I Knew About Her, Made in USA, One Plus One capped by the magnificent Week End.

I still haven't seen Made In USA. I think that some legal issue has kept it from being available in America. I don't think Two Or Three Things is on Region 1 DVD also, but thankfully I have a letterboxed VHS copy I bought off of eBay for peanuts.

[Reed John]

Worst films by good directors

AI is one of the worst films I've ever seen, period, so it's Spielberg's worst by some distance and that's not to say he hasn't made some other duds.

Surely, Eyes Wide Shut is Kubrick's worst.