What was the WORST movie you've ever seen?

.. .we have to separate the actual pretentious CruD... like a lot of newish netflik stuff. ..from the B movies made on a shoestring... I have collected drivel since the inception of VCR, and part of the charm is that u can watch them again a few years later cos no way can you remember them that long.
There was a 12 min. cut-down version of the Giant Spider Invasion... I've done this too, with certain movies,: edit down to ten minutes or so, and it usually seems to concentrate the sub-B rubbish quite nicely.
 
There are a lot of just plain bad films out there. Films that are filler for TV channels and are made for length. For me the warning sign is any TVM with the title "Someone's name: the true/real/untold story". They are usually even worse if the can get the word "Baby" in to the title.
As for cinema... The Thin Red Line [1998]
I just don't understand how anyone can like this film. Pretentious, confusing, and unintelligible in places.
I paid money to see that and still think Terrence Malick owes me £2.50
 
It's a toss-up between two:

1) Nuke 'em High (1986). This is in the Toxic Avenger series, the other installments of which I've thankfully never seen. I didn't like the gross-out "humor." The script and actors were horrid.

2) S. Darko (2009). This is a pitiful, pretentious sequel to Donnie Darko, one of my favorite films. If you're also a fan, I strongly suggest skipping this one.
 
What do people mean when they use the word 'Pretentious' about movies? (I haven't seen The Thin Red Line or S.Darko, I'm not having a go at you, Cupofjoe or Guttersnipe.) But I really find it hard to understand how the word applies to a piece of art. I can see how it applies to people. (The innate British class system means I am part of a society that seems to be culturally hardwired to sneer at people getting 'above their station' or be snobbish about those who pretend to be 'better than they are' and all that other crap - though less so than in earlier times I am glad to say.) I have seen many films I adore being dismissed as 'pretentious'. Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Kubrik's 2001, Kieślowski's Double Life of Véronique . All slow, long, but wonderfully rewarding films - and not a car chase in any of them. I have watched films that have baffled me, left me cold, and therefore probably in reflection weren't worth the effort in watching them. A recent example would be Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie go Boating 1974) which is lauded by them that know and securely in place in the pantheon of 1001 Films You Should Watch Before you Die but left me just sitting there thinking what's this all this ABOUT? for most of its running time. Experimental, challenging, obscure, elliptic, different, non-standard, odd, boring, disjointed, weird, - I can recognise all those in a film (all apply to Céline et Julie vont en bateau in parts ) But 'pretentious'? I don't know how to apply the word. Just because I didn't 'get it' - whatever 'it' is doesn't mean it isn't there to get. It just means I don't have the critical tools to hand to find it.
 
JunkMonkey said:
What do people mean when they use the word 'Pretentious' about movies? (I haven't seen The Thin Red Line or S.Darko, I'm not having a go at you, Cupofjoe or Guttersnipe.) But I really find it hard to understand how the word applies to a piece of art. I can see how it applies to people. (The innate British class system means I am part of a society that seems to be culturally hardwired to sneer at people getting 'above their station' or be snobbish about those who pretend to be 'better than they are' and all that other crap - though less so than in earlier times I am glad to say.) I have seen many films I adore being dismissed as 'pretentious'. Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Kubrik's 2001, Kieślowski's Double Life of Véronique . All slow, long, but wonderfully rewarding films - and not a car chase in any of them. I have watched films that have baffled me, left me cold, and therefore probably in reflection weren't worth the effort in watching them. A recent example would be Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie go Boating 1974) which is lauded by them that know and securely in place in the pantheon of 1001 Films You Should Watch Before you Die but left me just sitting there thinking what's this all this ABOUT? for most of its running time. Experimental, challenging, obscure, elliptic, different, non-standard, odd, boring, disjointed, weird, - I can recognise all those in a film (all apply to Céline et Julie vont en bateau in parts ) But 'pretentious'? I don't know how to apply the word. Just because I didn't 'get it' - whatever 'it' is doesn't mean it isn't there to get. It just means I don't have the critical tools to hand to find it.
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I think it's because it's trying to be something that it isn't. The Thin Red Line is a war movie that tries not to be , and ends up just being boring. There's a fine line between genius and dull; I think that 2001 is a scifi movie that tries something different and succeeds, The Deer Hunter is a war movie that tries something different and succeeds; TTRL is a war movie that tries something different and fails miserably.
 
paranoid marvin said:
I think it's because it's trying to be something that it isn't. The Thin Red Line is a war movie that tries not to be , and ends up just being boring. There's a fine line between genius and dull; I think that 2001 is a scifi movie that tries something different and succeeds, The Deer Hunter is a war movie that tries something different and succeeds; TTRL is a war movie that tries something different and fails miserably.
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Then that's just failure. If 2001 had failed would that have been pretentious? Is everything that fails pretentious?

I think the closest thing I can think of as being 'pretentious' is the Matrix movies* which a lot of people seem to think are deeply philosophical works but just appear to to me to be sophomoric twaddle dressed up in bad science fiction movie clothing. (Or conversely a bad science fiction movie with a thin veneer of cod philosophy slapped over the top of it to hide the cracks.) Battlefield Earth with better special effects and fewer wonky camera angles. I cannot really think of Battlefield Earth as a pretentious film. It's just bad.

* Or Southland Tales
 
paranoid marvin said:
I think it's because it's trying to be something that it isn't. The Thin Red Line is a war movie that tries not to be , and ends up just being boring. There's a fine line between genius and dull; I think that 2001 is a scifi movie that tries something different and succeeds, The Deer Hunter is a war movie that tries something different and succeeds; TTRL is a war movie that tries something different and fails miserably.
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A film describing itself as art is pretentious
 
Films are just as much an art as any other form of human expression / discipline. Just as much an art as opera, architecture, painting etc.

I'm not sure how a film describes 'itself' as art.

Opening Title Card: I am Art

?
 
Art is what you believe it to be. A creator can declare that something is art, but only you can agree with that.. Or not.
 
AE35Unit said:
Films are entertainments, not works of art
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That, is an utterly fatuous statement.

Just because something is made to entertain doesn't mean it's not art. Someone had better tell Mozart. Handel, and Wagner they were just entertainers not real artists. And Proust, Hemingway, Wilde, Shakespeare, Moliere... they weren't artists either? You'll be telling me that painting isn't an art form next because most of classical art was done by skilled painters for hire to specific commissions (money!) to make political/religious/client-aggrandising statements. Or for titillation... all those nudes weren't painted by accident. A bit like movies really. Most art (since the Renaissance at least) has been made by people who expected to get paid for what they did.

Movies are an expensive proposition. They cost a lot to make. It's easier to make your money back if you make entertaining films. So of course most films will be entertainments. They are still pieces of art.

I remember hearing and interview with Philip Glass who was bewildered when people accused him of 'selling out' when his music started to become popular. He said: "I'd been trying to sell out for years - no one was buying!"

CupofJoe said:
Art is what you believe it to be. A creator can declare that something is art, but only you can agree with that.. Or not.
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So if I say The Sistine chapel roof is not art it ceases to be art? It's undeniably art. All I can say is that it is Good art or Bad art. Which is not the same thing as whether I like it or not. There is a lot of bad art I like and a lot of good art I dislike - intensely. And sometimes I change my mind - I though Mark Rothko was a talentless chancer till I actually saw some of his paintings for real (and not just reproduced in books) and I was bowled over; I thought they were brilliant.
 
JunkMonkey said:
So if I say The Sistine chapel roof is not art it ceases to be art? It's undeniably art. All I can say is that it is Good art or Bad art. Which is not the same thing as whether I like it or not. There is a lot of bad art I like and a lot of good art I dislike - intensely. And sometimes I change my mind - I though Mark Rothko was a talentless chancer till I actually saw some of his paintings for real (and not just reproduced in books) and I was bowled over; I thought they were brilliant.
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If a viewer believes it not to be art, then it is not art to them. They may be in a minority of one but it is still just their point of view. And just as valid as any other.
Someone else [and I'm thinking of an elderly Aunt] would see it merely over fussy decoration and should be overpainted in a nice magnolia. No seriously, she said something very similar about an old [pre-reformation?] fresco in a local church. It wasn't quite the Last Supper but all she could see was the faded and flaking paint and not the messages behind it. Overpainting it would make look "tidy".
I don't believe in good and bad art. There is stuff someone likes or can appreciate and stuff they don't.
I think Rothko is the perfect example.
He divides opinion. but it is just that, opinion. I am one of those people that goes in to London [okay not recently] to sit in his room in the Tate Modern for hours, just looking and trying to see what he saw. My mother wouldn't even walk in to the room calling it "dirty" and many people don't get him. As you say I think, you have to see them to get them.
I love Da Vinci's drawings but many of his paintings leave me cold. I really don't understand why the Mona Lisa is rated as a painting. It's okay but nothing special, as far as I feel. But the queue of visitors into the Louvre and about 500 years of general consensus are some what against me.
 
JunkMonkey said:
What do people mean when they use the word 'Pretentious' about movies? (I haven't seen The Thin Red Line or S.Darko, I'm not having a go at you, Cupofjoe or Guttersnipe.) But I really find it hard to understand how the word applies to a piece of art. I can see how it applies to people. (The innate British class system means I am part of a society that seems to be culturally hardwired to sneer at people getting 'above their station' or be snobbish about those who pretend to be 'better than they are' and all that other crap - though less so than in earlier times I am glad to say.) I have seen many films I adore being dismissed as 'pretentious'. Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Kubrik's 2001, Kieślowski's Double Life of Véronique . All slow, long, but wonderfully rewarding films - and not a car chase in any of them. I have watched films that have baffled me, left me cold, and therefore probably in reflection weren't worth the effort in watching them. A recent example would be Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie go Boating 1974) which is lauded by them that know and securely in place in the pantheon of 1001 Films You Should Watch Before you Die but left me just sitting there thinking what's this all this ABOUT? for most of its running time. Experimental, challenging, obscure, elliptic, different, non-standard, odd, boring, disjointed, weird, - I can recognise all those in a film (all apply to Céline et Julie vont en bateau in parts ) But 'pretentious'? I don't know how to apply the word. Just because I didn't 'get it' - whatever 'it' is doesn't mean it isn't there to get. It just means I don't have the critical tools to hand to find it.
Click to expand...
Interestingly enough, the first definition of pretentious is "intended to impress" and refers to things rather than people for the most part. S. Darko is just that. Whoever made it was clearly biting off more than they could chew. Movies like these attempt to be "artsy" and wind up falling flat. Another film I find pretentious is A Ghost Story, which includes a seven-minute pie-eating scene.

I do agree that films are works of art, but they're still very different from paintings.
 
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