Birth of a Nation fascinates me. It’s mentioned in almost any discussion of classic films, but the story it tells is absolutely appalling. I realize that the time in which it was made was a vastly different one, but you have to wonder how that much…well…evil…could be seen as okay.
Nobody ever calls Birth of a Nation a classic because of its story (not for 60 years at least, anyway). It’s because, like Citizen Kane, it broke new ground in cinematography and editing and formed much of the syntax of film for decades to come. Even Griffith himself kinda sorta tried to atone for the story and the film’s political impact with Intolerance.
Yeah, I also always found Wizard of Oz really creepy.
I think there are a lot of classics that can’t fully be appreciated for their accomplishments at the time - but that has the effect of making them pretty overrated when judged by today’s sensibilities, since their technical achievements are rote today. Citizen Kane is definitely an overrated classic for that reason - remarkably bold filmmaking and technical innovation - dull today.
For most overrated, I pick Easy Rider. Again, amazing product of its times, but pretty wretched as a narrative.
But also: Dracula (much as I love Bela); Doctor Zhivago (hell, every David Lean film other than Bridge on the River Kwai); From Here to Eternity (and many war movies); a lot of Kurosawa (although he has several that hold up very well, like Seven Samurai); almost all Fellini movies; I haven’t seen enough Renoir or Godard movies, but my impression from what I have seen is they are pretty overrated/have aged poorly; 2001 a Space Odyssey; every Spielberg movie, other than Jaws; every movie directed by Clint Eastwood; Silence of the Lambs
Note that all of those are still good movies, some better than just good. Just overrated. There are a ton of actually horrible movies that are, or were at one time, well regarded: (Crash, Chicago, English Patient, Driving Miss Daisy, Out of Africa, hell, almost everything the Academy has picked in the past 30 years).
It is hard for me to imagine Lawrence of Arabia being a disappointment to anybody but hey, it’s everybody’s list. Speaking of which, may as well throw my vote in: The Godfather. I’ll blame the fact that I saw it way after release, having somehow missed catching it until well into adulthood. While I certainly can respect the movie and appreciate the performances, I just don’t find the mafia all that interesting. They’re kind of like vampires that way, I just can’t see where you can take a story about La Cosa Nostra anymore. I guess it’s kind of funny that I consider Coppola’s next movie, his “little” film The Conversation, to be one of my all-time favorite movies.
I find Kubrick really inconsistent. A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove and The Shining are all flipping brilliant, but 2001: A Space Odyssey not only didn’t do much for me but led to Arthur C. Clarke writing the rest of those books based on the inferior movie instead of his own wonderful novel…I didn’t get that at all. And although there are parts of Full Metal Jacket that are fascinating and it’s practically the only acknowledgment I’ve ever seen that there was city fighting in Vietnam, which is so indelibly thought of as a jungle war, that one doesn’t really work for me either. Finally, although it’s not clear to me how much of Kubrick’s original vision is present in AI, I only liked a couple bits of that one (Jude Law was great). (I have yet to see any of his pre-Strangelove films, Barry Lyndon or Eyes Wide Shut.)
I first saw 2001 as a small child, and didn’t understand what I was seeing. Much, much later I rented it from Netflix, and it bored the hell out of me. What surprised me more than anything else that instead of the special effects serving the story, there are countless scenes which focus on pointless special effects, like a several-minute long docking sequence. There’s nothing resembling a plot or characters we care about until the story shifts to the Jupiter 2 spacecraft.
The struggle of Dave Bowman and Frank Poole vs. HAL 9000 is good, with one small problem: they don’t have remotely enough reason to suspect something’s seriously wrong when they start getting paranoid. They get weird over something very, very small. Turns out that even paranoids have enemies, and things finally start to get interesting.
The journey into the monolith orbiting Jupiter is another special-effects centric one, one that rivals the endless, pointless journey through Vger’s cloud in Star Trek 1. I can make allowances for how terribly dated the effects are, but not for how long they drag on.
What surprised me was how easy to understand the final sequence was. It’s a bit infamous, and I thought it would be totally opaque, but even though it’s an unconventional way to shoot a “long time passing” montage, it’s actually quite easy to digest. I think audiences of 1968 were just unready for an unconventional story telling device. We’ve been exposed to so much weird stuff in film since then that it’s much easier for us to adjust.
I’m not sure I would have understood the Bowman-as-transhuman “space baby” if I didn’t know what I was supposed to be seeing. I think that did need something more.
Overall, I think there’s a fantastic 20 minute short film buried inside 2001, but I can’t say I think much of it as a whole.
I love Lean, but Doctor Zhivago is overrated. It’s a terrible mismatch between subject matter and medium, as movies about writers often are. Zhivago is supposed to be a great poet and thinker, but because movies in general and Lean in particular are better at showing external, dramatized conflict rather than inner depths, Zhivago himself comes across as a rather dull rich dude with a bit on the side that he thinks of as his grand passion in life - a rather conventional fellow in the end, not a blazing star of intellect and poetry. Zhivago is a giant black hole of tedium in his own movie.
(Rod Steiger’s Komarovsky is a much more memorable movie character, because his character traits are all externalized. He may be disgusting, but he’s dramatic.)
I was somewhat older when the movie first appeared and could better appreciate the special effects for what they were at the time, which was completely unlike anything that had been seen before. Especially when seen on what was at the time the giant, curved Cinerama screen, they were more than enough to justify the movie. The first appearance of the Jupiter 2, which slowly fills the screen from right to left, was just jaw-dropping back then. Consider that, until 2001, a film like Forbidden Planet was the state of the art in special effects. 2001 moved the art well forward of that and set the stage for the next leap by Star Wars.
However, I agree that the movie hasn’t aged well. With the special effects no longer inspiring, the story is really exposed as threadbare.
I come to Citizen Kane from the opposite end of the spectrum. All my life I’d heard that it was the greatest movie and whatnot. I’d never seen it.
In my first films class in college, our survey of movies was chronological. At one point early on in the semester, I think we’d watched in a row in consecutive labs Grand Illusion, Grapes Of Wrath, and the Great Dictator. All are fine films, but they all feel like olde tymey movies. I was getting burnt out…and we were going to spend three lectures on Citizen Kane.
Well. We had to make it to evening showings of the movies, and I nearly blew off Kane out of burn out. Finally went because a girl I was hot for had agreed to go to this nearby bar that didn’t card with me afterwards. I was ready to snooze through Kane. I was sure that the movie was another overhyped, overrated “You had to be there, seriously, this was big” kind of movies that are useful for historical perspective.
I can pinpoint the exact moment in the movie where I bought all in. It’s the early, early shot of the nurse entering the room, seen upside down in the snowglobe. Holy shit. What a fucking camera shot that is. I felt like I’d touched an electric fence. I fell in love with Citizen Kane watching that movie, probably blew my chance with the hot girl because I wouldn’t stop blabbering about it afterwards, and I still make time to watch it at least once a year. For me, I don’t think it’s possible to overrate that movie.
To be fair to Clarke, you have to take into account that the screenplay was a collaboration between Clarke and Kubrick. Somewhere on my bookshelves I have a paperback that Clarke assembled that traces the process. It began with Clarke’s previously published short story, The Sentinel, which involved only the discovery of the alien artifact on the Moon, and then proceeded through various drafts of the screenplay. Kubrick’s input was to make the drafts increasingly less detailed and more abstract. The novel was, in fact, a novelization of the final screenplay. 2010, on the other hand, was first a Clarke novel and then a screenplay written by Peter Hyams.
The space station and the Jupiter 2 still look pretty good, actually. It’s that the film spends way too much time on the shuttle docking with the station, and it’s an event that has no narrative meaning at all. It’s there just because up until that point, space travel was poorly imagined on film, and Kubrick wanted to show off. It’s a classic case of a film maker focusing on special effects rather than the story.
The effects that look bad are the ape suits at the start and the psychedelic journey into the Jupiter monolith. I’m willing to look past the former, and I think the ape sequences are OK other than the bad suits and actors that don’t really understand how to be the ape the way someone like Andy Serkis can. I can make allowances for the poor effects of the journey into the monolith, but not for the length of the sequence, which is excessive.
I have trouble believing that the novel was based on the final screenplay since a fair number of key points differ from the movie’s storyline, points that are later retconned to the movie version for the subseequent books. But yes, I certainly don’t blame Clarke for the failure of the movie to work for me since as I say, I think the novel is terrific.
As for 2001, I think that film deserves high praise until the ending, which is overblown and pretentious.
That’s Clarke’s fault, not Kubrick’s. You can certainly blame Kubrick for not making it clear what’s going on in the ending, when Clarke’s novel is explicit, but the “overblown and pretentious” aspect is all in the book.
Actually, I enjoy the the book’s treatment of the ending. It’s the film I dislike for being far too long (hence overblown) and far too determined to beat you over the head with the Important Cosmic Events You Are Witnessing (hence pretentious).
