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This is the post in which we shall ...

... complain about movies which had great potential and yet have failed.

I just got Clockers, directed by Spike Lee, from NetFlix. I got this because I read Richard Price's novel and thought it was great.

However, this movie sucks. I cannot fathom how this is possible.

Comments

I'll put Golden Compass up here just because of the ending which, for those who have read the book, ends a whole chapter early. My kids and I were blinking at the screen saying "What? What??!! WHAT???!!!"



I'd like to add 'Deck The Halls' to that list. Worst flick I've seen in a long time. Then again, pretty much anything with Matthew Broderick in it tends to suck. Even Ferris Bueller's Day Off danced on the edge a couple times.


yeah Golden Compass (I suppose they ended early cause they couldn't end on a sour note, no one would come to the next one), Lord of the Rings, Narnia, etc ETbloodyC.
Gotta say it is getting increasingly difficult to drag me to the movie theater. It is just bloody stupid to try and make a full length book into a movie, lack of imagination and lack of ability.
*get off my lawn*


Can anyone explain the Richard Gere segment of "I'm Not There"?


MST3K: The Movie. I looked forward to this movie, and what was there was funny. However, the whole thing was barely more than an hour long. For some reason, nearly a third of the movie being mocked was lopped out, leaving a large, unexplained gap in the narrative. This irks me to this day.


I second "MST3K: The Movie." Now only was it way short and cut off in so many places...but the worst offense what that it wasn't even all that funny. Yes, there are some good laughs in there, but they did many more movies on the show that were much, much funnier.


Wasn't Clockers the movie where the reds and greens stand out like crazy? I like the way the movie looked.
I don't remember the plot though


Every comic book movie EVAR MADE!!! (actually, there are some comic book adaptations that are good (I am Legend, Batman Begins, Mystery Men, Hellboy), in general, most of them are absolutely horrible!
I saw the Catwoman movie, even though I knew it was going to be horrible. It was even worse than I imagined...
Had I not been drunk, I don't know if I could have sat through it (for the love of Selena Kyle, that could have been a cool movie!).


i thought 30 days of night was disappointing. great premise: vampires in alaska with no threat of daylight for a month.

and it starts out really terrifying right before deviating into hokey suck.


I would have to disagree with throwing LOTR into the category of bad adaptations of books. First off adapting three books so revered as Tolkien's trilogy is almost bound to piss off at least 50% of the fans of the books before you even have a pre-production meeting. Secondly you have to give them some credit for allowing Peter Jackson to make three 2+ hour movies. You damn well there was some slick Hollywood asshole suggesting that maybe they could cram it all into one 3 hour movie. I read and loved all three books before ever seeing any of the movies. That said I think they did a phenomenal job. In my opinion the battle scenes in the last two movies were some of the most visually stunning things I've ever seen. Lord of the Rings I think was one of the rare examples of Hollywood not destroying a good book.


Strictly Ballroom is one of my absolute fave "so bad it's good" flicks. Always worth the .99 cent monday pick @ Mr. Movies.


I understand why people liked the LOTR movies, but to me they ran over long on the battles and less so on the other bits, changing and expanding plot lines that weren't there before, cutting others out etc. Yes it was overwhelming, but lord it was repetitious. And after a bit the CGI battles had a certain sameness, an effect that has managed to leach itself into other films (the Narnia one/s, the Golden Compass, & I'm sure PJ will find a way to do the same in the Hobbit). To me they where movies that relied on keeping you awed on spectacle and exposition, less so on actual character and plot. I'm not knocking those who liked it, but I honestly feel that turning books into movies is usually pretty lazy, if things are written FOR the screen then you can optimize them for that medium.
There has only been two movies based on books (that I can think of right at this moment) that haven't disappointed me, one movie was four hours long and the other was based on a story that had already gone through several incarnations so was inherently mutable.


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