Terrible Films

T3 was rubbish. Barring one or two sequences, the entire (short) film and it’s anticlimatic ending, is a joke.

The Matrix reloaded was ok but could have been better if they did’nt release so much footage in the trailers.

No problem Dennis,

I’m absolutely sure i wouldn’t have liked Shostakovich when i was 11. And i doubt i was weird enough back then to enjoy a good bit of commie agitprop back then too 😀 The ones i’ve seen so far were either brilliant (Eisenstein of course, but also a few other directors of his ‘school’: high-contrast, angled camera and other stuff nobody in the West seemed to think of in the 1920s) or such absolute crap they were hilarious in their own right. The latter including a great 1980s Rambo-ripoff… no matter how bad you imagine it, it is in fact worse. Great fun to watch – well, at least in my insignificant opinion.

I think Shostakivich’ complete works are quite easily available now. Perhaps you could visit your local classical music store and listen to a few bits of the Fall of Berlin – even at my age i sometimes surprise myself when comparing my taste in music from way back to my current collection.

I do think quite a few wonderful movies have been made in the former USSR over the last years. Examples:
Prisoner of the Mountains/Kavkaski Plennik is a very touching story about two Russian soldiers being taken PoW somewhere in the Caucasian mountains. The final scene is hair-raising even though nothing really happens… just think ‘menacing’ and Mi-24…
Another gem is Luna Papa, actually a Euro-Russian-Tadjik film. I guess this film can best be described as a combination of Russian insanity, and Central-Asian colourfullness, and it is about a pregnant girl on a queste for the guy who impregnated her. For me it was a great depression-cure… partly because of the way that An-2 is being flown around!

Arthur-Shostakovich, Wow!

Arthur, in 1953, when I was only 11 years old, my musical vistas were confined to Frankie Laine singing ‘Jezebel’ and the dance band-jazz music my parents used when teaching ballroom dancing and my mother’s Gigli opera records.
I didn’t discover Shostakovich until much later but I didn’t know that he did the music for the “Fall of Berlin’ and I haven’t seen the movie since 1953 when I watched it in the now, long vanished, Lyceum cinema in Edinburgh’s Slateford Road.
I have seen all the classic Eisenstein clips-the steps at Odessa the Teutonic knights sequence in Nevsky and of course, Eisenstein’s movies were classic cinema mixed with propaganda but to me, propaganda in a more palatable form than than the Stalinist excesses of ‘The Fall of Berlin’.

Potemkin? Is that the one with the famous scene on the stairs in Odessa?

Pendennis,

There is plenty of brilliant Soviet propaganda cinema aroundd just as well. Brononosets Potemkin and Aleksandr Nevskii (both by Eisenstein, who was truelly a genius) are both great films, but terribly propagandistic.

Interestingly enough, the music score for ‘The Fall of Berlin’ you disliked so much was written by Shostakovich, and it appears to be highly acclaimed by quite a few people who are in to that kind of classical music. The Hymn of the US Marines is of course a lot more catchy, especially when you’re young…

In my list of terribles movies , I forgot this one:
American Pie !!!! oh my god , one of the most silly …

worst film/Ink

Yes Ink-many of the American films and British films of my childhood did have a strong propaganda element as you suggest. But at least with Richard Widmark in the ‘Halls of Montezuma’ my childhood buddies and I were able to exit the cinema singing the Marine Corps Hymn-which was much easier than trying to master the ditty -‘Oh when can I meet my Natasha and her Red communal farm tractor down on the Collectivel farm again thanks to omnipotent Comrade Stalin’ which was the closing song in the ‘Fall of Berlin’
Nor could I relate to the Cossacks on the Reichstag steps in the closing credits singing:
‘How you gonna keep us down in the Steppes now we have seen gay Berlin?

pendennis,

You were old enough and wily enough to realise that the Soviet film was propaganda yet too young to realise that the same was true for similar British and American films?

Apocalypse Now is one of my all time favourties. Great napalm bombing (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”)and best ever UH-1 action.

Indepedence Day was pretty silly. Hoards if fighters all attacking in tight formation. Firing sidewinders at a 20km wide target as well. What were they thinking???

worst film? The Fall of Berlin

In 1953 aged just 11 I watched a Russian war film which was made just before that monster Stalin had kicked the bucket in March 1953.
Suprisingly the British ABC cinema chain had given this movie-The Fall of Berlin’ a general release but even though I was only 11 I knew propaganda when I saw it.
This movie featured Uncle Joe in a shimmering white tunic promising Nikolai that he would personally direct the whole Voronzeh front to look for his Natasha, who earlier had had to draw lots as to whether she would fall for Nikolai or her communal farm tractor(this was Socialist realism don’t forget.)
Funnily enough some of the battle scenes-ie the storming of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide in the bunker were quite well done, but overall it was Soviet Stalinist horse manure. Enough to cover the steppes many times over!.

ex-gf!! Currently I’m off duty 😀 why else would I be on the forum so much these last weeks. :p Some women like weirdo’s do I already figured out, but I can act normally tough (if I take my pills).

I seem to recall Sunset Boulevard was not actually a 40s movie-wasn’t it 1952?-it just feels like it- maybe because it was B&W.

I reckon this is quite “anoraky” – but unlike , Geforce, I say tell your GF: that you spot these things in Movies- she of all people should know what a weirdo you are 😀

Best Regards

Tony

Karloff? Karloff? Sidekick? Fukc you! That Limey cokcsukcer does not deserve to smell my sh!t!

Thanks for reminding me!:D

I’d forgotten about Lugosi’s spat with Karloff-quite funny but the film still stinks.

A bit off subject-but a lot of 40s movies couldn’t be remade today without losing that feeling or essence (cheap production values= a certain charm?), in say a movie like Sunset Boulvevard-although the theme is timeless and could be used again and again-fading has-been coming to grips with an unforgiving present (cue to …”the morning sun really shows your age” -Maggie May!).

BTW, I hear Citizen Kane is been re-released digitally remastered etc with a really good print-don’t knoe if it has extra scenes or Welles doing a little number in the CD.

Best Regards

Tony

Well, anyone seen the Rock. Didn’t know the USAF had F/A-18’s. Don’t mention this though when you’re watching it with your gf otherwhise she’ll think you’re a weirdo. 😀

The world wouldn’t be such a nice place now if Ed Wood did have the talent or cash… the products of his imagination were so incredibly weird, any sort of added quality (through cash/creativity/decent production… etcetera) would have done his work a great injustice. Even the tiniest aspect of any of his films lacks even a hint of quality. They are perfectly balanced in their own right, which probably gives them their current status. I personally think they are higher art, just because everything in it is such absolute crap.

Bela Lugosi’s cameos (well, he’s actually the storyteller in Glen or Glenda and has a very prominent part) are IMHO only a part of the whole picture. Lugosi himself is absolutely heartbreaking in all his demention, addiction, denial and -indeed- dignity, but none of the films really rest on Lugosi as an actor. Boris Karloff could have taken those parts just as well

😀

Karloff? Karloff? Sidekick? Fukc you! That Limey cokcsukcer does not deserve to smell my sh!t!

Interesting that Ed Wood could make a career in making movies without the talent (or cash) to translate his ideas (weird or not) into a half decent film.

The cameos by Bela Lugosi are interesting if only to see Bela-master of horror movies in the thirties-reduced to pathos-but actor that he is carries on with a kind of noble dignity.

Best Regards

Tony

I never understood why the cult-maniacs proclaimed Plan 9 from Outer Space the worst film ever. Of course it’s terrible, but so is every film by Ed Wood. I think Glenn or Glenda (about the right to be a drag queen, which is perfectly normal unlike those disgusting perverted homosexuals) outweirds Plan 9 by a very, very wide margin.

Of course, Bela Lugosi also stars in Glenn or Glenda.

Another one to avoid:
Anger Management (even though i like Marisa Tomei a lot)

Oh, and i think the best part of the Matrix: Regurgitated were the horribly knitted woolen sweaters. Did anyone see any sheep in Zion? Neither did i.

Plan 9 From Outer Space is so awful that it is brilliant in a perverse way. For me Pearl Harbour (or should that be Harbor?) was a genuinely dreadful film – my hackles were raised when it began with the Americans winning the Battle of Britain, and it got steadily worse. What a waste of $$$$ (and more fool me for paying to see it!)

Originally posted by paulc
Wayne’s World – utter c***

I disagree, but i will say its not brilliant. Its just a fun no brainer to put a smile on your face. Its only the Bohemian Raspsody scene thats gave it major recognition and deservedly so.

Re: Bruce Willis films

Originally posted by atc pal
But “Die Hard 2” is one of the worst I´ve seen. Really makes me angry with all the stupid mistakes about flying and ATC. 😡

Factual errors do not necessarily make for a bad film, when it comes down to it who really cares about all the mistakes about flying and ATC? Its an action film created for a target audience and unfortunately aviation enthusiasts was not it.

Yes they could’ve spent plenty of time and money to make sure everything was spot on but only a handful of people would’ve appreciated it and it wouldn’t have effected the money they would make back on the film, so quite rightly they didn’t bother.

As it stands i quite like the film, it not brilliant but its enjoyable to watch.

Regards

Domin