His first 10 films were crap, Saraband is an ugly, trite embarrassment, and there's a lot of boring dross in between: Brink of Life, Winter Light, Autumn Sonata, for example. Even the good 50s films are very middlebrow. Cries and Whispers: I'd like to think it was intended as a red comedy, but I doubt it was. Certainly the dinner table scene is a scream.
Those are all just empty labels and slogans. They can be applied to any director and sound about as persuasive:
"Ozu's first 10 films were crap, Tokyo Twilight is an ugly, trite embarrassment, and there's a lot of boring dross in between ..."
"Antonioni is bollocks. He's just a pretentious fuckwit who doesn't know how to tell a story properly, so he relies on a lot of bullshit symbolism ..."
"Mizoguchi is shite. Ugetsu and Sansho are overrated, Sisters of the Gion is crap, and all the junk he made in between is an embarrassing bore. I had to quit watching The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums halfway through out of embarrassment for the guy. Still better than Theo Angelopolous, though."
"Hitchcock's films are a waste of celluloid. The only good film he ever made was Family Plot, and that's just because Bruce Dern was basically making fun of the movie the whole time. You look in Dern's eyes in certain scenes, and you can actually see him thinking, 'This guy is a great director?' Still, Rebecca works if you read it as a parody of a certain kind of inept thriller."
"Glad to see some Welles hate creeping in here. Citizen Kane is the only halfway-decent thing he ever did, and even that is about an hour too long, and filled with embarrassing symbolism. Plus, it's widely known by those who care to do the research that his supporting actors practically directed the film themselves. I actually laughed out loud when the film revealed that Rosebud was a sled. Still, better than Touch of Evil, starring the great Mexican actor Charlton Heston. What a joke. Welles's voice work in the Transformers movie was pretty good, though."
"Francis Ford Coppola is probably the most overrated director of all time, after Carl T. Dreyer. The irony is that while his early films are still praised by middlebrows the world over, it wasn't until Jack that he began to demonstrate basic competence as a storyteller. I defy you to watch the second half of the Conversation and tell me what the fuck is going on."
"I'm glad to see that people are finally giving up the tired pretense of liking Ernst Lubitsch. There's one director who never knew what to do with sound; his early talkies are a mess, and some of his later work -- I'm thinking of Ninotchka, Heaven Can Wait, and most of The Shop Around the Corner -- is so dreadful, you have to wonder why the studios even bothered to restore it. The first half hour of Trouble in Paradise is okay, though. Too bad he lifted all of those scenes from other directors."
Wait -- this is actually sort of fun.
But can we, like, set aside another URL for this kind of stuff? I sort of value the discussions on this forum.
