Cracked's "Ten awesome directors who temporaly lost it"....

Here's a better idea - how about ten great directors who never lost it? If you have a substantial body of work, some of your stuff will naturally suffer by comparison. Another stupid list from Cracked.

I guess John Carpenter is so far gone that he doesn't even make the list.

I don't think we have any evidence that Terry Gilliam losing his mind was "temporary." He'd have to make something decent again to erase The Brothers Grimm and Tideland. Same goes for M Night.

Yeah, but instead it being a poor man's Mad Magazine, it's now a poor man's Spy Magazine.

Not only do they talk shit about Blacula, but they spell the name wrong above the jpeg of the DVD cover. Fuckers.

What about William Friedkin? Also, I think Shaymalan lost it at The Village.

Uh oh.

I liked Jack. Didn't know it was Coppola until now. I liked Hook too, though I'm sure that statement might land me on some ignore lists...

That would be a great list to put together and worthy of debating over.

Cronenburg might be a good start.

I would tentatively put Cameron on that list, also. Kind of a cheat since he's been dicking around for so long, but I'm still ready to stand by that choice.

I take it your not considering DARK ANGEL (created by) as part of his oeuvre...

I suppose not, as I completely forgot that show even existed.

I love Cronenberg but he did make the very weak M. Butterfly.

Despite the fact that it made huge sums of money Titanic is a bad movie.

It's my least favorite of his films, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad. The tech achievements alone make it worth watching.

It makes for a great FX/Set Dec reel not a good movie. The story is trite and cliche. The dialogue is stilted. The acting is ponderous (except Kathy Bates). The characters are all one dimensional. Even Cameron's usual sharp eye for visuals is replaced with "Look at the pretty boat" shots. Horribly done ADR. The whole thing is a mess until the ship sinks and that happens too late to save it.

I'm not saying it's Manos bad just that it's as bad as others on that list that are being considered missteps.

ETA: Love your avatar.

I'd call Spider a misstep, too. I've never seen Fast Company, but I always assumed that was sort of below-average Cronenberg, too.

I don't think there are any directors with a substantial number of movies to their names who haven't put out a mediocre movie. Great directors with few movies tend to have cleaner track records, but even Malick has The New World, which isn't so hot. Before anyone says it, I don't think you can really count P.T. Anderson, Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, etc. Their records are fairly clean, but they're all kind of young, relatively speaking.

No way is the Titanic a misstep akin to Jack or She Hate Me. Even if you don't consider it an artistic achievement on the level of Cameron's other movies (and we're talking an ouevre that includes True Lies and Terminator 2, hardly masterpieces of subtle, character-driven filmmaking), it was enormously successful. Most of the movies on that list thoroughly failed artistically, as entertainment, commercially - everything. A huge number of people found Titanic entertaining, and it made a ton of money. It may not be your cup of tea nor mine, but I don't think it's an instance of Cameron "losing it" at all. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.

I'd argue that SPIDER did as well, regardless of a lack of commercial success.

Whoa, Whoa, WHOA!

Absolute Power was great fun, you cocksuckers. Judy Davis gave good Type-A-Within-Screaming-Inches-Of-Crazy, and Gene Hackman was the all-time smarmy leader of the free world until Cheney came on board. Blood Work, not so much.

I've always liked Fast Company but it's certainly not one of his best. I completely forgot about Spider, though. I would consider it well below M. Butterfly even. At least Butterfly had great camera work and beautiful scenery plus a pretty good performance from John Lone.

I would argue that Magnolia was a small misstep for PT Anderson but not as large as anything like She Hate Me. However, get back to me in about ten years because I'm sure each of those guys will have one large dud next to their name.

I see what you're saying but I can't help but think Titanic is the moment where Cameron went off the rails. He seemed to let his hubris take over his film making style. He was always bombastic, distant and lacking in subtlety but at least he was in the right genres for those to work in his favour. The success of Titanic seems to have suggested to him that he's capable of doing drama while still lacking, for want of a better word, the human touch. And it's starting to sound like he thinks he's bringing those "dramatic chops" to Avatar.

Hardly. A pretty good performance from Lone (and a decent one from Irons) against some great stuff from Fiennes, Richardson, Redgrave and even a decent Gabriel Byrne? SPIDER is miles away better than M. BUTTERFLY.

FAST COMPANY might not be a misstep, exactly (it introduced Cronenberg to Mark Irwin, with whom he had a long and successful working relationship) but it's certainly not a very good movie.

Titanic as a misstep? Not even close. Not liking a movie and a film being a complete success (for what it's trying to be) are two different things.

I know there are problems with The Wiz (I love it, anyways, though), but their ripping of that one scene is incredibly stupid. There's a reason the camera is behind them, and it's not as if having Diana Ross and Michael Jackson in your film means you have to have the camera on their faces the entire movie. In fact, we're better off otherwise.

I'm glad to see others referring to Spider as a misstep. I feel like an art house pariah for not enjoying it. Though I still think M. Butterfly is the weaker film. I actually can't think of a single director I love that doesn't have at least one film I hate. Maybe Scorsese?

I don't even think Titanic was a success for what it was trying to be. As I said earlier my problems go well beyond not liking the story or the acting. It fails as a melodrama as it manages to bring almost no emotion to the screen. It fails as a disaster movie because it takes close to two and half hours to get to the disaster. And it fails as an epic because it's story scope is to narrow.

All the things that work in a typical Cameron flick undermine the central premise. His movies are usually about the here and the now. Everything is immediate. The main theme of Titanic (such as it is) is that love is eternal. His immediacy of style is counter to that theme.

I really didn't like the performances in Spider. I freely admit that I may be the only one who didn't though. They just all felt flat and distant to me.

Good lord, no, it's not a good movie. But I like it anyways. Can't explain why I prefer it to Spider but it worked better for me.

Just because you don't like or enjoy a film doesn't mean it's a misstep.

I don't like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM; I didn't care for it on first viewing and a later viewing has convinced me I don't need to see it again any time soon.

But it's obviously not a misstep and to call it one would be selfish and dumb.

I take Scorsese back, I forgot about New York Stories. I replace him with Herzog.

Cameron has one great film and a slew of grand mediocrity to his name.

My bad. I kind of changed thought pattern there. I meant to say that I enjoy M. Butterfly more then Spider but think M. Butterfly should still be seen as more of a misstep. It's not keeping in tone with the rest of his output and he seems to have a tough time hanging on to the theme. Plus it was neither commercially nor artistically successful.

I haven't seen M. Butterfly (of Cronenberg's major works, I think I'm just missing that one and Fast Company), but I really do feel like Spider was a misstep. It's not one of those colossal hubristic failures where a director goes completely out of his comfort zone and bombs miserably, but, unlike most of his movies, I found it really forgettable.

I didn't care for McGrath's novel all that much, either, but it has the advantage of a slow reveal and a halfway intriguing narrative voice. Cronenberg's version lacks mystery, and the psychological impact it might have had is thrown off by the distance he keeps between the audience and his main character. I don't ordinarily have this problem with his movies, even when he maintains a significant clinical, narrative distance (in Crash, for instance). I think the problem is that so many of his movies have a sociological bent to them that transcends character, and Spider seems very much a character study without that sociological commentary. Even if I don't connect with Allegra Gellar, James Ballard, and Tom Stall (though I found it easier in each of their cases than connecting with Spider's titular character), there's more to those movies than character. I don't get that something extra out of Spider. Its status as an anomaly is heightened even more, considering that it came out between eXistenZ and A History of Violence, two movies very concerned with social commentary.