FAIL DRAFT: Those Films That Didn't Suck Enough To Get Drafted

Fucked Up

My posts here won't alter my bonus round, so let me add these for now. The two picks that competed with my actual pick for number five -


More to follow...



Edit -Sorry. Drunk Post. I follow the rules when sober. Really.

The Cell
3000 Miles to Graceland
The Life of David Gale
Bamboozled
Flags of Our Fathers
1941

I guess bold, red, underlined sentences just dont draw the same kind of attention they used to.

I'm Sorry!

EDIT: I'm such a fucking tool.

I'm sorry for not being able to fucking read. Man, I know it was late, but what the fuck was I thinking? I'm embarrassed.

EDIT: It's in red! I can see red!

I would agree on Moonraker. Moore was certainly the worst Bond

As for other films:

Masked and Anonymous
Mary Reily

The one I really regret not picking is Batman Returns.

I would put Shoot'em Up as a failure worth defending.

Speed 2
Die another Day
Biker Boyz (Torque wannabe)
Evolution (Next gen Ghostbusters my ass)
X-3

2 Fast 2 Furious
Die Hard 2
Live Free or Die Hard

Bamboozled was one that I very nearly drafted, although that movie made me so ashamed to be white that I'd feel guilty about picking it.

What I had left:

Mortal Kombat Annihilation
The Island
Moonraker
Alien Resurrection
Superman III
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
X-Men: The Last Stand
The Crow: City Of Angels
Day Of The Dead (1985)
28 Weeks Later
Vanilla Sky
Little Miss Sunshine
Cars
Stigmata

Also, I had Superman Returns in the defense pile.

Good list Justin - minus MK:A...

Could have gone with She Hate Me instead

Don't make me argue about that piece of shit again. I just did it last draft.

not true at all. Love that flick. Except for the hero zombie concept, the rest works very well.

Hey, let's be cool now.

Now why in the fuck hasn't Boondock Saints been picked?

Fucking Land of the Dead on the zombie front. That movie is absolutely horrible and I don't understand anyone that defends it no matter how much they yell "But it's dumb Romero fun!"

I didn't participate, but if I had

Torn Curtain - A Cold War thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews should have been unfuckupable. Instead, outside of one fight sequence, it's a dull, lifeless, humorless slog. (I haven't seen Topaz, but my understanding is that it would belong too.)

Sleuth - Branagh, Caine, Pinter, and Law. It should have been at least an entertaining trifle.

The Island of Dr. Moreau - Brando sure must have needed a paycheck. Same for Frankenheimer.

New York, New York - This was supposed to be a safer bet at the box office than Star Wars?

Prêt-à-Porter - Coming off of The Player and Short Cuts, Altman fumbled badly.

There's only one film that I wanted to draft really badly, but couldn't while sticking to my draft - Red Dragon. Next to Lost in Space, the most disenchanted I've come out of a cinema. Great trailer, great cast, great source material. Fucking appalling film, where no one comes out unscathed. And I was high when I first saw it - it didn't have to be art, it just had to not be as lifeless and wasteful as it was.

I've never really heard anyone mount an attack or defense on it, cos it kind of faded out of existence for most as being just another mediocre film. But it really is the worst kind of mediocrity and banality - the kind that has no right to be anything other than good, given its pedigree. This is the film that completely burned me out on Ratner.

I did pick Land of the Dead.

My left-overs:

Hard Target
The Crow
Blade
Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade
The Lost Boys
Armageddon
Live And Let Die
For Your Eyes Only
License To Kill
Star Trek 3, 4
The Usual Suspects

Also, outside of my theme: Stroker Ace

I completely missed that. Sorry about that. Oh, and great pick.

It doesn't nearly live up to the promise of its setup, the film climaxes halfway through with the firebombing, and never rises to the occasion again.

There's stuff I love in it (the first 10 minutes are right up there with the best in the genre), but the film just kinda shrugs trying to take advantage of everything it presents upfront.

For Your Eyes Only? They cheap out on Blofeld's death and the score is godawful, but that's still the only film outside of Spy Who Loved Me worth a damn during Roger Moore's run. I'd love to hear the justification for this one.

There's a case to be made for Usual Suspects, even if I disagree. I'd like to hear this one too.

Surprised to see this little sucker get absolutely NO mention...



RAISE THE TITANIC

"It would have been cheaper to have lowered the Atlantic!"
-Lord Lew Grade-Producer

Smokin' Aces
Hannibal Rising

I wanted the titans of sucking, but because I only picked the worst movies of the worst careers, I couldn't pick A Knight's Tale, Deep Impact, or Party Monster. Party MOnster in particular was tempting, because Macauley Culkin is like rape in that movie.

But hre are the other shitty movies my Titans of Suck have made:

Travolta:

Staying Alive
The Experts
Look Who's Talking 1-3
White Man's Burden
Broken Arrow
Phenomenon
Michael
Mad City
A Civil Action
The General's Daughter
Lucky Numbers
Swordfish
Domestic Disturbance
The Punisher
Be Cool
Wild Hogs


Roberts:

Sleeping With the Enemy
Hook
The Pelican Brief
I Love Trouble
Pret-a-Porter
Mary Reilly
Conspiracy Theory
Stepmom
Runaway Bride
The Mexican
Erin Brokovich (yeah)
Full Frontal
Ocean's Twelve
Mona Lisa Smile


Shyamalan: In this case, I'm taking quality over quantity. you can't talk about shit cinema of the last decade without M Night coming up.

The Village
The Happening

Robin Williams: Whoa

Club Paradise
Cadillac Man
Hook
Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest
Being Human
Toys
Mrs. Doubtfire
Nine Months
Jumanji
To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar
Father's Day
Flubber
Patch Adams
Jakob the Liar
Bicentennial Man
House of D
Robots
A Night at the Museum
August Rush
License to Wed


Kevin Spacey: He started so fucking well

A Time to Kill
K-PAX
The Shipping News
The Life of David Gale
Beyond the Sea
Superman Returns
Fred Claus

Correct answer.

I thought about selecting HOUSE OF D just because it's a crappy coming of age story with Williams playing a retarded janitor. That's right, Robin Williams playing a retard.

Full retard?

Can't say really. I admit most of the films I list I haven't seen. Like I said, I don't go out of my way to waste my time looking at shit.

My leftovers:

X-Men: The Last Stand
Yor: The Hunter from the Future (I would even defend that!!)
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (ditto)
Hannibal Rising
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (HOW did this become a huge hit!?)
The World is Not Enough
Die Another Day
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Taxi
Days of Thunder
Over the Top

Who defends it like that? There's nothing dumb about that movie. No point in arguing though, anybody who's willing to mount a defense of Batman Forever, we're not going to agree on much.

For Your Eyes Only is a great Bond movie on paper. Unfortunately, it's sunk by a creepy, too-old Moore. Always too pussy to be a real James Bond, his discomfort with the violence shows, ruining some what should be classic moments. The fact that the legion of Moore apologists cite this as an example of his tenure not only being a success, but preferable to the Connery glory is a failure on the part of Geek nation.

Also the disco score sucks.

The Usual Suspects is a case of the emperor having no clothes. A post-Tarantino rip-off; the gimmicky-nonsensical twist ending, aided by a showy Spacey performance, evidently suckered a generation into thinking this faux bit of cool was the real deal. Closer to Boondock Saints than Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, I find the acting & dialogue at times atrocious.

The performances by everyone except DelToro, Spacey, and maybe Byrne, are awful. A lot of miscasting. Steven Baldwin?!! Ughh. (I'm not sure if that was an attempt at acting, or his natural assholeness shining through) Kevin Pollack? Am I the only one who wanted to knock that baseball cap off his head? ([Even Zed from Pulp shows up and takes me right out)

Bryan Singer doesn't really impress me. I'd rather watch McQuarrie's Way of the Gun or truth be told, even Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead. (I know) Actually, I do like Apt Pupil. This, his so-called crowning achievement, just leaves me cold.

Also, distaste for violence or no, kicking the car off the cliff was just bad-fucking-ass.

How about that sizzling chemistry Moore had with Lynn-Holly Johnson?

Connery would've hit that in a second. Moore came across as the pervy granddad who sneaks off to the bathroom to jerk off.

Love the Sheena Easton theme song though.

Edit: The kicking the car off the cliff was great, yet, in his hands, oddly still not badass.

Now Connery would've sold it with a wicked grin.

I would agree with most of your picks (I kind of like a lot of A Time to Kill), but I don't get this.

Unless your argument is that it overamplifies the saintliness of the real Brockovich, I won't hear a word said against it. Its brimming over with great character actors doing often career best work (including my favourite Eckhart performance, after In The Company of Men), its well shot, well-paced, its emotional, its funny and it provides that rarest of things in double whammy form - an attractive Roberts giving a good-to-great performance (to my knowledge this only happened one other time, with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) and a lead role for a woman that's both well-written and not a romcom.

I only had a few left on my short list:

Legend
(Altman's) Popeye
The Village
Die Another Day
Street Fighter: The Movie

I didn't get much of a chance to think about my round five pick because I had to go out of town, and while I'm ok with Daredevil, I think I would have gone with The Golden Child instead, which I'm surprised not to see here (unless I fucked up the list I kept and it was already drafted). That thing was so many kinds of fail.

The two that got left on the board that I really wanted to draft were -
Boondock Saints
Tideland