Horribly overrated movies...

BaldFriede wrote: sircosick wrote: ^ How many times you can watch a movie before get bored? And how many times an album? The answer is the reason why.  There are movies I can watch again and again without ever getting bored in the least. "Don't Look Now!" by Nicholas Roeg or "Rashomon" by Akira Kirosawa are examples for that (though there are people who can't even watch them once without getting bored). I could list dozens of movies I could watch again and again (and actually did). The reason you can listen to an album again and again is that you don't really have to concentrate on the music to listen to it; it just becomes a background to you. If you try to really "listen" to an album, fully concentrating on it, you will find it as impossible to listen to again and again (at least in succession) as watching a movie more than once. Of course the Hollywood bullsh*t that is being dealt out nowadays is really not worth more than one look. Not worth a casual glance even.

That really depends. There are albums that never get me bored, no matter how concentrate I am listening to it.

I said that mainly because I consider the cinema a mediatic incarnation of art...... Nothing against movies, I love some of them as all of you do, but that's my humble opinion.

Hyperborea wrote: All Peter Sellers movies are/were overrated, as were anything Spike Milligan done. The Pythons did do some fantastic stuff, but let themselves down badly with The Meaning of life, truly awful.

I hope you didn't include Dr. Strangelove to overrated Peter Sellers movies. Anyway, I agree about The Meaning of Life, there's hardly anything funny in it.

Not movies, but I think Bergman is quite overrated. He might have some good movies, but most of them are very, very boring

watching the original Cape Fear with Mitchum, great performance from another underrated actor

300.

BaldFriede wrote: Visitor13 wrote: I'm aware that cinema and music are apples and oranges, but in this case, I believe oranges are superior to apples, or at least, the best oranges are superior to the best apples. Music (not all music, obviously) has just so much more room for ambiguity and tension, mainly because its ties to 'reality' seem just so much looser than cinema's. Someone mentioned music as a resource cinema makes use of. Funnily enough, that Cinema Paradiso review Rocktopus quoted relies on an argument that I could somehow reuse here. While image and music can work together really well, there is a danger that the result will be 'hopelessly manipulative', that the ambiguous music will be tied to a less ambiguous image, and therefore will lose some of its depth and independence. To the observers, there will 'never be any doubt about what they're supposed to think' when they hear the soundtrack afterwards. While we're not talking film music here, the recent Tchaikovsky vs Stravinsky discussion is a good case in point. Some people said Tchaikovsky was cheesy. I think there's quite a lot of people who think that way. Would this be the case if Tchaikovsky's music wasn't hopelessly attached (in the popular mindset) to the scenes from his ballets? There you go, I guess in the long run music can only suffer from attachment to visuals, not necessarily cinematic ones. Another thing - this is probably quite flimsy, but what the hell - it seems that the adjective 'musical' is considered to be the greatest compliment one can award the product of a non-musical art. A 'musical' painting or poem seems to be synonymous with a truly great or beautiful painting or poem. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter are just some of the artists who wanted their work to be 'musical'. Whereas a piece of music does not have to be 'illustrative', it does not have to 'tell a story', it does not even have to be 'colourful' to be beautiful. And finally, why should I spend money to watch people act? I might as well go out and take a stroll round the city, I'll see enough people act to last me a whole week :P      A somewhat strange argument, since some of the most famous works of Stravinsky ("Firebird", "Rites of Spring", "Petrushka", "Pulcinella")  are ballet music!!!

I would even go so far and say Stravinsky is known for his ballets exclusively. ask anyone to name some works of him, and they'll come up with "Rites of Spring" and "Firebird", but hardly anyone will remember he wrote symphonies too ("wasn't there a Symphony of Psalms?"), and maybe they'll remember his "History of the Soldier" too, but you will be lucky if they think of his works for piano or his other orchestral works.
Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, will not only be known for his ballets, but also for his 1812 overture (the one with the cannon shots), his Piano Concerto No. 1, his violin concerto (both the violin concerto and the piano concerto are among the best known in their genre, and almost everyone knows the opening bars of his piano concerto No. 1; the phrase is almost as well known as the opening of Beethoven's 5th), his "Capriccio Italien", his "Symphony Pathetique" and his operas "Pique Dame" and "Eugen Onegin".
so on the whole, the statement was pure nonsense


Edited by BaldJean - August 13 2007 at 06:11

The pink panther movies are embarrasingly bad......pish poor hid even worse story lines. Sellers is overrated in my opinion,  and very unfunny.

Visitor13 wrote: BaldFriede wrote: Visitor13 wrote: I'm aware that cinema and music are apples and oranges, but in this case, I believe oranges are superior to apples, or at least, the best oranges are superior to the best apples. Music (not all music, obviously) has just so much more room for ambiguity and tension, mainly because its ties to 'reality' seem just so much looser than cinema's. Someone mentioned music as a resource cinema makes use of. Funnily enough, that Cinema Paradiso review Rocktopus quoted relies on an argument that I could somehow reuse here. While image and music can work together really well, there is a danger that the result will be 'hopelessly manipulative', that the ambiguous music will be tied to a less ambiguous image, and therefore will lose some of its depth and independence. To the observers, there will 'never be any doubt about what they're supposed to think' when they hear the soundtrack afterwards. While we're not talking film music here, the recent Tchaikovsky vs Stravinsky discussion is a good case in point. Some people said Tchaikovsky was cheesy. I think there's quite a lot of people who think that way. Would this be the case if Tchaikovsky's music wasn't hopelessly attached (in the popular mindset) to the scenes from his ballets? There you go, I guess in the long run music can only suffer from attachment to visuals, not necessarily cinematic ones. Another thing - this is probably quite flimsy, but what the hell - it seems that the adjective 'musical' is considered to be the greatest compliment one can award the product of a non-musical art. A 'musical' painting or poem seems to be synonymous with a truly great or beautiful painting or poem. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter are just some of the artists who wanted their work to be 'musical'. Whereas a piece of music does not have to be 'illustrative', it does not have to 'tell a story', it does not even have to be 'colourful' to be beautiful. And finally, why should I spend money to watch people act? I might as well go out and take a stroll round the city, I'll see enough people act to last me a whole week :P      A somewhat strange argument, since some of the most famous works of Stravinsky ("Firebird", "Rites of Spring", "Petrushka", "Pulcinella")  are ballet music!!! 'Argument' as in 'argument for the superiority of Stravinsky over Tchaikovsky'? A very strange argument, I agree. And not one that I am making. It's music minus the visuals for me, please. And both of these composers' music works beautifully without them. Just not to be hopelessly off-topic (again) - I see that plenty of people think that the Matrix sequels are bad as opposed to the original one. I guess this makes the original Matrix movie overrated. I think it's just as bad as the second one (haven't seen the third). The FX were awesome, everything else was quite bad.

to the "Matrix" comment. rather watch Rainer Werner Fassbinder's tv-movie "Welt am Draht" ("World on Wire"), which deals with the same theme, but in a much more intelligent way, without all these effects

I liked the "Animatrix" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328832/) a lot more than "The Matrix" itself!

That's a very big generalization, but I see your point.