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redPen 
"Because I said so!"
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 Posted - 06/23/2007 : 06:52:27
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I have to admit, there are two notorious Hollywood "flops" that I really enjoy watching.
Heaven's Gate is one of the most legendary financial flops in film history. Michael Cimino, hot off his huge success with The Deer Hunter, proceeded to make a 6-hour (later cut to 3.5 hours, then re-released in a butchered 2-hour version) panoramic western/romance, during which he spent every dime that United Artists studios had! (This one film alone almost bankrupted the company, and forced its sale!)
Seven Years in Tibet is a little-known film starring an against-type Brad Pitt in a true story about a German mountain climber during the early years of WWII who is imprisoned when he crosses the country line in the Himalayas, and upon his escape, ends up in neutral Tibet, where he is introduced to the then-prepubescent Dalai Lama, and they strike up a friendship.
For me, what makes or breaks a movie regardless of genre is the characters. If I care for them, get into the story so far that I don't remember I'm watching a movie, etc., that's a movie I love. These two are great examples of that. I list them among my favorites despite the fact that hardly anyone has seen them.
What's in your collection that raises eyebrows???? |
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GHcool
"Forever a curious character."
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Posted - 06/23/2007 : 07:53:16
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| Probably the greatest correlation between how much I enjoyed a movie and how much money that movie lost at the box office would be Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Yes, the story and characters were crap and it was not a perfect film from an animator's perspective, but it broke new ground and took me to places I've never seen before. |
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ChocolateLady 
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 06/23/2007 : 09:48:33
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I wouldn't call them flops. Call them sleepers or cult movies. For instance Ressurection (1980) wasn't a hit at the box office but I thought it was wonderful, and it got two Oscar nominations. Even so, how many people remember that movie?
Harold and Maude was considered a box office flop, but I wouldn't mind having it on DVD for my collection.
And the original Fun With Dick and Jane was a wonderful movie that had charm, style and lots of laughs, and I loved it. Apparently didn't do very well back then, so they remade it the Jim Carrey.
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Edited by - ChocolateLady on 06/23/2007 09:52:17 |
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Tori
"I don't get it...."
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Posted - 06/23/2007 : 19:57:36
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| I didn't realize Seven Years In Tibet was a flop. I liked it. |
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duh 
"catpurrs"
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Posted - 06/23/2007 : 20:41:00
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quote:
Originally posted by ChocolateLady
I wouldn't call them flops. Call them sleepers or cult movies. For instance Ressurection (1980) wasn't a hit at the box office but I thought it was wonderful, and it got two Oscar nominations. Even so, how many people remember that movie?
Thank you for the reminder of this film. It is one of my all-time favorites.
quote:
Harold and Maude was considered a box office flop, but I wouldn't mind having it on DVD for my collection.
I've never seen that one, but am surprised to learn that it was a flop, because it has such cult status.
I'd have to say that 'Conan The Destroyer' was definitely a flop, a very great disappointment after 'Conan The Barbarian'. Yet, I've seen it dozens and dozens of times because it was a favorite of my children when they were very small. Go figure. "I sawr it, I sawr it," still provokes laughs in this house. |
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Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
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Posted - 06/23/2007 : 23:13:49
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[FIRST, A BRIEF RANT ABOUT "SUCCESS"]
When you think about it, it's odd that we really only have two ways of telling whether a movie is a "success":
(1) It makes a lot of money at the box office.
(2) It garners a lot of positive reviews and/or awards from critics.
Financial success is fairly easy to measure (despite notoriously inaccurate accounting in the movie business), but it's odd that the only real "measure" of artistic success is how the critics react. Critics can get it wrong. They do it all the time. I can't even read Entertainment Weekly or Premiere because I think their critics are completely incompetent. And as for the so-called "awards season" which culminates in the Oscars, it's really more about marketing, politics, and posturing than it is about actual artistic quality. Notice how comedies, for instance, are frequently overlooked at awards time when actors, writers, and directors agree that making a funny comedy is just about the most difficult type of movie to achieve.
It reminds me of a quote from Barton Fink in which the title character ruminates on the idea of success: "I feel I'm on the brink of success... Not the kind of success where the critics fawn over you or the producers like Derek make a lot of money. No, a real success." One of that film's stars, Steve Buscemi, recently appeared in a documentary about William Greaves in which he said he didn't measure the "success" of a movie in terms of box office returns or critical reaction.
My point here is that the distinction between "success" and "flop" is arbitrary and unfair.
That said, my favorite film "flops" include: Shock Treatment, Popeye, The Hudsucker Proxy, UHF, Lost Highway, Bring Out The Dead, Joe Vs. The Volcano, and The Ladykillers. |
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TitanPa
"Here four more"
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Posted - 06/24/2007 : 06:44:02
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| I really liked 'THe Majestic' with Jim Carrey |
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ChocolateLady
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 06/24/2007 : 06:46:56
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Last night they had North Country on television which must have been a critical success since both Charlize Theron and Frances McDormand were nominated for Oscars for their performances. However, I'd never heard of the movie before and I'm sure it was never in the theatres here, since we saw quite a few movies that year, and we certainly would have noticed anything with both Theron and McDormand - two of our favourite actresses. Was it a boxoffice failure? I'm thinking it probably was. But if we take other movies of the same genre like Erin Brockovich or Silkwood, I'd have to say that North Country was better. I'd have to say that only Norma Rae was better.
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ChocolateLady
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 06/24/2007 : 06:50:14
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quote:
Originally posted by TitanPa
I really liked 'THe Majestic' with Jim Carrey
And Man in the Moon wasn't good? It was excellent. So was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That Hollywood and the boxoffices seem to be trying to keep a good dramatic actor from taking dramatic parts because he's also a comic genius, is a real shame.
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MM0rkeleb 
"Better than HBO."
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Posted - 06/24/2007 : 18:26:05
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| I have a whole accolade devoted to films I really like but were (so far as I know) never successful in any way - financially, critically, or retrospectively. 'Course, it's hard to tell, especially for the older ones, since I don't know how they were received when they first came out. |
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Demisemicenturian
"Four ever European"
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Posted - 06/24/2007 : 18:57:13
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quote:
Originally posted by M0rkeleb
I have a whole accolade devoted to films I really like but were (so far as I know) never successful in any way - financially, critically, or retrospectively.
I enjoyed American Dreamz and Breakdown, and really like The Mosquito Coast - those are the only ones I have seen. |
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Stalean
"Back...OMG"
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Posted - 06/25/2007 : 01:01:00
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O Brother, Where Art Thou? There are some very good discussions in the IMDB forum, at the OBWAT? link, about why some people try to like this film as much as others do but can't seem to 'get' it or like it as much as the other Coen Brothers' films, e.g. The Big Lebowski.
What I find most interesting about OBWAT? is when it was released the critics hated it. It even had a 'rotten' on Rotten Tomatoes. But, as time has passed, the ratings have grown, without any added reviews or reviewers, to a 'fresh' of 79%. Here is a question for knowledgeable fwiffers, can critics change their reviews/ratings for a film after having given it their original rating? |
Edited by - Stalean on 06/25/2007 01:26:15 |
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randall 
"I like to watch."
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Posted - 06/25/2007 : 02:44:18
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quote:
Originally posted by Stalean
Here is a question for knowledgeable fwiffers, can critics change their reviews/ratings for a film after having given it their original rating?
If you're talking about offline, one of the most egregious examples was Time magazine over 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in 1968-69. Originally hated it, warned readers away, the worst possible review. Then, their "film capsule" column gradually began to warm to the picture until less than a year later it was calling 2001 a masterpiece.
I've noticed that happening to almost all of Stanley Kubrick's films. |
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Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
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Posted - 06/25/2007 : 02:58:16
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quote:
Originally posted by Stalean
O Brother, Where Art Thou? There are some very good discussions in the IMDB forum, at the OBWAT? link, about why some people try to like this film as much as others do but can't seem to 'get' it or like it as much as the other Coen Brothers' films, e.g. The Big Lebowski.
People seem to forget that Lebowski itself was a commercial flop and a critical disappointment at first. Polygram dumped it into theaters in the winter of 1998, critics were blase, box-office was mediocre, and it disappeared quietly. It took nearly five years before it began to become a cult hit, largely thanks to video and DVD. I seem to remember O Brother doing terribly with critics but not-half-bad at the box office at the time, largely thanks to interest in the OBWAT soundtrack.
I've noticed something about the Coen films which might account for a lot of the bad reviews they get. At first, many of their films seem so odd and stylized that they take a while to get used to. I can remember only sort of liking Lebowski when I saw it during its initial theatrical run and not liking O Brother at all when I first saw it on video. But now I'm a fan of both those films, and they're both in my DVD collection. One criticism frequently levied at the Coens is that they throw in a lot of gratuitous weird stuff -- oddball characters, stylized dialogue -- just to amuse themselves. But once I've seen the movies a few times through, this stuff doesn't seem odd at all and in fact seems quite natural. An example is George Clooney's dialogue all throughout O Brother, his purposely stilted and flowery speech. Once I got past the oddness of it, I found it to be one of the funniest things in the movie. And on first viewing, Lebowski seemed like a hodge-podge of disparate elements (1940s noir meets early 1990s California), but now it feels like all this stuff somehow belongs together in one movie.
That's why I said that the distinction between success and flop is often unfair. It seems like a movie's fate is decided in one week. The initial reviews come in (largely from newspaper critics in a few major cities) and the opening weekend box office is tallied, and based on that, we call a movie a hit or a miss. |
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ChocolateLady
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 06/25/2007 : 06:24:26
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| That really hits the nail, Joe. I think the only Coen brothers film that "made it" was Fargo, and while I think it is a great film, I can't say it is my favourite Coen brothers film. |
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GHcool
"Forever a curious character."
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Posted - 06/25/2007 : 18:20:25
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quote:
Originally posted by Randall
quote:
Originally posted by Stalean
Here is a question for knowledgeable fwiffers, can critics change their reviews/ratings for a film after having given it their original rating?
If you're talking about offline, one of the most egregious examples was Time magazine over 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in 1968-69. Originally hated it, warned readers away, the worst possible review. Then, their "film capsule" column gradually began to warm to the picture until less than a year later it was calling 2001 a masterpiece.
I've noticed that happening to almost all of Stanley Kubrick's films.
Psycho had a similar history. As it was first released, critics couldnt look past the gore, the bra, and the Oedipus complex stuff. Lay people often make the mistake of judging a film by its characters' personality traits. If the characters are disgusting people that do disgusting things and you personally wouldn't want to spend an afternoon with that character, then the movie is disgusting and you wouldn't want to spend an afternoon watching that movie. This is the falacy people make when they say they don't like horror movies or gangster/mafia movies. This falacy is tolerable in the general moviegoing public, but serious film critics should not fall into this trap.
Anyway, Psycho was panned by critics because it was grotesque and exploitative even though Hitchcock himself would probably agree with these adjectives. They aren't criticisms, but objective descriptions of the film. Audiences, on the other hand, generally liked Psycho and within a month or so, critics started reappraising it. Even after it was reappraised, it took a little longer to become a "classic" than Vertigo or North by Northwest did.
The Wizard of Oz and Its a Wonderful Life were generally well liked in its time, but they didn't become the classics we think of them today until they they started airing on television. |
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Greatest Flops
