Name the worst of all living film-makers.

[semper occultus]

paul w s anderson

[DrVolin]

I very much enjoyed Jackie Brown, but I have to say the rest of Tarantino's work is not my cup of tea. Jackie Brown is the only film in which he succeeds in creating something like his model. I was really outraged by Pulp Fiction. It has nothing at all to do with pulp fiction. In fact, in some ways, it is its complete opposite. If you want to see pulp fiction in a relatively recent film, watch Payback. Tarantino's half of Grindhouse again spectacularly fails to approach what it supposedly recreates. Rodriguez gets much closer while still innovating.

[Canadian_watcher]

M Night Shyamalan always lets me down.

Yeah it makes me think he must have stolen the script for "The Sixth Sense". Maybe met the guy who really wrote it, had him killed, you know, a la "Death Trap"

yeah, I liked the Sixth Sense even though I figured it out.. (maybe that's why I liked it, some to think of it)...

I second all nominations thus far put forward - particularly Bruckheimer and Tarantino.

[Bruce Dazzling]

Oh, oh, oh ... Eli freaking Roth!

King of mainstream torture porn, and just generally a dillweed.

He was one of the talking head commentators in a Scream documentary I was looking at the other night, and every time he came on I wanted to leap through the screen and throttle him.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Bastard. I specifically logged in moments ago to add f'ing Eli Roth to the list, and you beat me to it.

Might as well add Robert Rodriguez to the mix then, along with the previously-mentioned dooshbag Tarrantino..

self-important over-rated uber-hacks, the lot of them. And unbearable in their cameo appearances [Tarrantino was particularly dorky and over-anxious in his Pulp Fiction spot, and Eli Roth was just plain abominable in his role as the Jewish bat-wielding toughie in Inglorious Basterds].

I admittedly liked Pulp Fiction back when it was initially released, but I was younger and more easily impressed then. It was also Tarrantino's best offering, other than perhaps Reservoir Dogs. It's been all [rapidly] downhill from there; clearly the prevalence of these mongrels in cinema is part of an agenda to corrode the attention spans, perception abilities, and cultural sensibilities of the average film-goer [to the extent the average film-goer has any of the above traits in any measureable quantity to begin with].

[JackRiddler]

.

Ah, Tarantino's masturbation for a hipster set. I remember Paul Schrader complaining that Pulp Fiction had ushered in an era of mindless, meaningless violence. Paul Schrader. Author of Taxi Driver!

Anyway, Tarantino's not assaulting children. So I think Bay et al. are much more pernicious.

Just to add something cool to read, here's a retrospective review of Taxi Driver by J. Hoberman:

http://www.villagevoice.com/content/pri ... n/2452927/

35 Years Later, Taxi Driver Still Stuns

By J. Hoberman
published: March 16, 2011

Sony Pictures Repertory

Checkered past: De Niro drives angry.

Details:
Taxi Driver
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Sony Pictures Repertory
Film Forum, March 18 through 31


Some motion pictures produce the uncanny sensation of returning the spectator’s gaze. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—a movie in which the most celebrated line asks the audience, “Are you talkin’ to me?”—is one such film. It came, it saw, it zapped the body politic right between the eyes.


Celebrating its 35th anniversary with a newly restored print and a two-week Film Forum run, Taxi Driver was a powerfully summarizing work. It synthesized noir, neorealist, and New Wave stylistics; it assimilated Hollywood’s recent vigilante cycle, drafting then-déclassé blaxploitation in the service of a presumed tell-it-like-it-is naturalism that, predicated on a frank, unrelenting representation of racism, violence, and misogyny, was even more racist, violent, and misogynist than it allowed.


The 12th top-grossing movie of 1976, Taxi Driver was not just a hit but, like Psycho or Bonnie and Clyde, an event in American popular culture—perhaps even an intervention. Inspired by one failed political assassination (the 1972 shooting of presidential hopeful George Wallace), it inadvertently motivated another (the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan). The movie further established its 33-year-old director as both Hollywood’s designated artist and, after Taxi Driver was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes, an international sensation—the decisive influence on neo–New Wave filmmakers as varied as Spike Lee, Wong Kar-wai, and Quentin Tarantino.


Scorsese didn’t direct Taxi Driver so much as orchestrate its elements. Lasting nearly 20 minutes and fueled by Bernard Herrmann’s rhapsodic score, the de facto overture is a densely edited salmagundi of effects—slow motion, fragmenting close-ups, voluptuous camera moves, and trick camera placement—that may be the showiest pure filmmaking in any Hollywood movie since Touch of Evil. Certainly no American since Welles had so confidently presented himself as a star director. And yet Taxi Driver was essentially collaborative. It was the most cinephilic movie ever made in Hollywood, openly acknowledging Bresson, Hitchcock, Godard, avant-gardists Michael Snow and Kenneth Anger, and the John Ford of The Searchers. Moreover, the movie’s antihero, Travis Bickle—a homicidal combination of Dirty Harry and Norman Bates who describes himself as God’s Lonely Man—sprang from the brain of former film critic Paul Schrader and, as embodied for all eternity by the young Robert De Niro, all but instantly became a classic character in the American narrative alongside Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield.


Citizen of a sodden Sodom where the steamy streets are always wet with tears, among other bodily fluids, Bickle embarks each evening on a glistening sea of sleaze. Seen through his rain-smeared windshield, Manhattan becomes a movie—call it “Malignopolis”—in which, as noted by Amy Taubin in her terrific Taxi Driver monograph, “the entire cast of Superfly seems to have been assembled in Times Square” to feed Travis’s fantasies. The cab driver lives by night in a world of myth, populated by a host of supporting archetypes: the astonishing Jodie Foster as Iris, the 12-year-old hooker living the life in the rat’s-ass end of the ’60s, yet dreaming of a commune in Vermont; Harvey Keitel as her affably nauseating pimp; Peter Boyle’s witless cabbie sage; and Cybill Shepherd’s bratty golden girl, a suitably petit-bourgeois Daisy Buchanan to Travis’s lumpen Gatsby.


Brilliant and yet repellent, at times even hateful, Taxi Driver inspired understandable ambivalence. (At Cannes, the announcement that it had won the Palme d’Or was greeted with boos.) How could reviewers not be wary? Taxi Driver is nakedly opposed even to itself, as well as the culture that produced it. For Travis, all movies are essentially pornographic; had he met his creators, he would surely, as observed by Marshall Berman in his history of Times Square, consider them purveyors of “scum and filth.” It’s the slow deliberation with which this lunatic kicks over his TV and terminates his connection to social reality that signals his madness—and the filmmaker’s.


Like Werner Herzog’s Aguirre or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver is auteurist psychodrama. Not for nothing did Scorsese give himself a cameo playing a character even wiggier than Travis. Who can possibly imagine the internal fortitude or psychic cost this movie required or exacted? Certainly no one connected with Taxi Driver ever again reached such heights (or plumbed such depths), although Albert Brooks became a significant filmmaker in his own right, while Scorsese and De Niro would come close with Raging Bull and The King of Comedy—two movies that equal or surpass Taxi Driver in every way except as the embodiment of the historical spirit.


Recalling his youth, Baudelaire wrote of simultaneously experiencing the horror and the ecstasy of existence. So it is with Taxi Driver . The pagan debauchery the child Scorsese saw in Quo Vadis is played out in the Manhattan of 1975 A.D. Hysterical yet sublime, the movie crystallizes one of the worst moments in New York’s history—the city as America’s pariah, a crime-ridden, fiscally profligate, graffiti-festooned moral cesspool. Scorsese ups the ante by returning endlessly to his boyhood movie realm of 42nd Street, which, in the mid-’70s, was a lurid land of triple-X-rated cinema, skeevy massage parlors, cruising pimp mobiles, sidewalks crammed with hot-pants hookers, and the customers who on any given weekday evening, according to NYPD stats, were patronizing porn-shops at the rate of 8,000 per hour.


It was while Taxi Driver was in post-production that the Daily News ran the headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” The movie is Scorsese’s hometown farewell (a love letter quite different from Woody Allen’s). Like Nero, he torches the joint and picks up his lyre. Taxi Driver is a vision of a world that already knows it is lost. A third of a century later, the Checker cabs are gone, as are the taxi garages at the end of 57th Street and the all-night Belmore cafeteria. Times Square has been sanitized, the pestilent combat zone at Third Avenue and 13th Street where Iris peddles her underage charms has long since been gentrified. New York is no longer the planet’s designated Hell on Earth. (Six years after Taxi Driver, Blade Runner would dramatize a new urban space.)


No nostalgia, though: In other aspects, the world of Taxi Driver is recognizably ours. Libidinal politics, celebrity worship, sexual exploitation, the fetishization of guns and violence, racial stereotyping, the fear of foreigners—not to mention the promise of apocalyptic religion—all remain. Taxi Driver lives. See it again. And try to have a nice day.


jhoberman@villagevoice.com

[Project Willow]

I don't like threads centered on a negative, unless we're constructing a perp list for exposure purposes. You guys are mean.

Jane Campion

WTF?

Well, that somewhat explains your complete breakdown into irrationality in the misogyny thread. The piano was a beautiful movie about imperialism, love, and survival, or perhaps the perseverance of love in the midst of such forces and during a time when women were relegated to a status, oh, some place only slightly above that of a slave. Plus, we get to see Harvey Keitel's dick, what's not to like?

[Nordic]

The Piano is one of my favorite movies of all time.

[JackRiddler]

Well I remember being moved by The Piano (was it 20 years ago?!) but I never gave it the most essential test of a second viewing, so I'll get back to you when I do. (About half of the ones you think are great fall apart the second time.) Jane Campion seems most out of place on this list, even if I decide she's didactic. Didactic is far from the worst thing I can think of, when so many non-didactic ones stupify, or teach that humans are totally worthless and live truly only by inflicting suffering (the torture-porn genre).

[Project Willow]

My goodness Nordic, we have found an area of overlap, the movie is amongst my top 50.

If I were to single out a female director for some scorn it might be Nora Ephron. The cuteness factor kills, it KILLS!
Although the now infamous "I'll have what she's having" scene has served some not insignificant social benefit over the intervening years, according to what I hear anyway.

[8bitagent]

M Night Shyamalan always lets me down.

M Night is interesting, as I feel there are visionary elements in some of his films...as in, with some clever editing, some of his movies could be turned into brilliant near flawless scenes.

If I had to pick, Signs is by far my favorite. There's scenes in that film that truly gripped me, like when theyre seeing the stuff on tv. There's part of Unbreakable I think worked, and I liked some of The Village.

His last three films have just been terrible in my view.

But regarding this topic, there's so many bad directors I'm more interested in what people think are visionary directors.

Also, since people mentioned Faces of Death and Hostel, anyone here seen A Serbian Film or Martyrs? I've been hestitant to watch them, as the revies make them seem truly unrelenting and soul shattering to watch. I remember barely making it through Irreversible, and I notice that French dramas are much more disturbing and upsetting than any American horror film.

[Canadian_watcher]

M Night Shyamalan always lets me down.

M Night is interesting, as I feel there are visionary elements in some of his films...as in, with some clever editing, some of his movies could be turned into brilliant near flawless scenes.

exactly! the promise is there.. and I think he's capable of artistry. But every time I watch, there's the "pfffffft" factor again.

[Searcher08]

I don't like threads centered on a negative, unless we're constructing a perp list for exposure purposes. You guys are mean.

Jane Campion

WTF?

Well, that somewhat explains your complete breakdown into irrationality in the misogyny thread. The piano was a beautiful movie about imperialism, love, and survival, or perhaps the perseverance of love in the midst of such forces and during a time when women were relegated to a status, oh, some place only slightly above that of a slave. Plus, we get to see Harvey Keitel's dick, what's not to like?

No NO NO!!! that was you Fukashimaing into footstamping emotionalism Obviously, some films age well and I dont think this does, especially given it was dreadful to start with <boom-tish> I just thought it was dreary and dull and as subtle as the Haka. And you know what **even worse** then The Piano (I'm getting into this, its fun!) 'Holy Smoke!'.
THIS is why she deserves to be in this list (except the list seems to be covering just about everyone )

I used to have two hands and two feet. Then I saw 'Holy Smoke!' AND BY THE END I HAD GNAWED MY OWN FIST and FEET OFF. (**)It was sooooo humourless and self-indulgent. The characters were two of the least believable I have ever seen, the script should have been given the Ol Yeller treatment. There are some films that are so bad they become great, other are just bad. This is firmly in the latter category. Have you ever tried to change a channel with bleeding stumps? - and this despite having Kate Winslett nekkid!!(*)

(*) I cant remember if it had Harvey's dick in it, but he did wear a red dress. It didnt suit him
(**) Washing ashore years later in BC...

[brekin]

.
.
I agree with everyone so far, and this director isn't the worst of all living film makers, he has just gotten very, very bad for a long time. Along with George Lucas he is in the category of from best to worst.

It's Tim Burton everyone!



O.K. Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Edward ScissorHands & The First Batman were pure genius. But he has now become the P. Diddy of
Filmmakers, ruining classics rapid fire.

And his reward for all this? The muse Helena Bonham Carter.

This probably won't be popular.
I also loathe Johnny Depp.


2010 Alice in Wonderland

2007 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2005 Corpse Bride

2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

2003 Big Fish

2001 Planet of the Apes

1999 Sleepy Hollow

1996 Mars Attacks!

1994 Ed Wood

1992 Batman Returns

1990 Edward Scissorhands

1989 Batman

1988 Beetle Juice

1985 Pee-wee's Big Adventure

[jam.fuse]

Peter Jackson for his rape of Tolkien.

Ridley Scott for his neo-L. Reifenshtahlesque(sp)? Blackhawk Down.