This piece by Ben Shapiro of Big Hollywood (apparently a far-right Michael Savage-loving bag of douche among his other faults) is one of the dumbest film articles I've ever read, steeped in poor writing, bad argumentation, pointless name-dropping and a distinct lack of facts - not to mention an apparently deliberate attempt to piss off as many film buffs as possible.
Besides the whole pointlessness and subjectivity of the overrated debate, Mr. Shapiro - who must be someone's son or distant in-bred cousin - writes a pathetic little screed that wouldn't be worthy of being posted on Film General. And yet he seems to have an audience of thouands in a popular online publication.
Let us see what Big Hollywood is getting for their money. I'll abstain from commenting on David Lynch, Darren Arnofsky or Woody Allen since, I'm ashamed to admit, I've seen none of their films. Well, except for select comments that I can pluck out of context.
Top 10 Most Overrated Directors of All Time
A redundant headline that can perhaps be blamed on the editor. We'll let this pass.
Ever since the advent of the modern motion picture industry, critics have praised directors as the key to great film.
Um... no. For most of early Hollywood, stars and producers were regarded as the primary movers-and-shakers behind a film. The auteur theory as such only came about in the '50s with the advent of Cahiers du Cinema and their looks at John Ford and Howard Hawks.
So you're one sentence into your article and have already made an idiotic comment. This bodes well.
The auteur theory of cinema is idiotic
I wouldn't say it's "idiotic", but I might agree it's overly reductive and overused by certain critics. The most important name on a film is variable, and quite often it's not the director. Fair enough.
since writing is truly the key
So replace one idiotic, overly simplistic critical dogma with another? Okay.
It is one of the great travesties of artistic justice that no one remembers the writers of great movies – nobody knows Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, for example, but everyone remembers Frank Capra.
It's one of the great travesties of universal justice that more people know who you are than any of the people you just name-dropped.
Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong. There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong. Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time…
Wait, wait, wait - I'm sorry, what the fuck is this? You just forced us to sit through a little self-satisfied rant about the idiocy of the auteur theory, and then you create a lengthy list-based article based around the concept of the auteur?
Well, I guess consistency isn't going to be a hallmark of Mr. Shapiro's article.
Ridley Scott: Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.
I almost agree with this, as I'm no big fan of Ridley Scott's. So not a bad start.
Michael Mann: All style, no substance.
That's really all he has to say. That's not an abridged quote. Look it up yourself.
I think you can see what kind of analytical mind we're dealing with here. This might pass muster as a random message board post but as part of a lengthy published article, it's beyond worthless. Especially when he has space for extended rants and idiocy regarding other directors.
David Lean:
You just fucked with the wrong blogger, pal. Now the gloves are coming off.
Everything Lean made is too long by at least half an hour.
Which thirty of the eighty-six minutes of Brief Encounter would you cut out, oh great one?
I know it’s mortal sin to suggest that Laurence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ryan’s Daughter are anything less than masterpieces, but … they’re all less than masterpieces.
Thanks for the insight. Your criticism of Lean amounts to "his films are long", which immediately labels you as a pillock. And who in hell thinks Ryan's Daughter is a masterpiece anyway (besides me of course)?
Mike Nichols: No. Just no. The Graduate is contemptible and snort-worthy spoiled 1960s-child angst. The ending of that movie alone makes it unworthy of human viewing.
I have sympathy for this particular opinion, inasmuch as I hated The Graduate, but this is the only film Mr. Shapiro seems apt to comment on in Nichols' lengthy career. Nothing on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Catch-22 or Primary Colors or Angels in America or Charlie Wilson's War, all good-to-great films.
In fact, who in hell thinks Nichols as an all-time great director anyway? He seems to be one of those craftsmen like Michael Curtiz, Robert Wise and Fred Zinnemann whose films are better-known than their director.
Quentin Tarantino: I recently watched Inglourious Basterds and marveled at Tarantino’s skill. But he is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema.
Meh, I like Tarantino's early work but I agree with this up to a point, at least in regards to his last few films.
Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story
Wait. What? What?
What!?!
Are you seriously arguing that Tarantino is a bad storyteller? That's his greatest fucking asset as a filmmaker, you imbecile. Argue that he's self-indulgent and self-important, that he's completely unoriginal and rips off older movies, that he's overly fascinated with gorey violence, that he cares more about wowing the Cannes crowd than making a good film. But don't sit there and tell me Tarantino cannot tell a story.
To paraphrase William McAdoo on Warren G. Harding,
No one in the history of Planet Earth ever cared what William McAdoo said about Warren G. Harding. Ever. This is name-dropping at it's most puerile and obnoxious, and funnily enough it comes in the midst of mocking Tarantino for same.
This would be the historical equivalent of Tarantino using a Death Rides a Horse track in Kill Bill: it might sound cool, but no one cares.
Sometimes Tarantino’s films actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner … until the idea dies of servitude and overwork.
Do you even understand what you just wrote, you pretentious douchebag?
From his otherwise skipped-over Woody Allen commentary:
As a side note, he made Diane Keaton into a “legitimate actress,”
Apparently The Godfather films didn't do that?
Christ, what a dunderhead...
Martin Scorsese('s)... films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.
Yeah, I might agree with this, but that doesn't make it bad. I don't think Scorsese wants us to like Tommy DeVito or Travis Bickle or Ginger Rothstein.
With the article wheezing to a climax, here comes the heavy title-dropping! Fasten your seatbelts.
Nobody cares what happens to Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed (in fact, in one screening I saw, people cheered when he got it in the head).
Arguing a generalization by anecdote. Nice.
The Aviator takes as long to tell as Howard Hughes did to live.
Modestly clever I guess.
on a side note, there is no excuse for killing Liam Neeson in the first ten minutes of a film
Yeah, because his leaden and wooden presence is rarely necessary for a film to be entertaining. In any case, Scorsese is hardly the only one guilty of this - Neeson has made a career out of playing doomed mentors.
Casino is nasty, brutish, and long.
Yes, it is, but it's also Scorsese's most complex and underrated film. And your quoting Hobbes, while slightly less pathetic than your McAdoo namedropping, fails to impress anyone.
Goodfellas is similarly disgusting – you feel the need to take a shower after watching.
Disgusting? Well, it's not exactly a paragon of moral virtue, but I'd save that classification for something like a gore-soaked slasher flick.
The Last Temptation of Christ is baffling.
That's it. It's baffling. Genius.
Raging Bull is gross
What are you, six? Gross is when your classmate picks his nose and rubs the booger on your jacket. A boxer's life degenerating into depravity is many things, but "gross" is far from the word I'd use.
Mean Streets is gross and soporific
It's my love for the bizarrely dichotomous perhaps, but I love the mixture of an incredibly immature comment with a "big word" in the same sentence. Indubitibly, dude.
Taxi Driver is perhaps the most overrated film in Hollywood history — dreary, grungy, and subzero.
Dreary, yes. Grungy? Explain that one. Subzero? Now you're making shit up.
1. Alfred Hitchcock:
The sad thing is I'm not at all surprised.
He never made a great film.
To make such a broad claim about a director who made sixty-seven feature length films, and at least a dozen acknowledged classics, you'd better have some real ammunition to bring to the table. Sadly, I'm expecting Ben to be feeding .22 bullets into his .50 machine gun.
The psychoanalysis at the end of Psycho is laughable.
I think most everyone will agree that the Simon Oakland exposition scene at the end is overlong and completely unnecessary. But that's about three minutes of a two-hour film.
North by Northwest relies on the tried-and-true random helpful coincidence to save our hero, time and again.
Would you make this criticism of Dickens or Shakespeare or any other novelist who uses coincidences? I'd actually say North by Northwest has really clever plotting, and they get him into trouble as much as they get him out of it. Not realistic, perhaps, but certainly excellent for that type of film.
It brings to mind one of Twain’s rules of writing,
How many times do I have to tell you? No one cares.
Spellbound once again relies on amateur psychoanalysis.
Okay, I'll give him this one, since there's not much more to it.
Notorious is the same movie as Rebecca.
Excuse me, what the hell?
Notorious: a CIA Agent recruits the daughter of an executed Nazi spy to help break up a ring of neo-Nazis, marrying one of them. She falls in love with the agent, but gets poisoned by her husband and his mother.
Rebecca: a middle-class woman marries a handsome, rich widower who worships his ex-wife. As she struggles to adjust to her new life, her husband's chief servant tries to drive her insane. Meanwhile there's a murder investigation into Mrs. DeWinter's death.
Yeah, no difference at all between those two.
Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button.
If you have the attention span of a caffeinated chimp.
Vertigo makes one reach for the cyanide.
Why? Care to back up this argument with a modicum of analysis or actual criticism? Or are you just a prick little kid who can only laugh, point and name-call at things he doesn't like?
Wait, I know this one!
In some ways, this little rant of mine is the pot calling the kettle black. But I have an excuse: I'm a blogger whose stuff is read by maybe a dozen people. Mr. Shapiro doesn't have that excuse. Plus he wrote a really stupid piece of shit article and I'm just making fun of him.
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