"Don't Look Up" is indeed terrible, but there have been lousy nominees aplenty over the years. I actually kind of like "Greatest Show;" it's not great, but once one gets a sense of DeMille's directing style (it's especially apparent in "The Ten Commandments," in that he never stopped directing silent pictures; he just added sound), it's tolerable. I've seen a lot of worse pictures that were supposed to be "important."
There are plenty of dogs that actually won. "Cimmaron" is generally ranked among the worst, but it's just dull, not bad. For sheer lousiness, though, it's hard to beat either "Cavalcade" or "How Green Was My Valley," though I'll stipulate that I don't like that one because I can't stand John Ford (especially "The Quiet Man"). As for McKay, the more films he does (and I liked "The Big Short"), the more obvious and smaller his bag of tricks becomes. I'm thinking particularly of "Don't Look Up," with its overripe "aren't we outrageous to tell truth to power this way?" vibe, but also the atrocious "Winning Time," about the Lakers. Too much talking to the camera, outright lies about people and events, and ramping everything up to eleven. Farrell (who would have been awful as Jerry Buss) should consider himself lucky that he got edged out. --Dave Sikula On Friday, March 25, 2022 at 8:41:16 PM UTC-7 PGage wrote: > This is a much more difficult call than naming the best film ever > nominated for Best Picture (obviously, The Godfather). I did a quick Google > search and saw a lot of different nominees, some of which I thought were > ridiculous (I really liked JoJo Rabbit). It’s hard to go back in time to > judge just how bad old films were. I have seen “Greatest Show on Earth”, > and it’s not good, but I’ve seen Ivanhoe too and it’s not clear to me it is > that much better. Dr. Dolittle has been my go to worst Best Film nominee (I > hated it even as a kid in the demo when it came out). More recent films in > contention for me are Prince of Tides and Extremely Loud and Incredibly > Close. > > But I finally got around to watching “Don’t Look Up” this evening and, > wow, is it bad. It is basically a mediocre 4 min SNL sketch stretched to 2 > hrs and 20 minutes. I don’t often agree with Sikula, but in this case he > has been understated in his criticism. I write this as a huge fan of Vice > and, especially “The Big Short”, which is one of my favorite films of the > last 25 years. DLU may not be the worst film ever nominated for Best > Picture, but if it’s not it is in the top three. > > I’m not that surprised the film stank; they took a big swing and whiffed. > It happens. I think it would have been a lot better had they played it > straight, as in Big Short, but it’s easy to say that after the fact. But I > am shocked it got nominated. Why did that happen? Who thinks this is a > great movie? Even if you thought it was sporadically amusing, like > Anchorman II, you can’t really think it is good. I laughed at one joke, > which paid off during the credits, and that might just have been relief > that it was finally over. > > It strikes me that the thinking behind nominating this film is the same as > that behind nominating other stinkers like Green Book, Blind Side and The > Help. Lazy arm chair liberals mark it as somehow making a socially > significant point, and they want to pat themselves on the back for getting > behind it. > > > On Sun, 26 Dec 2021 at 11:03 PM [email protected] > >> Let me just say that, after enduring the grisly "Don't Look Up" tonight, >> I owe Mr. Sorkin an apology. McKay's effort (emphasis on the "effort") is >> so inept as to make Sorkins' look like a 30's Paramount comedy. >> >> --Dave Sikula >> > -- > Sent from Gmail Mobile > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/dcf3492d-05ac-4a37-966c-35695282c579n%40googlegroups.com.
