Movies That Are Underrated.....

Yes! That scene is great--so absurd, so painfully shallow. My favorite parts are when Bateman philosophizes about the 80's pop bands, especially Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News.

"I think Invisible Touch was the group's undisputed masterpiece. It's an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums."

"In Too Deep is the most moving pop song of the 1980s, about monogamy and commitment. The song is extremely uplifting. Their lyrics are as positive and affirmative as anything I've heard in rock."

All delivered in Christian Bale's dead-on slickster voice in situations that are otherwise tense and disturbing. Brilliant!

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You were a demon and a lawyer? Wow. Insert joke here."

Mary Loquacious, I really like your taste in movies.

Christian Bale's performance in American Psycho is one of the best performances in the last 10 years and he didn't win a single award for it. Shame! I can't believe people dismissed this for its ending. I guarantee you that the film's conclusion was a lot more satisfying than the book's which hardly ended at all.

In fact, I rate American Psycho as the best adaptation of a source material ever filmed. Usually Hollywood messes it up. But in this case they definitely improved on the source.

Does anyone agree with me that only a woman could have directed this film as well as it was directed? A man would have made the violence much too sickly. Harron left the violence in the audience's minds more than on the film and it worked. Thumbs up to Mary Harron. Hope she does more in the future.

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I couldn't believe that she knew my name. Some of my best friends didn't know my name.

Loved that movie! I don't know why...it's an odd movie to love. It sure was smart, wasn't it? Speaking of Hostess products, who likes Snowballs?

Anyhoo...
I think I liked the part when he was listening to music and talking about his taste in music...
Christian Bale has come a long way from Swing Kids...I wonder what he was doing that whole time, and what he's doing now.

Right back at ya .

Yes! I have been telling people this ever since the movie came out. The book... well, it was good, but it got lost in the gore--Ellis got too caught up in it--so the satire in the book got almost lost in the shuffle. People weren't getting it. The film corrects that problem, and does it well, allowing the satire to come out in the forefront. It's definitely a better telling of the story, and I agree, it's one of the very few cases where Hollywood got it right . Not the least because of Harron, whose I Shot Andy Warhol was great, too, and Bale. He's a chameleon. And hey, he did get at least one award: Fangoria named him their best actor. Small consolation, I know... and yes, I do read Fangoria. Stop looking at me like that.

About the female director thing... It's an interesting theory, one I hadn't thought of. I know she co-wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner (who also wrote Go Fish), so there's two women adapting the novel, as well as a female director... You know, I think you're right. Not that violence is limited to the male perspective, but so much of it in the novel was a macho thing on Bateman's part. It's much more interesting to not know every graphic detail--but did you notice, near the end when the secretary finds his sketchbook, that some of the pictures show killings that were in the novel and not the film? That was a nice touch, a subtle one, that maybe only a female director would've thought of as an alternative to buckets o' blood onscreen...

Whew. That was a long one.

I thought American Psycho was a very good, very funny comedy when I first saw it.

I second Kingpin.

I nominate Vanilla Sky to this thread. The second best movie of last year is hated, hated, hated by everyone.

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**** the Lakers!

the book was so much better (American Psycho)

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I am Jack's smirking revenge.

Hiss. Boo.

It was a good book, I can't deny that... but it's a better movie.

I'd have to say Memento. I thuroughly enjoyed that movie. I love mind benders, and this one twisted my brain into a knot.
Half the people I saw it with hated it because they couldn't follow it. "Why is it backwards?"
It didn't play down to the IQ threshold of a 14 year old movie rat, so I think it lost a big chunk of the movie-going-population.

*remembers dreamily... * Kind of reminds me of Jacob's Ladder...

-GTB

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Puppets are people too.

Me too. We call them 'puzzle movies' in our family. Cube is another one. I can't think of any others off-hand besides Memento, which you mentioned.

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Good times, noodle salad.

I really enjoyed Cube, but I have a hard time reccommending it to people because it gets so crazy towards the end. If you broke the movie into three acts...act one and two are excellent; act three is the weakest part of the movie, save the last two minutes.

I'll have to give it a long overdue second watching, and see if I see what you mean.

I was particularly annoyed with the pissed-off social-worker-type lady.

Yeah...I agree, she's was just as over-the-top as the guy I disliked.

Cube is a movie people have been telling me to see for a few years now, and I just never got around to it.

I thought that Nurse Betty was a great movie--it got good reviews, too, but many people haven't seen it, or Neil LaBute's first film, In the Company of Men. That one is just brutal, mesmerizing. Good stuff.

Mary Lo

I thought The Iron Giant was a great movie. It's a really good story about trust and friendship. It's too bad, I think that peole avoided it because it was a cartoon. Definately underrated.

-GTB

I agree Greg, I have a soft spot for The Iron Giant. I always bring it up and someone has to say, "Isn't that a cartoon?" To which I reply, "well, yeah". And then they do the pft remark and we move on.

I really wish more people would watch it, it has a lot of good messages in it.

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"I was walking down the street with my friend and he said, "I hear music", as if there is any other way you can take it in. You're not special, that's how I receive it too. I tried to taste it but it did not work." - Mitch Hedberg

Dare I say, The Iron Giant was the last great piece of traditional animation that we'll ever get to see in cinemas. I thought it was a beautiful film.

Underrated gems. The Bill & Ted Saga. Classic. They're better than Wayne's World and I'm a Mike Myers nut. Those Bill & Ted films had such lofty ambitions. The first dealt with history, the second with religion. What other teenage comedies can say they dealt with such themes. Granted, it didn't always work, but I'll always applaud effort. And Bill & Ted was a great work of effort, if nothing else.

"Wild Stallyns"

I somewhat agree val. Better than Wayne's World? I don't think so. The good thing about the two different "franchises" is that what you don't get in one, you get in the other. So I'd say they even out.

Multiplicity, I've always felt, is highly underrated. Didn't do particularly well at the box office, and I rarely hear anyone talk about it...but I loved it. Cracked up through the whole thing.