Most Overrated Movies

Citizen Kane feels like Orson Welles had a lot of ideas and no way to tie them together so he came up with something simple and slapped it all together to make it one film when it's really a lot of shorts compiled into one thing. That's how I remember it anyway. It's been roughly thirteen years since I watched it a second time so I could be remembering it wrong.

I think pretty much any French or German or Italian (except their spaghetti Westerns) film is trash so anything popular from those countries I can't fathom liking so I guess I'd find them, ugh, "overrated".

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For Citizen Kane, context is very important. The stuff Welles did in the film had not been done, at least to the extent and contextual effectiveness, he did up to that point. Talky films were still very young when he started work on Citizen Kane, so a lot of the tricks you mentioned were yet to be explored. In effect the audience would have been, from my understanding and most likely, floored from seeing all of these things for the first time.

I personally think it's great because I love to see movies where someone has an outward appearance of success and an inward truth of utter failure, which is done here to great effect.

Yup; that's similar how I feel about it too, because it felt like a movie that tried just a bit too hard to do things to force itself to seem like a great movie, rather than allowing that to happen more naturally, right down to the overly obvious, ironic symbolism of the camera shot that lingers on The Statue Of Liberty in the background, contrasting the brutality of the mob hit taking place in the fore in the "Leave the gun, take the canoli" scene. Good scene, but it didn't need to force the theme so hard.

I think most of the movies in this thread are overrated. The question is which one is the most overrated?

The Shawshank Redemption. It's number 1 on imdb's top 250. It's a well acted, reasonably enjoyable film, but it is pretty generic and predictable. There is no world where I could ever consider The Shawshank Redemption one of the greatest films of all time. It doesn't even make my top 300.

I've only seen it once and really liked it but that was back when it first came out. I wonder how I'd feel about it now?

I don't disagree on any particular point. I just had a brainspark on the fact a lot of Welles camera work, the montage, etc. were new ideas he was exploring. I mean this very much tongue in cheek: Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one of the seminal slasher films that explored territory that was new at the time. That alone did not make me a fan of the genre!

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Oh, not to worry. I said "What's not to like" as a light-hearted way of agreeing TGTBTW is so obviously enjoyable. I'll try to track down some of the director's other work.

About half our evening watching consists of Korean serial dramas and movies. My absolute favorite is "The Beauty Inside" (the 2015 movie, not the series that came later). Highly recommend it if you haven't seen it. Thoroughly charming. And quite the directorial feat ... I think 120-some different actors to play the main character.

I've steered clear of the discussion around the meaning of "overrated" or "underrated." Kind of like dancing on the edge of the razor. All I'd say is there's a useful difference between saying "Citizen Kane is overrated" and "I consider Citizen Kane overrated." But it's understandable that in the exuberance of discussion we conflate opinion with fact.

Thanks for the discussion!

Yeah I figured you meant it positively. Kim Jee-woon did Bittersweet Life, also with Byung-hun Lee, which is a Korean gangster film that I find excellent. He did Age of Shadows too, which is a period piece set before World War II, also with Byung-hun Lee and Song Kang-ho. It's thoroughly entertaining too.

I haven't seen Beauty Inside, though, so I could look for it. There was a stretch of about three years some time ago where I obsessively watched Korean films. It tapered off after that into more of a casual thing than an obsession though I will never shy away from watching a Korean film.

@TheManBehindTheCurtain I need to make a correction; Age of Shadows is set a mite more before World War II than I remembered. It's set in the 1920s, which is earlier than the 1930s than I remembered. Please pardon my gaff.

That sound like what I saw.....a bag of tricks. I give it credit for that, but so much of the plot line and the tricks seemed painfully obvious to me. I wasn't overwhelmed.....more like "middlewhelmed", like when you say "Pretty good". It wasn't the stuff of greatness except in the expansive mind of Welles, a guy who was never timid with self-promotion.

It's been quite a while since I saw it. Maybe it's time again. Ironically, I looked for it on Amazon Prime. They want $3.99 to "rent" it. Maybe on a rainy night.

I think the scenes are awesome even though their connections to each other aren't the strongest. Welles was never short of confidence, which honestly isn't a bad thing in Hollywood for the Hollywood people. I've seen it in other films where they're full of a lot of great scenes with some loose connections. I don't know if it's a regular formula for success though.

I was considering buying the film myself. I don't know what's available in your area, but I know my local library system has it, so maybe that'd work for you?

Movies I have found to be overrated going off of IMDB ratings:

Lord of the Rings trilogy
Jaws
The Usual Suspects
Inception
The Dark Knight
The Matrix
Gladiator
Django Unchained
The Departed
The Lion King
The Avengers
Good Will Hunting
Toyota Story - lol, I'm just going to leave this unedited, because it makes me laugh. Damn auto correct, but I think I would LOVE Toyota Story.


These are all films that have some good moments or aspects to them, but on the whole I don't find to be great and I could easily go to my grave if I never watched them again.

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I see that Amazon has a DVD for about nine bucks. I might put it on my list for the next time I spend some money at Amazon. The nine bucks would get lost in a purchase that includes a bunch of things. If nothing else, CK on my shelf will elevate my self-image. It looks much more erudite than The Blob or Curse of the Demon.

I will see if I still think it's "over-rated". I have to admit that Welles's self absorbed egotism gave me an attitude about him.

Yeah it's really affordable. I have it saved for when I'm ready to spend some money on Amazon. I'm getting it through the library first to decide if I want to buy it.

I have a copy of Citizen Kane waiting to be picked up at the library. It'll be held until like the 17th or so of this month so I have time to pick it up, so there's no rush. I think the movie is fine even considering Welles being self-absorbed and into himself. It's a valid observation, and one I tend to see as accurate.

I think a great movie is a movie that lots of people with experience watching movies of the same type think is great.

Usually, my tastes fit well with the tastes of others, so I usually agree with the evaluations of movie X being great.

I do have; however, a preference for Hollywood movies made after 1965 over movies from earlier decades like Casablanca. However, I really liked Citizen Kane, despite being a type of movie I generally don't like (1940s Hollywood).

I agree on Casablanca, but the ratings specialist in me says that I can't justify it. There's no science that can make Casablanca better than any "third rate" cop story or creature feature, so it's a matter of people liking it for reasons that are completely personal and not quantifiable at all. Lots of them do and continue to do like it. I completely agree, but can't present any evidence as to why.

The statistician in me is troubled.

But I think the only really quantifiable things in regards to art are:

1. Its physical properties, which are irrelevant to its artistic merit.
2. The fact that some piece of art is popular or not with people into that type of art.

So basically, a great piece of art is any piece of art (book, painting, movie, TV show, videogame, comic book, etc) that many people who are into that kind of art generally consider great. Casablanca is a movie that many people into movies love, so its a great movie.

Things don't have to be absolutely "quantifiable" in the sense of being numeric and precise. There are community standards which we can understand, in principle, even if they're hard to apply, in practice. We can discuss composition, shot length, theme, acting quality, blocking, SFX, lighting set-ups, etc., relative to these standards and have fruitful discussions to the extent that these allow us to arrive at an agreeable conclusion.

Are there cosmic standards of art? Would reasonable Gribnars of planet Krathag be forced to admit Casablanca is a classic? Maybe not. But we haven't met them yet. That stated, we can look for aesthetic preferences which are biologically grounded (e.g., the preference for symmetry, the preference for some musical chords over others, stories that speak to the human condition), and those can be investigated scientifically. We can also look to community standards, and relative to a community judge an artwork by those standards. We can talk to each other and see what standards we share in common and use those local commitments to arrive at local conclusions (e.g., our local assessment of the quality of Casablanca). Finally, we can attempt to work from our own standards if we minimally wish to justify an evaluation to ourselves.

I think we need to resist the temptation to cut the Gordian Knot and cash out for a "TomaYtoH/TomAHto" relativism (i.e., let's call the whole thing off) in which no one is really right or really wrong. In a cosmic sense, it is likely that no one really is, but this does not mean that cannot strive to have productive conversations, arrive at temporary closures and pronounce local conclusions. There are all sorts of things that we may appeal to as relatively externalized guardrails. The pleasure of aesthetic conversation is taking an intellectual stroll with others and work our way along them and towards them (allowing our conversation not to entirely dive off the cliff into the abyss of absolute subjectivism).