wondering how really terrible movies even get made

LCD.....Movies are marketed/made for the most part to/for the lowest common denominator. Same with music. The Studios are trying to please a very young demographic and they just throw stuff to see what sticks....once something does, it gets remade 1000 times with different actors and a the story tweaked a little.
I'm such a terrible judge of what's going to be a hit it's not even funny....I remember seeing the preview for Titanic. I turned to my friend and said..."Yeah, Titanic alright...Titanic Flop"

The worst movie I ever saw that had a big budget, good actors, a good director, etc. etc. was Dreamcatcher...I couldn't watch it. It started out OK, but then I was like WTF were they thinking.
 
pulpfiction007 said:
The worst movie I ever saw that had a big budget, good actors, a good director, etc. etc. was Dreamcatcher...I couldn't watch it. It started out OK, but then I was like WTF were they thinking.
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Dreamcatcher is so awesomely bad it's staggering, but it's the kind of bad that only highly skilled people can achieve. It's fascinating.
 
Batutta said:
Dreamcatcher is so awesomely bad it's staggering, but it's the kind of bad that only highly skilled people can achieve. It's fascinating.
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Or just sad - t's like in those stills forums where some guys make photos with a Nikon D3s and the most expensive lenses and the pics are such a dull garbage that it hurts your feelings, so much that you come to the conclusion that THEY are the TRUE artists - creating such a crap with such tools - ART!
 
Batutta said:
Dreamcatcher is so awesomely bad it's staggering, but it's the kind of bad that only highly skilled people can achieve. It's fascinating.
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Yeah, Dreamcatcher was the biggest WTF? experience I've ever had going out to see a movie in the theater. The only redeeming thing about seeing that movie was that they showed one of the Animatrix short films between all the pre-movie commercials and trailers. Back at that time, the Matrix sequels were the most hyped up movies as far as I remember. At the time I was jonesing for any little scrap of Matrix that I could get leading up to those sequels.

One thing that I kind of enjoyed about Dreamcatcher was the idea of the mental library. That was a cool concept for getting inside a character's mind in a visual way. Other than that little tidbit, the film was as you said, fascinatingly bad.
 
Dreamcatcher rocked, love that movie .Mister Gray or gey..was always fun to here. Was a little slow in the beginning .
Never saw a trailer or what ...but I found it very entertaining. The flashbackscenes were great. Thought the plot unfolded very well ! Gey implanting messages in his friends knowing that that one day will come. Maybe some or many were not ready for it :) Remake !
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
Filmmaking is so complicated, the chances of making a bad film are MUCH bigger than making a good one, because in order to make a good film there are just so many things that need to work out in conjunction.
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Not really. Filmmaking is not that complicated. A great script and cast well and it's really hard to stuff up a movie.

The problem is great scripts are few and far between.

Until the writer is recognized on an equal level as the director, terrible movies will stay with us.
 
Futchibon said:
Not really. Filmmaking is not that complicated. A great script and cast well and it's really hard to stuff up a movie.

The problem is great scripts are few and far between.

Until the writer is recognized on an equal level as the director, terrible movies will stay with us.
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I'm speaking from my own experience of course. Writing, directing and producing feature films are (in my own personal experience) extremely complicated.
Maybe it's different for you.
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
I'm speaking from my own experience of course. Writing, directing and producing feature films are (in my own personal experience) extremely complicated.
Maybe it's different for you.
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I'm not surprised you find that, given the blood, sweat and tears you've spent on MARIANNE - and kudos for doing that.

As you work with bigger budgets (and I'm sure you will very soon) you can stop having to do multiple roles - VERY STRESSFUL! - and concentrate just on one, such as directing. Concentrating purely on performances instead of having to deal with a ton of others niggling problems on a micro shoot makes life a lot easier. I'm not saying filmmaking is EASY, but it does get easier. (And shooting on better cameras helps too. For example, I started shooting DVX and the lighting required to make that look good took forever. Then DSLRs which are great but HARD WORK. We just shot our first ad on the Alexa and that thing is so light sensitive you can shoot at night in available light, grade it and it looks incredible. It's so much easier to get a great looking image I feel like we're cheating).

I just wish Hollywood would spend more time on scripts. Whenever you watch a film's credits at the end, they list the director, then writer, then producer. But at the awards ceremonies, the director and producing awards come at the end, while the poor old writer gets relegated to the middle? No wonder most movies suck.
 
yes ,movies should be advertised "written by" not "directed by" or "produced by" ,its terrible mistake.
 
Dreamcatcher is so awesomely bad it's staggering, but it's the kind of bad that only highly skilled people can achieve. It's fascinating.

It's how I felt about Inception.
 
Dreamcatcher was a terrible BOOK before it was a below-average movie.

It all starts with the words on the page.
 
Yeah i remember seeing Dreamcatcher in the theater. Usually with bad movies, I just forget about them, but that one was so terrible that it's been ingrained in my head for years. I had free tickets, and I still wanted a refund.

M Night Shyamalan has been doing a pretty terrible job lately. Documenting his movie creating process to see what goes in to making such terrible garbage would probably make a better film than whatever he comes out with next. Especially since he's a "writer/director", we could really see which stages he makes his awful decisions.
 
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I recently decided to watch a movie that I've heard people mention numerous times over the years. I thought it would be a great classic, instead I was very disappointed. You might of heard of it, its called Planet of the Apes

God it was so bad
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
What's the abbreviation for the model where hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars are decided by the personal film taste of the people who sits on the money rather than market strategies and business calculations?
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Very good post. I read something like this a while back that said don't make movies based off of events in your life like what happened to you at band camp or similar subjects, make movies that will sell and appeal to the largest amount of people because what you might think is cool, the rest of the general population might think is really dumb, weird, creepy, etc etc. Your post reminded me of that tip
 
bwwd said:
yes ,movies should be advertised "written by" not "directed by" or "produced by" ,its terrible mistake.
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I wholeheartedly disagree.

That might have been in the case in Classic Hollywood. That might have been the case under the old continuity editing system. I'm not going to make the tired argument that directors are all that matter, but a script is a long way (usually several edits from producers, casting, the work of a director, the efforts of a cinematographer, the sculpting of an editor, and often times even further) from being a completed film.
 
I'm sure most start out with a half decent idea.
Having said that, I often wonder how/why in the world some heaping piles get any funding at all.
 
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