Academy of the Overrated: Directors

Lance Mannion invites inductions into the Academy of the Overrated, movie and director wings. I’ll try the latter first. With one exception, his suggestions force me to play the Woody Allen role in Manhattan: I think Truffaut (especially Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim), Kubrick (I even liked Eyes Wide Shut, although not Barry Lyndon) and Scorsese (one of the greatest American directors, although I grant that he’s only made one great movie since The King of Comedy in 1983) are all terrific. My list does work in the spirit of Lance’s argument; most of these directors have some striking skills, and with one exception they’ve made at least one movie that I like. I was sorely tempted to cite Michael Bay, given the rather disturbing raft of revisionism that preceded his recent bellyflop, but there’s still a near-consensus that he’s a hack, and there’s little point in this context of pointing out that the consensus is right. And, of course, I had to make some judgments about whose reputation was still good (does anybody defend Peter Greenaway anymore?) Let’s get to the silly list-makin’:

1.Bernardo Bertolucci: The most gifted director on the list, of course. I put the widely-mocked The Dreamers on my ten-best list of last year, and I look forward to seeing the new print of The Conformist (although I can’t say that I was knocked out by my first viewing.) With the exception of the risible-in-a-boring-way Little Buddha even his bad movies have something memorable and interesting about them. Still, for a major director the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, and (unlike, say, the very uneven Altman) the peaks aren’t nearly high enough. I basically agree with Lance about Last Tango, and yet it remains one of his strongest films. I find the Oscar-validated The Last Emperor visually sumptuous but frequently dull, and Stealing Beauty, 1900, The Sheltering Sky, and Besieged all lose their credibility sooner or later.

2. James Toback. The surprisingly fine new remake of Toback’s Fingers provoked the predictable Village Voice response that it failed to live up to the original. Audiard’s version, though, is better in virtually every respect. And Fingers is easily the best of the Toback movies I’ve seen. I swear to Christ, Roger Ebert gave both the real-estate porn When Will I Be Loved and–even worse–the silly and mind-numbingly repetitious Two Girls and a Guy positive reviews. (And even he wouldn’t defend The Pick-up Artist.) Plus, Toback wrote Bugsy, which is certainly going on my overrated-movies list.

3. Edward Burns. This pedestrian misogynist parlayed the much-lauded indie The Brothers McMullen into a multi-film career, which consisted of bad remakes of the debut and bad Woody Allen homages. And the thing is, The Brothers McMullen sucked too.

4. Michael Mann. I can tolerate him in his less ambitious, straightforward dramatic mode–The Insider and Manhunter work well enough, and while Ali is a failure it’s not a dishonorable one. But the films that made his reputation: the penny-ante existentialism of Thief, the tolerable for maybe 30 minutes of its 78-hour running time Heat–I find nearly unwatchable. I avoided the Tom Cruise-as-an-assassin thing without many regrets.

5. Richard Linklater: This one I’ve already covered.