The five most overrated films of the century so far
The theory of yin and yang, the ancient Chinese philosophy which essentially states that opposite forces are actually necessary and complementary, maintaining balance in the world, is certainly true where movies are concerned.
There are great movies and there are terrible movies. There are some that people love, some that people hate. But there are also some that are just inexplicably overrated, which is what we’ll talk about today.
As with most things, experts and critics are required to sort through the wheat from the chaff and let us know what we should be excited to see, what works well, what doesn’t and why. That’s OK, it helps, because a lot of movies get made, and otherwise we might spend our days watching bad films, and that would never do.
But sometimes, for some reason, often because they feel like they should in order to pander to certain groups of people, or because they like a director’s other films, these arbiters of taste will tell us a movie is amazing when it clearly isn’t. Which means you then have to take a stand and be brave and stick your head above the parapet and say, against the tide of popular opinion, “But wait… it isn’t very good.”
Nobody wants to do that, and so the end result is people agree en masse that a movie is excellent, when it is in fact, not at all excellent, just because they don’t want to seem unfashionable or upset the applecart. When that happens, you get movies like these: the most overrated of the 21st century so far.
The five most overrated films of the century:
La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016)
People who work in Hollywood absolutely love it when other people who work in Hollywood make movies about Los Angeles. And that was borne out on a grand scale by this deeply tiresome exercise in Ryan Gosling mansplaining jazz to Emma Stone for two hours, interspersed with some not very good dancing designed as a nod to musicals that were actually good.
Horribly pretentious, completely unrelatable, everyone said they liked it because it won so many Oscars, but actually wished they were watching something like Dumb and Dumber instead.
Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)
An eye-gougingly dull, annoying and far too clever for its own good film, touted by people who just wanted to show how well they could pronounce the director’s name, “Alejandro González Iñárritu” while sipping a latte in a frighteningly expensive coffee shop to a bored work experience girl.
Inexplicably, it won the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’, despite nothing of note happening in it, despite the immensely irritating percussion soundtrack, and despite the whole thing being about how hard it is for Michael Keaton to be an ‘actor’ while people in the real world go to work in an office all day, every day. Terrible.
The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)
Good lord, this is one of the most boring films you will ever sit through in your entire life.
Not even a soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead can salvage the excoriating nothingness that two hours sitting through this presents, and the fact it earned 11 Oscar nominations is proof that either the entire judging panel were too worried about catching Covid-19 to think straight or they just fancied giving Jane Campion a load of trophies for her mantelpiece.
It is 126 minutes of Benedict Cumberbatch and Jessie Plemons talking in quiet voices in old houses while a lot of wind whistles outside and some family members die slowly of Anthrax poisoning, which is ironically preferable to watching this film.
The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, 2017)
Listen, this is fine. It’s super weird, and weirdly over-sexual, and Sally Hawkins is decent in it, but then she’s pretty good in everything, although she is sadly in two movies on this list, and that’s unforgivable.
The Shape of Water, though, did not deserve to win the awards that it did. It won all the awards because people in positions that were able to dole them out thought that Guillermo del Toro was an arty and clever director who did Pan’s Labyrinth, which is a film that arty and clever people absolutely love to tell other people they love.
A woman has sex with a fish man. The fish man eats a cat. Sally Hawkins needlessly rubs one out in a bath. The fish man slashes Michael Shannon’s throat and jumps into a canal. There is not a chance in hell this nonsense deserved a ‘Best Picture’ Oscar over Three Billboards or Get Out or Dunkirk. Silly.
Paddington 2 (Paul King, 2017)
Ohhhhh kay, here we go. Batten down the hatches. It’s time for me to climb into my bunker to protect myself from the wailing protests of hundreds of thousands of penny farthing-riding, east London-dwelling under-30-year-olds angrily flourishing their Fred Again mixtapes, wearing Paddington 2 (the ‘best film everrr’) T-shirts semi-ironically.
Paddington 2 is a passable to decent children’s film. The near-mythical success it has enjoyed is because, at some point, someone introduced the idea that it was somehow more than that, that it was some kind of cinematic masterpiece, although nobody knows why that might be. And so that ‘fact’ was parroted across the world, vomited back out onto endless podcasts and resulted in people, often men, using it as a tool to show how sensitive they are on dates, as though it’s adorable to tell someone that Paddington 2 is their favourite film, rather than Scarface, which is the real answer.
Hugh Grant is pretty good in it, I’ll give you that. But otherwise it is the standard, every actor who used to be in Harry Potter, upper class family living in a massive ten million pound South Kensington house, occasionally amusing moment when a CGI bear steals a piece of chocolate cake, “Oh what’s on BBC one, oh it’s Paddington 2, oh has it started, fine I’ll watch it, pass me those biscuits” fare.
Get back to Peru, you overrated fuzzy little chancer.
