Which "Class of '99" major American filmmaker has most flagrantly sold out to awards-baiting?

granted i haven't seen alien 3

fyi voting russell for going back to harvey weinstein after he said he wouldn't

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well that was a fun read

i liked the part about magnolia being worse than hitler

obv orussell

about as close to objective truth as possible here

Martin Scorsese wins class of '69.

Eric and Alfred, why do you hate There Will Be Blood?

I don't hate it but it's a stiff, underwritten movie with one gargoyle at its center whom we're stuck with for two and a half hours.

I had to wait too long for there to be blood.

There Will Be Blood… Any Minute Now… Just Hang On… Coming Soon… Wait For The Blood… You Won't Be Disappointed, Promise…

Instead of blood, we got this damn milkshake.

oh, Eric

They might as well have called it There Will Be Credits.

at least it was Paul Dano's blood

Based on that post, you really ought to clear a spot on your calendar to see Prisoners if you haven't already, Morbs.

i'll wait a couple years for a Killing Paul Dano clipfest on YT

i hate paul dano

didn't like PTA's two big breakthroughs much, but he's been on the upswing with the last 3 features.

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Please sell out, Wes Anderson, a.s.a.p.

Wes got a Globe.

Wes got his Golden Globe tonight (alongside Linklater, who I'd put in the same cohort).

Jason Schwartzman as Bond.

(Or Ethan Hawke, if it's Linklater.)

clemenza. I don't get your warpath on Wes Anderson. I haven't seen his latest, but....I think Moonrise Kingdom brought girl-magical-thinking to the forefront, along with the boy-magical-thinking he has specialized in from the beginning. This was a real breakthrough.

And "Fox" was a proper kids movie, a nicely animated one at that, an effectively funny, well-put-together kids movie that appealed to actual children. Kids Movies Never Die. In other words, Wes Anderson has hardly stayed in the same little box theater setting all this time. I think he is progressing nicely and I hope he will continue to make his little, but ever bigger, movies.

By the way, Zissou was last decade's Big Lebowski: badly received movie that immediately followed the well-received movie (Fargo; Royal Tenenbaums). Attacked for the exact same reasons: indulgent, insular, smug, aimed at the intolerably knowing insiders --- rather than the goodhearted, salt of the earth, properly-demanding-of-sensible-entertainment citizens daily reviewers imagine themselves nobly uplifting & guiding to higher cinematic appreciation.

So yeah, Zissou was a blast, always, so a decade later we get ultra-nerdy articles such as this. http://mentalfloss.com/article/60795/32-facts-about-life-aquatic-steve-zissou

If the movie was such an obvious turkey, why any interest a decade later? Same question resounds with Lebowski, except critics have quietly decided to pretend they were into it from the beginning. But I was paying attention: Lebowski was HATED when it came out.

Wes Anderson has become a great litmus test for whether I'm interested in someone's opinions on cinema. When people say he's all style and no substance I just think they're not paying attention.

there is literally a clickbait listicle like that for every movie ever. it doesn't mean anything and zissou's cultural weight hasn't increased since its release imo. it had its fans and then they grew up and became accountants and it never got a second wind like lebowski

xp I think it's possible to have gone cold on Anderson and still have "valid opinions" about cinema?

It's about the nature of the critique. With the BAFTA noms and the Golden Globe win I've seen lots of people on social media wheel out the lazy received-wisdom line on Anderson: fussy dollhouse movies, all aesthetics, no emotion, etc. Obviously smart viewers have smart reasons for not liking him.

it might also be received wisdom etc., but for me Anderson's propensity to pretty much re-make the same film over and over again is the problem. I've seen Rushmore and enjoyed it, I have no reason to see repetitions with minor variations on the same theme(s).

Well to take just one movie, Grand Budapest Hotel isn't a repetition - it uses ideas of aesthetics and creating a perfect world to entirely different ends. Max Fisher is a confused teenager, Gustave is a hotelier in an old Europe threatened by totalitarianism. They share a desire for beauty and control but their motives are drastically different.

formally speaking those are two examples are pretty similar, if perhaps not in terms of content.

You're right that Wes Anderson does seem to get singled out for this kind of criticism though, no one seems to say the same about any of the other directors listed above when they arguably all have equally rigid aesthetics, stylistic tics etc.

Yes that's what I mean. Nobody is compelled to like him but he gets treated as the only director with a distinctive style and pet themes.

Lebowski was hated?? nah.. i mean i hated it, still do i think it's dreadful but it got very good reviews in the UK.
5/5 from Empire for starters
http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=2759

Yeah, looking at the Lebowski reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, overall critical reaction seems to have been mostly positive (80% favourable, for what that's worth).

But then Vic Perry's post above seems so stuffed full of straw critics it could be used to sacrifice Edward Woodward.

critical success, commercial flop IIRC

I intensely disliked the RT binary of fresh/rotten when I was a critic and still do. Owen Gleiberman gave Lebowski a B minus, which is around where I come down, and that counts as "fresh." So would a C plus, I guess.

B minus would still be a notch or two above 'HATED', though?

Lebowski was nowhere near as hated as The Life Aquatic because it was such an idiodynscratic movie that even if you loathed it there was no reason to think that the Coens had lost it, whereas TLA seemed like hollow self-parody and magnified all of Anderson's worst qualities. If there's a Coens equivalent it's The Hudsucker Proxy (which I love btw). Also, people who loved Lebowski did so with a passion whereas most of the praise for TLA was more cautious eg The AV Club: "Even when caught in a rut, Anderson's obsessive vision still yields many exhilarating surprises."

I swear I'm not making it up about contemporary reviews of Lebowski --- on the other hand, review aggregators didn't exist then (duh) and I don't pretend to have read all the reviews that year. And yeah, there really was a "Fargo was an Oscar qualified movie and I thought the Coen Brothers had grown up but look" vibe in reviews I saw then. The Coen Brothers career, judging from daily reviewers, has been a hype/backlash cycle all along.

Do please note that a lot of the reviews available now of Lebowski were NOT written the year it came out, but in the next decade.

Since its original release, The Big Lebowski has become a cult classic.[4] Steve Palopoli wrote about the film's emerging cult status in July 2002.[40] He first realized that the film had a cult following when he attended a midnight screening in 2000 at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles and witnessed people quoting dialogue from the film to each other.[6]:129 Soon after the article appeared, the programmer for a local midnight film series in Santa Cruz decided to screen The Big Lebowski and on the first weekend they had to turn away several hundred people. The theater held the film over for six weeks, which had never happened before.[6]:130

An annual festival, Lebowski Fest, began in Louisville, Kentucky, United States in 2002 with 150 fans showing up, and has since expanded to several other cities.[41] The Festival's main event each year is a night of unlimited bowling with various contests including costume, trivia, hardest- and farthest-traveled contests. Held over a weekend, events typically include a pre-fest party with bands the night before the bowling event as well as a day-long outdoor party with bands, vendor booths and games. Various celebrities from the film have even attended some of the events, including Jeff Bridges who attended the Los Angeles event.[41] The British equivalent, inspired by Lebowski Fest, is known as The Dude Abides and is held in London.[42]

Some RT reviews are from '98 but have the date they were linked to RT or put online, I think. Sarris's positive review is contemporary.

yes, there are more potheads in the gen pop than among critics... i think.

I do remember a baffled response at the time but a year later three or four college friends surprised me by quoting chunks of the dialogue; they'd watch it on VHS for hours, stoned.

I wasn't that into it at the time but it definitely grew in my esteem upon repeated viewings.

^^^

I went in not expecting a comedy, was the problem

or at least, I was expecting a darker/bleaker comedy a la Barton Fink

I know the dates are when they were linked/uploaded, it's when the reviews reference 'cult status' etc. that I know it's a later take.