Worst Directors of All Time -- NOMINATIONS Thread

List 'em all. I'll count 'em up and at some point do a regular poll. And please, no obvious challops-bait like Stanley Kubrick or Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman (unless you have a compelling reason for listing such folks as the WOAT).

the usual suspects:

Ed Wood Jr.
Coleman Francis
Uwe Boll

Michael Bay (extremely obv)

Brett Ratner

Roger Corman.

At least Ed Wood had a vision.

Mystery Science Theatre quote:

"Roger Corman? oh, this one's gonna go down hard, folks"...

Renny Harlin

^^^^^^^^ Exorcist: The Beginning was an incoherent pile of shit. I didn't think the original cut, Dominion, was amazing, but it was fucking Casablanca in comparison....

Schumacher

Schumacher

i WAS wondering when he would be mentioned. his rightly-deplored batman films notwithstanding, i still like flatliners and falling down.

Alan Rudolph

alan smithee

xxp - Flatliners I liked at the time (in eighth grade), but I caught it on cable recently & was surprised at how bad the acting was (and considering the caliber of some of the actors..). I'll rep for The Lost Boys & I didn't realize he did Falling Down (which I also remember liking, but haven't seen since back in the day), but the man has got a ton of cheesy schmaltzy crap on his resume. Not just the Batman films.

Tom DiCillo

Tommy Wiseau, surely. Tho with him and Ed Wood on the list this might be more like Most Fun Worst Director of All Time

McG

kevin smith

Richard Kelly

James Wan

batman forever was rad. i love how two face looked like the acid he got splashed with had some kool aid in it.

m. night shalamayan

batman forever was anal leakage on a plate. zzzzzzzzzzzzz inducing.

did you color all your coloring books in school wif black black black. cuz i did. then i discovered reading rainbow and rainbows in general. colors are good for the world, and b. forever brought some into the gothic world o' batman. ps adam west 4-ever

ahh hell even Burton's batman movies had lighthearted moments. but Batman Forever was cornball in a bad way. Val Kilmer was way miscast too. and the 'wink at the camera' jokes were more annoying than sly. boo.

Howard Deutch

whenever you need a horrible sequel, he's ready to jump on board

batman and robin was pretty dire tho, i'll give ya that.

worst director ever: some nobody no one's ever never heard of, surely. ok, maybe Paul Haggis. c'mon, if a movie is directed by a guy w/ sheep guts in his name, for-get it.

Harold P. Warren (but as in above, this is in a 'so bad it's good' category, thanks to Manos: Hands of Fate)

Brian Levant (but now i'm starting to get into "they chose reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally bad material" territory)

Rob Zombie (seriously, for all his hype, dude has made maybe one watchable movie)?

but that is one more than a terrible director should have.

Gaspar Noe

eh even a bad director can strike gold once. and for the record, the one film was Devil's Rejects, which I would have given 3 stars at best. Zombie has a penchant for awful dialogue and really caricaturic characters typical of a b-movie, except he seems to take the movies too seriously at times (read Halloween remakes).

Sidney Lumet

dammit when does enter the void come out in, like, a cinema i can go to xxp

WHAT? the mere existence of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead means you crazy. unless you're just challopsing

The number of bad films in his filmography outnumbers the good ones.

*outnumber

Love a lot of Lumet's movies but even the best are kinda good bad movies.

I'd almost place Clint Eastwood on the list. The modest quality of his good movies, his productivity, and his beloved old codger status with the Academy helps him.

While I didn't fully agree with what Morbius said, it's pretty difficult to put a director who had 5-6 films that are considered classics on the "worst directors of all time list" alongside people who at best came up with one or two watchable but not really "good" movies.

that was about Lumet, not Eastwood btw

Howards End aside (where the actors and material are so strong), I'd put James Ivory there too.

This thread can only be fun if we avoid obvious abominations like Brett Ratner, Schumacher, and Roland Emmerich.

I really think if he made more movies, Robert DeNiro could join this list. I didn't see a Bronx Tale, but Good Sheperd struck me as being made by someone who didn't understand the craft. Overlong, poorly paced (I fell asleep), and relied way too much on mood music (which played almost continuously throughout the movie!)

The number of bad films in his filmography outnumbers the good ones.

So, Mel Brooks and Brian De Palma, in?

Arthur Hiller.

I agree, but we had to get them out of the way first lest we forget to nominate them. Obvious or not, they still deserve to be there!

Plus we shouldn't be NOMINATING PEOPLE LIKE SIDNEY LUMET...FDAFLDAJ;FKLDAJDK;ALJ.

why on earth not?

We should be. Rather than just argue about who's the most technically inept, which wd give you the usual suspects list and almost certainly be a straight win for Ed Wood, it seems fair to factor in stuff like resources available, critical rep, ambition etc. Worst director shouldn't only be about basic technique I don't think.

kudos to everyone for avoiding the obvious thread-bait of Guy Ritchie. most therads woulda had him in by post #2.

Oh god Ritchie totally deserves a nom tho.

But Stone has made some great, interesting films.

obviously if i believed this i would not have nominated him.

i'm disappointed more people aren't hating alan rudoph and tom decillo

???

i really love at least a couple of rudolph films and can't think of any that i really hate. (although, ok, i saw a little of investigating sex and it seemed pretty lousy.) and dicillo, i've only seen living in oblivion and box of moonlight and liked them both to varying degrees. plus, he shot stranger than paradise.

if you are going to bring up daughters of notable directors, please skip Sofia Coppola* and go directly to Jennifer Lynch (Boxing Helena, Surveillance).

*Coming from someone who hated LiT but thought tVS was beautifully shot.

I'm a little drunk at this point but honestly this list haas become about personal grievances hasn't it?
Is there any way to be objective about cinema? One persons masterpiece is another person's showgirls (i love showgurls), I think that it should be about conisistency, aside from cronenberg few directors are consistent. e.g. i was hoping for wolfman to be good especially because i stan for del toro (hardcore) but it failed so badly that I was actually upset. I don't think there's a way of summing this list up to be quite honest unless it's on technicalities and very, very few are aware of those.
can't believe people walked out of irreversible...like they didn't know what was coming....

Jesus that took me ten minutes to write correctly.

this is an even dumber thread than the "actual worst writers" thread we had last year

go directly to DAVID LYNCH

sorry but I had to say it at some point!

also, guy ritchie, steven soderbergh (he does have a style.. a terrible one)

^^ was thinking about doing this w/ lynch tbh

and no, there's no way to be objective about cinema. showgirls is hilarious and I have no idea how anyone could NOT realize it's trying to be that way, I mean he is not trying at all to make a good movie acted in a competent manner that just happened to come out exaggerated and camp.

max, i hear you. a number of years removed from college/grad world where a lot of people took art seriously, sometimes the most you can hope for is finding people who at least know who directors are, even if collectively we are saying dumb things about them

spot on daria.
what's wrong with sodebergh?! I know lynch can grate but he's hardly the worst of all time

p.s john singleton IS technically good imo but he is a bad director. still I liked boyz in the hood and four brothers.

soderbergh i find grating, it feels like he cuts back and forth at awkward points and has people talk over each other and.. it seems like he has an idiosyncratic style but the effect of it is to make his films flat and boring

any director should be proud of Erin Brockovich and The Girlfriend Experience.

oh i think smart stuff is being said in this thread! i dunno something about this kind of exercise just smacks of dickwaving as opposed to the opposite--when ppl argue about the "best" director everyone wants to make a passionate case for art they care about; arguing about the "worst" leads ime to challops and condescension of the worst kind.

and thats even before u take into acct how difficult it is to compare directors across diff't movies let alone across eras, industries, genres, whatever else. writers all do the same thing; two different directors might get the same credit but have utterly different levels of involvement or creative control over a movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgkvfke4h_w&NR=1&feature=fvwp

eh i went and looked back at the worst writers thread and it was pretty fun and smart

and this thread has some good discussion

so im just being a crank

I don't think there's any way to make a conclusive list tbh. I focus more on actors anyway because very few directors have a distinctive personal style (e.g. lynch, mann, cronenberg etc) that is noticeable to the general public.
I'm officially asking for this to be a most overrated directors thread.
(i wanna read that worst writers thread, i'm pretty sure it will feature stephen king, dan brown, zadie smith & ian mcewan heavily)

personally, i prefer crank to challops, kiu.

if you are going to bring up daughters of notable directors, please skip Sofia Coppola* and go directly to Jennifer Lynch (Boxing Helena, Surveillance).

*Coming from someone who hated LiT but thought tVS was beautifully shot.

― ✌.✰|ʘ‿ʘ|✰.✌ (Steve Shasta), Monday, March 1, 2010 2:17 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

fuck yes jennifer lynch.

IS THER EVAR GONNA BE A POLL?

at this point i fucking hope not.

a lot of the debate seems to have already been had in here too

you know whos a chump? Akira Kurosawa, doesnt even do his own subtitles and i dont speak japanese WHAT AN ASS

Fritz Lang - look jerk if you cant take the time to record dialog, im not taking the time to watch your movie

Francis Ford Coppola? More like Francis Ford CRAPOLA, amirite?

i heard martin scorcese forces women to jerk him off on the toilet. while David Lynch watches....

A new contender: Bob Misiorowski

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtOGgcBbgBU

Heh, "No fucking way" was exactly what I said when he made the first sideways jump. Shades of Cool as Ice.

George Lucas and Kevin Smith seconded

ffs when is the poll coming out

Sidney Lumet

― Inculcate a spirit of serfdom in children (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, February 27, 2010 10:27 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what the fucking fuck

there are a lot of challops in this thread (reading further).

lumet was spotty but he had some great movies

Missed this thread the first time 'round, but these need reiterating:

Hal Needham
Mimi Leder
Garry Marshall

robert greenwald
gus van sant

Tim Burton, 21st C edition.

terry malick, 21st C ed

Had to look up Greenwald, only to realize that I'd seen three (!) of his films. OTM, though--he's a bore. Say what you will about Michael Moore, but at least he knows a thing or two about filmmaking.

Alan Parker
Danny Boyle
Luc Besson

I know some will beg to differ but I hate everything by these fuckers.

Neil Breen

at least he knows a thing or two about filmmaking.

well, he might know /one/ thing. or did know it, and since forgot.

gus van sant is obviously a talented guy and his films don't lack for polish but his /ideas/ have long seemed totally bankrupt (or worse) to me, and in the last five or six years he's just completely run out of steam.

i'm not even sure if his most recent film got a proper theatrical release.

The Sea of Trees was panned by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 0%, based on 12 reviews, with an average rating of 2.4/10. At its May 2015 debut at the Cannes Film Festival, the film was met with harsh critical reception; it was loudly booed and laughed at by an audience of critics, with critic Scott Foundas calling it a film "for nobody."

to be sure, lots of good movies are booed at cannes. but this one sounds genuinely worthless.

Jason Reitman.
Innaritu.

i was wondering when inarritu would come up!

he's like cuaron's evil twin-- everything cuaron touches turns to gold (or nearly), and inarritu seems incapable of turning out anything but shit.

Garry Marshall

had to look him up and i can't help but find something grotesquely compelling about the fact that someone would choose to make the kinds of films he makes into their 80s

We always need anonymous hack work when it's good, and I'll defend bits of Pretty Woman and The Flamingo Kid.

There are many movies that are far, far less watchable than Pretty Woman and The Flamingo Kid, but as a filmmaker, he's such a shameless hack that he'll even recycle things that worked in one movie for another one. I'm pretty sure the "which fork should I use" bit is not only in both of those films, but also one of The Princess Diaries movies (which are basically the G-rated version of PW anyway, no?).

Guys I just watched half of Domino so Tony Scott comes to mind. Even if top gun is canon

Oh yeah Tony Scott made some shockers, particularly his string of bizarrely awful collabs with Denzel.