worst movie in the IMDb top 50

Inception vs. Forrest Gump vs. Usual Suspects

the lotr movies vs prob DKR

but they're both great as spectacle i spose

once again i gotta go gump

there's some stupid shit on this list and a lot of hackwork but that's still the only one that inspires actual revulsion

I thought spirited away was terribly boring and that dudes movies fail to inspire my inner child or w/e

lotr movies also terrible

much as I hate Inception and Usual Suspects neither of those films have quite the disgusting reactionary politics that underpins Gump

I would rather watch forrest gump 3 times in a row than the lotr movies in sequence

mostly just cause it would be over faster tho

Lot of great movies there...haven't seen six or seven, including #1. Among the others, the only one I flat-out hated was Fight Club; Raiders, Terminator, Inception, and one or two others didn't mean much to me. I'm glad the voters have given so much thought to Django Unchained.

lotr movies. at least gump had some amusing moments.

lotr is not all one movie guys

ya it's like 14 bad movies

look it's simply a grand spectacle and one of the singular achievements of our time*

*since jesus

return of the king is my pick. sorry return of the king fans.

I vote American History X

For some reason I thought IMDB had discontinued this list because of fraudulent voting--there was a time when there'd always be things in the Top 10 you'd never heard of.

lotr is not all one movie guys

i cant tell them apart!

what's the one with that battle scene

it's probably 'gump,' though lingering loyalty to zemeckis makes me want to find something else to vote for.

lotr was filmed together with the same moron casting orlando fucking bloomps and adding werewolf scenes

Gump, Shawshank and the LOTRs in a tangled top-5 heap.

return of the king is the one with the nineteen different endings.

American History X, easily.

TDKR easy

first two replies say it all, really

haven't seen gump but am quite compelled to vote for it on reputation. that said, christopher nolan. and the usual suspects was deeply, profoundly slow-witted. worst, most inconsequential hype twist ever. lotrs horrendous but jackson gets a pass for his early shit

iatee, did you cold vote for spirited away

ya but I regret not joining the lotr caucus as it looks like it might win

DR. STRANGELOVE

the 3 lotr movies vary pretty distinctly in quality

voted django unchained over the matrix

fellowship is the twee piper flautist one, two towers is the doom metal one, ROTK is the wagner nazi ghost one

there can only be one terrible movie to rule them all

o wait didn't see the dark knight rises, wow

think I really have to vote Nolan here tbf

Inception is the movie that gets worse and more anathemical to the true spirit of imagination and the unconscious every time I unfortunately think about it, but TDKR was a singularly sledgehammering experience, pinned to my seat and pelted with incongruous thematic masonry for one hundred and fucking fifty minutes

consider me torn

oh and re: LOTR, the first one was actually halfway decent but the second was so, so, so very dull that I didn't see the third, thank dickens

lol mr. snrub

i saw TDKR for the first time and i was kind of amazed, TDK was i thought excellent and pretty tight and focused for such an expansive superhero film, but TDKR was so sloppy.

first time recently

fuck back to the future

fuck to the future

that or django unchained, even though i havent seen django unchained yet

best is Rear Window by a fucking mile fwiw and fuiud

Django still really grates on me, but I want to let it sit for a few more months before I decide whether I'm irritated with the film or QT or what.

Shawshank is the worst.

Sunset Blvd the best, though Rear Window is probably second, followed by Kane, I reckon.

fellowship is magic until drunken sheepfuxor panto galdriel, also alarmed that elrond left his priscilla face on, but those two bits aside it doesn't deserve lumping in with the gak that is the second.

the third, as any real hedz know, is too short.

i never got what part of foorest gump ilx's collective balls clipped as it passed under them tbrr, i like it

rear window is the best movie on this list

back to the future is perfect. best are probably that, kane, spirited away, strangelove, RW, IAWL, and the two chaplins.

funny, i would rank them 2>1>>3, with all being good imo but the second being most compelling for some reason, maybe i just like the helm's deep shiz

inception sets up an incredible movie and turns into an utter dud, which is a huge pity

TDKR doesn't bother with that first part

derren brown slapping me with an old testament for three hours in a darkened room at least would feel like a personal vendetta rather than nolan's thundering granite bollocks

ahx is way worse than any of the lotrs or gump

i mean it's IMDB, the generic 'middlebrow' vote is swamped by fanboy "this is badass AND grown-up! i'm sophisticated! it's dark!" votes. compare to say best picture nominees - middlebrow crowd i think still reps for, e.g. the pianist, lost in translation, titanic, the aviator, capote, no country, jerry maguire, lincoln, birdhood, good will hunting, hurt locker, king's speech, black swan, the help, 12 years a slave, there will be blood, braveheart (?), apollo 13... all absent here. as a side note, not sure how but it might be interesting to poll which best 90s pictures nominees now seem most baffling in terms of their present day reputation.

what's striking about the list above actually is how much it shifts from the 90s to the 2000s in this sense - 1990-1997 are all straightforward oscar bait movies except for se7en and reservoir dogs, suggesting a strong received wisdom from parents/older siblings pushing THIS IS A GREAT MOVIE at some juncture. or just surviving consensus among the generic middlebrow segment of the voters. forrest gump beats pulp fiction, american beauty beats LA confidential. then starting with fight club, almost everything after that seems very consistently popular with a certain "type" of moviegoer except for the intouchables which i have never heard of before today but which sounds more like an oscar movie than anything i just named. hrm.

er, 'life is beautiful' beats la confidential obv

can someone explain the presence of the Intouchables on this list to me

I think my eyes just blanked over the Intouchables due to the prolferation of In- films in that section (new theory - films beginning with In are surefire hits). I've never actually heard of it before, either. Weird.

*proliferation

its very much the "one of these kids is doing his own thing" entry

wasn't it a huge hit in France, like the most successful film of the last 20 years or something? did they let French people vote in this survey?

didn't know that there was an English language remake looming:

In addition to acquiring distribution rights in English-speaking countries, Scandinavian countries and China, The Weinstein Company acquired the rights to remake the film in English.[116] Paul Feig was originally slated to direct, with Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx and Idris Elba eyed for the role of Driss, and Jessica Chastain and Michelle Williams considered for a female lead,[117]

By 2013, Feig dropped out, with Tom Shadyac in talks to replace him, Colin Firth was attached to star as Phillippe, and Chris Tucker was in consideration for Driss.[118] In 2014, Kevin Hart was cast with Firth still attached.[119]

The rankings are from all ratings on IMDB, so it's worldwide. I guess the userbase is primarily Anglo/Western, though, as otherwise more things like Bollywood smashes would be appearing.

xp

Had no idea that Into the Wild had such a following, either.

^^^ was surprised that beat there will be blood which seems right smack in-genre but iirc mccandless himself has a bit of a cult?

the only ones that aren't sausage parties: eternal sunshine, fargo, silence of the lambs, maybe memento

memento is totally a sausage party

it has one female major character who isn't a love interest -- but only one

that was a role that made me wish carrie-anne moss worked more tbh

2013: "The Wolf of Wall Street"
2010: "Inception"
2009: "Inglourious Basterds"
2008: "The Dark Knight"
2005: "Batman Begins"

these are all fucking shit, as in 4/10 or worse

'98-01, pretty good!

didn't figure you for a fellowship fan

agree w Morbz on Inception at least, what a load of shit

liked the first LOTR movie. they got progressively tedious.

two towers is my favorite by a nose over fellowship, i like the doom metal fantasy over the pastoral folk metal fantasy a bit. ROTK was def a step down, not a fan of galloping horse power metal fantasy.

rewatched two towers recently and was surprised to find myself liking it almost as much as fellowship; always marked it down as much worse in my mind (i think i was overestimating how much time was lavished on the pointless CGI warg-rider scene and aragorn's fake death). it's one of those "one big battle" movies but it genuinely earns it, really getting us invested in the people who are going to be in the battle (bernard hill's graveside scene is fantastic), and not skimping on the little details and step-by-step progress of that battle. it's still weirdly paced and struggles to keep the frodo/sam and merry/pippin material feeling like it's even on the same planet, and i always thought the praise for smeagol was a bit overegged.

ROTK just seems like a slog to me. i'm not sure how it could have really been otherwise given the story material they left themselves for the last movie and the inevitable grab-bag of endings. some of the bits and pieces stick out in my mind as really great but it's exhausting me just thinking about watching it again. nonetheless, as far as big fantasy epics go i really don't think there's anything better out there than those three movies.

ROTK really falls down in the last third when it's endless fade-in-s/fade-outs of Frodo + Sam trying to finally, finally destroy the ring (and then get back down and out etc.). that whole sequence takes way way longer than it should

I think it was an (understandable) mistake to make them so beat down so early in the quest. It definitely makes their efforts in ROTK that much more heroic, but it sort of strains patience to see them basically crawling for a hundred miles. My memory of the books is that the journey is interrupted by more episodes (while totally selling the spreading shroud of doom and futility) but maybe it's just that the movie sorta rushes through Shelob, Cirith Ungol, and the "choice of Master Samwise" - always some of the most vivid parts in my mind, and better as a cliffhanger in II than a cold-open to III. Honestly, and this is sacrilege, but it might have made more sense to cut out/down the Faramir sequence, whatever its value to the Smeagol storyline, since it doesn't really do anything for the movie and they kinda fuck up Faramir anyway. Get Shelob back into the second movie and you really can get an Empire Strikes Back kinda ending --- the Gandalf team has won the battle but not the war, but all looks nearly lost for the Frodo team.

yeah I think they made some poor decisions in messing with the overall structure, the Faramir subplot is not that critical and gets way more screentime than necessary, and Frodo captured by Shelob is a great cliffhanger ending.

And that would've made time for the Scouring of the Shire, which really does tie the themes of the books all together imo

I didn't like the climax of the Helm's Deep battle, where Éomer's army charges down this absurdly steep slope with the sun behind them. Too "galloping horse power metal fantasy."

uh isn't this the source material for galloping horse power metal fantasies

Scouring of the Shire really really should be the last act - with cutaways, over the closing credits, to Aragorn's coronation, Sam raising kids, and the Grey Havens. The big argument against doing that is it means the Ring, whose destruction presumably was driving everything else, gets destroyed halfway through the movie - - but i feel like that basically happened anyway! Obviously today it would have been split into two movies, and even worse for it.

I should just be glad for what we got... I mean in three three-hour movies it's amazing that there's really only a handful of scenes or shots that even hint at what you'd expect from "Hollywood got their hands on Lord of the Rings, brace yourselves." It could have been so bad and it's only from having those films around now for years and years and sort of taking them for granted that I can really poke holes in them. Even all that excellent design work, sets, props, casting, everything... nothing else comes close. They're not the three best films of those three years, but I'd accept one 'collective achievement' kind of award, which is clearly how the Oscar people were thinking about it.

yeah I agree with all that

i just remember when ROTK won best pic the audience seemed so appalled, it was great

Shawshank & Fight Club should be banned from all polls for 20 years

I may actually hate Fight Club the most out of the ones I've seen here (have never actually seen Shawshank (!!), Interstellar or whatever the fuck The Intouchables is).

I've never seen Shawshank either and feel no inclination to remedy that

Some variation on "How do you love movies and you've never seen The Shawshank Redemption?!" is something I've heard way too many times over the years. At least if I finally go ahead and watch it I'll have something (possibly/likely) contradictory to say about it when it comes up.

Now I envy you all your first chance to hate Shawshank.

shawshank is this queasy mix of corny as fuck and sadistic and yet it's pretty good i think. the denouement is nice. however i do think it deserves every shred of flak for being considered the best movie of all time by imdb.

there are definitely plenty of hateable elements about it

i saw it a fair while after it first released and i was like "ok wtf is everyone so flipped out about"

It had its Academy cult that steered it to its nominations and, I suppose, it broke even in home video? That's where I imagine the thirtysomethings who love it heard of it.

I def remember around 1997 or 1998 friends and students saying, "You should see this incredible movie...The Shawshank Redemption and thinking, holy shit, really.

i had friends in college who were all about it, i guess it has an "it made me cry manful tears" fanbase idk

i loved the short story but the movie was just so overwrought to me

As an Oscar junkie I used to read Premier and Entertainment Weekly, and after they'd crowned it as a fall movie to watch and it didn't do well I was surprised to see it in the Best Picture lineup. Guess it spoke to their voting bloc.

*Premiere

seriously who voted for the departed? over all the other dreck?

loving the nolan hate tho

SPOILERS FOR SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION FOLLOW
SPOILERS FOR SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION FOLLOW
SPOILERS FOR SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION FOLLOW

shawshank is one of those things where the way it ends is so satisfying, in terms of how a movie can pay off a bunch of little things over its running time, that it really wipes out my memory of the rest of the movie. like i really skip in my memory from, ok, morgan freeman has his parole interviews, there's the beer scene on the roof, and then we're suddenly at the reveal of the poster, the tunnel, the bank accounts - oh MANNNN! i just love that bit. in my mind you cannot go wrong with a multi-decade plan painstakingly executed right under everybody's noses - that's just seductive storytelling IMO. and it kind of blots out the rest of the movie, including real missteps like the rape scene (as pointed out to me on ILX as a big flaw, which i agree about) and the rather forced "this guy knows the truth so we can kill him and twist the knife some more" bit. in my mind it was not a very "spoiled" movie (until this post) so i can imagine a lot of oscar voters, and people who checked it out after the oscars (it did basically all its business as a blockbuster rental, right?), having the same experience, this reasonable prison story, slowly told, a couple of "ugh i really wish this were not in the movie" scenes and then, whammo, all is forgiven, the ending rules and you walk away feeling great. seriously though, i get the hate but MAN i love that payoff. i'm a sucker for that kind of hollywood thing though. i would never in a million years mark it as the greatest anything but i can get why that would lodge in people's minds as a movie they feel satisfied about. i watched it with someone who was very much a "seen this movie five times" person so i also walked in kinda predisposed to like it.

plus y'know, male-male lead bonding movie, two guys redeeming each other, tim robbins basically organizing his escape plan around how he can also help morgan freeman realize that he's still a man and deserves his self-respect, or whatever is the moral of this thing.... it's a bit mushy but i think it's effective. maybe plays some of the same notes as your average buddy cop movie for male viewers but i think it plays them quite well. would compare it in this way to something like big fish which wears its fairy-tale qualities more explicitly but is also basically a really simple little male reconciliation/bonding story, blown up to big size, that fucking nails its ending. not sure how far i'd take that comparison but all of this is to say that i liked watching shawshank, didn't really feel like i needed to see it again, but find myself flashing on certain sequences surprisingly often, and can 100% see why certain people might latch onto it as the greatest thing ever, especially if most of the movies they watch are whatever else was similarly numerous on the new releases wall at blockbuster, which would be, i dunno, true lies, the mask, beverly hills cop iii and of course speed which is i'll admit definitely way better than shawshank. oh and pulp fiction, the lion king and forrest gump but everyone saw those in the theater already.

yeah but they don't fuck

Yeah, fuck that.

Just realized: Shawshank ... Pulp Fiction ... American History X ...

IMDB voters love man-on-man rape scenes.

VIET-FUCKING-NAM!