In search of an idea for another top ten list I got to thinking about directors. Who is the best director? Who is the worst director? Those two questions require some serious research and I just don’t think I am learned enough to say one way or another. Then I got to thinking about who may be the most overrated director? The best thing about this question is that it eliminates the likes of Uwe Boll from the conversation and I don’t need to regurgitate what so many others have said concerning the directors that have gone down in history as great. I don’t have to worry about telling you how great Alfred Hitchcock is and why. It’s fantastic. However I did a little online searching and it isn’t as if this is a question that hasn’t been asked before. However, it appears there are already a few stock answers.
Searching the Net it seems the most popular answers are the following:
Those three names seem to be the first three whenever the conversation is started. Oliver Stone appears to be around fourth place. Fifth and sixth seem to be interchangeable between Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Brian De Palma, the Coen brothers and Ron Howard seem to be the overall choices for seven, eight and nine. Tenth place isn’t as easy but I saw a lot of Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson so take your pick and the job appears to be done for me. That is, if I were a conventional bandwagoner, which I’m not. Woo hoo!
Before I go making any drastic claims I need to take a look at those I have already mentioned.
Shyamalan takes so much shit for even existing to call him overrated at this point is a bit redundant. I imagine the same people calling him overrated would be the same people calling him awful. I like Shyamalan, but I don’t think anyone has him ranked high enough anymore to call him overrated outside of his rabid fan base. It was a legitimate argument back in 1999, but now it is just annoying.
Kevin Smith isn’t considered to be anything more than a dick and fart joke director with a fantastic ability to write great dialogue. Smith even refers to himself as a dick and fart joke director and he is out to service his fan base. He jokes about making Jersey Girl and his follow-up was a return to form in Clerks II featuring a bit of donkey-on-human sex. Zack and Miri Make a Porno looks to be some more of the same.Hard to fault a guy for feeding a genre with films the intended audience loves.
Maybe I just enjoy Smith too much, but in my opinion he is something of an independent film maverick. Clerks encouraged filmmakers from every corner, showing them you didn’t need millions of dollars to make a movie and should it turn out for the best you may be able to make a career out of movies filled with dick and fart jokes. What’s so overrated about that? Inspiring maybe, but not overrated.
Personally I love Quentin Tarantino, but I can see how people may consider him overrated even if I don’t. Oliver Stone is a tough call, I haven’t liked a lot of his films but he has made some damn good ones at the same time and good or bad they all seem to stir up conversation, which I think is a definite sign of a director that is not overrated.
Lucas, De Palma and Howard have definitely had their ups and downs, but Lucas has never been much more than the guy that invented Star Wars and is never really thought of as a director of any consequence. Anyone thinking Ron Howard is overrated is likely to forget that in an instant should Frost/Nixon end up as good as it looks. As for Brian De Palma, he is tougher to defend. I love Scarface but a lot of people believe that film is overrated. I am not a huge fan of The Untouchables, but other people love it. Carlito’s Way is pretty good and I think Mission: Impossible is great. However, he also brought us Mission to Mars, Snake Eyes and The Black Dahlia. Those three films on top of the fact that he doesn’t appear to have anything left in the tank may mean he is an overrated director. It’s certainly a close call.
Finally, Wes Anderson, like Kevin Smith, services an audience and to call the Coen brothers or Martin Scorsese overrated is just asinine. Out of our original list that leaves us with Steven Spielberg, who I don’t think is overrated as much as I think he has just made a few bad films recently. Does a director that seems a bit off his game make him overrated when he brought us such films as Jaws, Close Encounters, the Indy films, E.T., The Color Purple and Schindler’s List? I pray he makes Lincoln next because I think that could be the film that Munich was supposed to be.
Of course, when considering best, worst and overrated it is all a matter of opinion. Maybe the 11 directors listed above are the names most people consider overrated, but I would much rather see a movie by the majority of the names above before I ever saw another film from Paul Haggis. Tony Scott seems to be a one trick pony as of late. Robert Zemeckis and his series of mo-cap films don’t interest me. Terry Gilliam has gotten too weird for his own good and Tim Burton is also starting to wear on me even though I loved Sweeney Todd.
Unfortunately any criticism over the directors named directly above goes away as soon as they make a new film. Outside of Haggis I will line-up for a new flick from any one of them because I know there is always potential for greatness from any one of them.
In recent years I felt Clint Eastwood was overrated as it seemed anything he made was going to be loved by one and all regardless of quality and entertainment value. I am sorry, but Flags of Our Fathers is boring as sin and Letters from Iwo Jima is just a’ight. I loathed Mystic River and yet two of those films were nominated for Best Picture and together they won three. Based on that I guess you could say I think Eastwood is overrated, but I am dying to see Changeling and Gran Torino because I think Eastwood is a great filmmaker, which throws that overrated argument out the window.
Paul Haggis is really the only one I can think of to call overrated, but the guy has only made two films and he is hardly on the tip of anyone’s tongue when it comes to great directors, which means he doesn’t really even have a rating and therefore can’t be overrated.
Unfortunately, that means I can’t even answer my own question posed in the headline. In my opinion there isn’t an overrated director. There are definitely good directors, bad directors and mediocre directors, but like I said before I haven’t seen enough films to list a top ten great directors yet, no one wants to read a list of top ten mediocre directors because that is just stupid and to make a list of the ten worst directors would be cliché and annoying.
Every director has his notch in film history. Michael Bay blows shit up and loves himself for it. Uwe Boll makes videogame adaptations and everyone hates him for it. Stephen Sommers makes corny CGI films. Tyler Perry makes films with his name in the title. Spike Lee has a tendency to make films centered on African Americans. Guy Ritchie makes English gangster flicks and shitty romances with his wife. Love ’em or hate ’em, they fill a void. It is their duty to the society of film. Without Uwe Boll who would you call the worst director? Without Spike Lee what high profile director would carry the racial torch? Without Oliver Stone who would revisit Vietnam over and over and over again?
Should I give you a few names on top of those already mentioned to consider? How about David Lynch, Jon Favreau, Jonathan Mostow, David Mamet, Michel Gondry, Peter Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola, Garry Marshall, Cameron Crowe, James Cameron or Paul Thomas Anderson? Maybe there is a name in there you believe gets more credit than he deserves. Just to be fair to the opposite sex, how about Sofia Coppola and Nancy Meyers?
As for me, well I have to get back to watching Bachelor Party directed and co-written by Neal Israel who proved he wasn’t overrated in 2002 when he directed the made-for-TV film The Brady Bunch in the White House. Natch.
