Kill your idols: The Godfather

You want to talk about a movie that is beloved but was actually bad?
'Star Wars'

I love the movie. I was 7 when it came out.
When I have tried to rewatch any scene as an adult, I can't get past the terrible dialogue and awful acting.

 

That's what the millennials will admit someday about the terrible Kevin Smith.

 

I'm a Gen Xer. 'Clerks' came out when I was 24, so I identify Smith more with my generation than the next.

I don't think he's terrible at all, but that anyone every gave him money in attempt to pursue mainstream box office success if pretty funny to me.
He's made a few good, small movies and several bad movies.

Maybe I'm making excuses for something I like, but I see a difference in the low-budget bad acting in 'Clerks' and the big budget bad acting of 'Star Wars.'

 

The budget on Star Wars was $11 million.

 

I see an untrained director whose characters don't talk to one another, they speechify.
Lucas's are on the other end of the spectrum.
Neither suspends disbelief.

 

You have to provide historical context. The average film budget in 1978 was $5 million, and that was two years after production on 'Star Wars.'
'Star Wars' was a big-budget movie. It cost well over double the industry average to make. The recent trend to portray it as the little film that could is revisionist.

The average film budget in 1995, again two years after production on 'Clerks,' was $34 million.

 

I was 10 when it came out. It was the greatest thing I had seen in my life. I saw it multiple times in the theater.

When my oldest son was 10 I got the DVD set and sat and watched the first one with him.

It absolutely sucks.

It's not really an issue of being dated, either. It's not the special effects that ruin it. The whole film is people in funny suits bitching unemotionally about the Federation. Yawn.

 

Robert Evans just snorted from laughter. Okay, maybe not laughter, but he did just snort.

 

Now I understand.

 

I am grateful I am not so jaded that I can still view something as my childlike self would have- if I exert the effort.
But Kevin Smith still f-kin sucks.
Plying myself with drugs wouldn't even make his movies work.

 

This ...

Though I agree with 'Vols on Brando's acting. When he sticks to script, he's pretty good. When ad-libs - his death scene, and the brutal crap in Apocalypse Now - he's awful.

 

Clerks is horrible. Horrible.
But I love Mallrats.
All his other movies fall somewhere in between.