One extratextual thing that I wouldn't bring up except it was the reason my dad and I saw the movie: this was also what Warner chose to put the Final Flight of the Osiris Animatrix short in front of as marketing leading up to Matrix Reloaded.
I'm a huge King fan, but Dreamcatcher is atrocious. I might, however, have to revisit the movie upon learning that the four guys I did not recognize twenty years ago include Raylan Givens and Todd from "Boogie Nights".
Same here! I was reading this, thinking "ugh, Dreamcatcher, that was awful" and then suddenly, "Oh, wow, I could really watch that cast in something awful."
Also, I'd read the book before the movie came out, and I recall being disappointed in the adaptation. But as to what was cut or changed or otherwise altered, I have no idea. And that's maybe for the better.
Me always wonder why one cavalcade of insane ideas becomes disaster like this, and other cavalcade of insane ideas become masterpiece like Sorry To Bother You or Everything Everywhere. Because on either side, you have to have people making movie convinced it going to be brilliant, and people worried it going to be unwatchable mess. Me wonder what fulcrum is that make one group turn out to be right or other.
Your point is a good one in general, but if anything, the problem with Dreamcatcher is that it doesn't have enough insane ideas. It's literally, "What if poop. And it were a monster somehow. From pooping."
Me suppose there upper limit to how much you can do with premise of "somebody poops out an alien". But then, on paper, "third act twist involve giant horse penis" probably not sound like recipe for razor-sharp satire, but here we are.
Tone is a big part, i think. Sorry To Bother You is already wild with the general premise and things like literally dropping into someone when you're calling. It's also the idea itself of course because some ideas are just plain stupider than others.
I have not read the novel since it came out, and I haven't seen the movie. But I suspect that the fundamental problem with the movie is that the book is awful, indulging in a lot of King's worst instincts. I love King overall, but even in '01 when I was freshly grateful he wasn't dead, that book was a slog.
I've never seen this (the reviews at the time of its release were more than enough to keep me far away), but I'm always curious about the films that get their makers sent to "director jail." Lawrence Kasdan didn't make another movie for close to a decade after this debacle. Alan Parker made the similarly reviled The Life of David Gale the same year and sat on the sidelines for the next 17 years until his death at age 76.
In the last few years Netflix has admirably stepped up to the plate to help deliver true-blue catastrophes with massive budgets: Don't Look Up, White Noise, etc.
You guys are not making it easier for me to one day finish White Noise, beyond the 15 minutes I've already watched. Noah Baumbach! Greta Gerwig! Adam Driver! There has to be something in there, right? Right? Right?
I am a big, big Baumbach fan and liked seeing him stretch into “action sequences” and money-wasting spectacle, but I thought White Noise was boring from soup to nuts, save for a few nice comic touches. I’ve read most of DeLillo, grimly and unenthusiastically, so I was not the target audience by any stretch, but the whole project felt more dutiful than inspired, like something a highbrow-ish filmmaker who is deservedly used to getting great reviews would do if he had a lot of money and no hot ideas. His other Netflix-era stuff has been peerless, though.
My main memory of this movie is that it left me wondering if Damian Lewis is actually a terrible actor. Because he is terrible in this movie, overacting appallingly. Maybe Keith's on to something with the hack-movie-at-blockbuster-budget thing. If he gave that performance against a cardboard backdrop with an antagonist in a cheesy rubber suit, I might think "this guy knows what movie he's in! HE'S having fun!" But in this movie, it's distracting and bizarre.
Even after seeing him give 20 years of wonderful performances in other things, I still wonder about him. Like, Inception-style, there's a top spinning in a safe somewhere in my brain.
I get it. I like what he’s doing in this movie better now that I understand how wayyy outside his usual range it takes him. It also seems to be a British actor’s attempt at a non-British person badly affecting a British accent, which didn’t necessarily register the first time I saw this.
One of the most baffling experiences in my life is seeing this with a group of old school friends when we congregated back home during a university break. We didn't go bowling, or play pool, or go for a pizza, the kind of things we regularly did together when at school - we made a collective decision to go to the cinema, which we had never before done as a group, and we saw Dreamcatcher (at Dreamland, aka friend-of-the-site Sam Mendes' "Empire"). Entirely unrelated: I don't think that group was ever together again.
When a terrible film is made from a blockbuster book, the usual complaint is that the filmmakers changed or chopped or missed the point of the story - Dreamcatcher is terrible because it *didn't* do this, it's absurdly faithful to the book. Even stranger given that, first of all, William Goldman was William Goldman, but also that he had not long prior heeded advice (from Tony Gilroy, re: adapting Absolute Power) to not be beholden to the source when it's obviously not working.
On the topic of recent epic misfires: it’s not in the sci-fi/horror spectrum but I think The Snowman should qualify. It is so inexplicably bad and I had so much fun watching it.
I have watched the Snowman at least five times, all with friends and under the influence, playing the party game of, “Who can guess what is happening?”
The closest film in recent memory with a strong cast fighting against a poorly conceived premise would probably be Cats, right? Although the wedged-in-the-uncanny-valley effects really precluded any enjoyment, and mostly made me feel sad for everyone involved. Although Hudson somehow manages to tear past the awfulness of the CGI through the sheer force of her talent.
The cast isn’t as strong, but Moonfall is probably the closest high budget, high concept terrible movie that’s still fun. While the performances alternate between sleepy (Wilson) and visibly regretting their career choices (Barry), my wife and I would howl anytime Emmerick showed the moon hovering over a character’s shoulder like the antagonist of a slasher film. It’s terribly misguided, but the glut of ridiculous ideas makes it entertaining at least.
Here's a vote for both Cats and Moonfall, and I think "poorly conceived premise" and "terrible" aren't really words for these movies or kinds of movies. They are both, like Serenity mentioned in your article, are exactly what they set out to be, 100% the creators' vision, and I love that about all three movies. "Misguided" may be a better term, but I kind of think it's more that they were made for an audience of one: the director. And I love that kind of thing, maybe even moreso when it's... well, when it's a Cats or a Serenity, I guess.
Mike D'Angelo best described it as the kind of misfire that only a genuinely talented director could make, ie Antichrist, Bamboozled, Southland Tales, etc. Definitely something made because a strong creative hand really wants it.
Agreed that Moonfall is 100% an Emmerick film, and the movie is better and more enjoyable for it. To use the earlier example of moon-as-slasher-villain, someone should have probably told him how ridiculous that choice was, but I'm glad they didn't. It's an insane decision, but the faults give the movie its character.
Cats is tough for me to go to bat for. There's a joy in watching incredibly skilled people doing their thing, but the CGI's PS3 cutscene quality undercut that completely for me. And the faults felt more informed by a studio saying "let's make a filmed version of Cats, that will make a lot of money, who cares if Judi Dench looks like a werewolf" rather than any kind of personal creative decision. I couldn't find an authorial footprint in the film like there is in Moonfall, but that may have been me finding the whole experience so off-putting.
I love Geostorm for the same reasons as I do Moonfall, even though it's a Roland Emmerich cover album, it leans in completely and hires consummate professionals Ed Harris and Andy Garcia to deliver real performances in a movie about space weather satellites freezing people solid.
I don't actually know much about Andrew Lloyd Weber, but I felt like his was the authorial footprint in Cats, like this movie finally brought to life what he thought about when he was writing the stage musical. Like that story (I don't know if it's true or not) about Phillip K. Dick seeing production footage of Blade Runner and asking Ridley Scott how he saw inside his head. Cats feels like that, but for silly musicals.
It was so weird, I took my kid, just because this is a once in a lifetime weird movie. If there were still video stores, Cats would show up on the Cult Classics shelf in 2040 with the other movies that might be terrible but are just too weird to die.
I was thinking about this in concert with having watched Southland Tales: we don't really get many full blown disasters like that anymore. Streaming produces a lot of bad movies for sure, but they're mostly bad in predictable ways. There's nothing ill-conceived on a Book of Henry type level much anymore, maybe because the budgets have gotten all out of whack.
Thanks to YouTube, everyone can now enjoy a Dreamcatcher DVD extra that is my favorite outtake of all time, with Thomas Jayne endlessly stretching out some car seat exposition while they drive to the final battle... https://youtu.be/cJuNoNqJV4Q?t=223
One extratextual thing that I wouldn't bring up except it was the reason my dad and I saw the movie: this was also what Warner chose to put the Final Flight of the Osiris Animatrix short in front of as marketing leading up to Matrix Reloaded.
It's difficult to describe how exciting watching 10 minutes of NEW MATRIX was before any of the sequels had been released.
I'm a huge King fan, but Dreamcatcher is atrocious. I might, however, have to revisit the movie upon learning that the four guys I did not recognize twenty years ago include Raylan Givens and Todd from "Boogie Nights".
And Jason Lee! That was the most exciting thing to me as a Kevin Smith fan at that time.
Same here! I was reading this, thinking "ugh, Dreamcatcher, that was awful" and then suddenly, "Oh, wow, I could really watch that cast in something awful."
Also, I'd read the book before the movie came out, and I recall being disappointed in the adaptation. But as to what was cut or changed or otherwise altered, I have no idea. And that's maybe for the better.
Me always wonder why one cavalcade of insane ideas becomes disaster like this, and other cavalcade of insane ideas become masterpiece like Sorry To Bother You or Everything Everywhere. Because on either side, you have to have people making movie convinced it going to be brilliant, and people worried it going to be unwatchable mess. Me wonder what fulcrum is that make one group turn out to be right or other.
I'm reminded of that oft repeated phrase: it's a thin line between madness and genius...
Your point is a good one in general, but if anything, the problem with Dreamcatcher is that it doesn't have enough insane ideas. It's literally, "What if poop. And it were a monster somehow. From pooping."
Me suppose there upper limit to how much you can do with premise of "somebody poops out an alien". But then, on paper, "third act twist involve giant horse penis" probably not sound like recipe for razor-sharp satire, but here we are.
Tone is a big part, i think. Sorry To Bother You is already wild with the general premise and things like literally dropping into someone when you're calling. It's also the idea itself of course because some ideas are just plain stupider than others.
Having seen all three, I would go with Sorry To Bother and Everything Everywhere have something to say. Dreamcatcher, on the other hand, doesn't
I have not read the novel since it came out, and I haven't seen the movie. But I suspect that the fundamental problem with the movie is that the book is awful, indulging in a lot of King's worst instincts. I love King overall, but even in '01 when I was freshly grateful he wasn't dead, that book was a slog.
I've never seen this (the reviews at the time of its release were more than enough to keep me far away), but I'm always curious about the films that get their makers sent to "director jail." Lawrence Kasdan didn't make another movie for close to a decade after this debacle. Alan Parker made the similarly reviled The Life of David Gale the same year and sat on the sidelines for the next 17 years until his death at age 76.
In the last few years Netflix has admirably stepped up to the plate to help deliver true-blue catastrophes with massive budgets: Don't Look Up, White Noise, etc.
Kind of liked WHITE NOISE.
I kind of liked Don Cheadle but otherwise, oof magoof.
You guys are not making it easier for me to one day finish White Noise, beyond the 15 minutes I've already watched. Noah Baumbach! Greta Gerwig! Adam Driver! There has to be something in there, right? Right? Right?
This is how I felt about Fleishman is in Trouble....
As did I. Baumbach has made great use of Netflix’s deep pockets.
The Meyerowitz Stories was PHENOMENAL.
I am a big, big Baumbach fan and liked seeing him stretch into “action sequences” and money-wasting spectacle, but I thought White Noise was boring from soup to nuts, save for a few nice comic touches. I’ve read most of DeLillo, grimly and unenthusiastically, so I was not the target audience by any stretch, but the whole project felt more dutiful than inspired, like something a highbrow-ish filmmaker who is deservedly used to getting great reviews would do if he had a lot of money and no hot ideas. His other Netflix-era stuff has been peerless, though.
Is it strange that Morgan Freeman can play God with aplomb but can't play an insane, violent, megalomaniac?
My main memory of this movie is that it left me wondering if Damian Lewis is actually a terrible actor. Because he is terrible in this movie, overacting appallingly. Maybe Keith's on to something with the hack-movie-at-blockbuster-budget thing. If he gave that performance against a cardboard backdrop with an antagonist in a cheesy rubber suit, I might think "this guy knows what movie he's in! HE'S having fun!" But in this movie, it's distracting and bizarre.
Even after seeing him give 20 years of wonderful performances in other things, I still wonder about him. Like, Inception-style, there's a top spinning in a safe somewhere in my brain.
I get it. I like what he’s doing in this movie better now that I understand how wayyy outside his usual range it takes him. It also seems to be a British actor’s attempt at a non-British person badly affecting a British accent, which didn’t necessarily register the first time I saw this.
One of the most baffling experiences in my life is seeing this with a group of old school friends when we congregated back home during a university break. We didn't go bowling, or play pool, or go for a pizza, the kind of things we regularly did together when at school - we made a collective decision to go to the cinema, which we had never before done as a group, and we saw Dreamcatcher (at Dreamland, aka friend-of-the-site Sam Mendes' "Empire"). Entirely unrelated: I don't think that group was ever together again.
When a terrible film is made from a blockbuster book, the usual complaint is that the filmmakers changed or chopped or missed the point of the story - Dreamcatcher is terrible because it *didn't* do this, it's absurdly faithful to the book. Even stranger given that, first of all, William Goldman was William Goldman, but also that he had not long prior heeded advice (from Tony Gilroy, re: adapting Absolute Power) to not be beholden to the source when it's obviously not working.
Lol’ed at “friend of the site Sam Mendes”
On the topic of recent epic misfires: it’s not in the sci-fi/horror spectrum but I think The Snowman should qualify. It is so inexplicably bad and I had so much fun watching it.
I have watched the Snowman at least five times, all with friends and under the influence, playing the party game of, “Who can guess what is happening?”
The closest film in recent memory with a strong cast fighting against a poorly conceived premise would probably be Cats, right? Although the wedged-in-the-uncanny-valley effects really precluded any enjoyment, and mostly made me feel sad for everyone involved. Although Hudson somehow manages to tear past the awfulness of the CGI through the sheer force of her talent.
The cast isn’t as strong, but Moonfall is probably the closest high budget, high concept terrible movie that’s still fun. While the performances alternate between sleepy (Wilson) and visibly regretting their career choices (Barry), my wife and I would howl anytime Emmerick showed the moon hovering over a character’s shoulder like the antagonist of a slasher film. It’s terribly misguided, but the glut of ridiculous ideas makes it entertaining at least.
I still have to watch that one. Thanks for the reminder.
Here's a vote for both Cats and Moonfall, and I think "poorly conceived premise" and "terrible" aren't really words for these movies or kinds of movies. They are both, like Serenity mentioned in your article, are exactly what they set out to be, 100% the creators' vision, and I love that about all three movies. "Misguided" may be a better term, but I kind of think it's more that they were made for an audience of one: the director. And I love that kind of thing, maybe even moreso when it's... well, when it's a Cats or a Serenity, I guess.
Mike D'Angelo best described it as the kind of misfire that only a genuinely talented director could make, ie Antichrist, Bamboozled, Southland Tales, etc. Definitely something made because a strong creative hand really wants it.
Agreed that Moonfall is 100% an Emmerick film, and the movie is better and more enjoyable for it. To use the earlier example of moon-as-slasher-villain, someone should have probably told him how ridiculous that choice was, but I'm glad they didn't. It's an insane decision, but the faults give the movie its character.
Cats is tough for me to go to bat for. There's a joy in watching incredibly skilled people doing their thing, but the CGI's PS3 cutscene quality undercut that completely for me. And the faults felt more informed by a studio saying "let's make a filmed version of Cats, that will make a lot of money, who cares if Judi Dench looks like a werewolf" rather than any kind of personal creative decision. I couldn't find an authorial footprint in the film like there is in Moonfall, but that may have been me finding the whole experience so off-putting.
I love Geostorm for the same reasons as I do Moonfall, even though it's a Roland Emmerich cover album, it leans in completely and hires consummate professionals Ed Harris and Andy Garcia to deliver real performances in a movie about space weather satellites freezing people solid.
I don't actually know much about Andrew Lloyd Weber, but I felt like his was the authorial footprint in Cats, like this movie finally brought to life what he thought about when he was writing the stage musical. Like that story (I don't know if it's true or not) about Phillip K. Dick seeing production footage of Blade Runner and asking Ridley Scott how he saw inside his head. Cats feels like that, but for silly musicals.
It was so weird, I took my kid, just because this is a once in a lifetime weird movie. If there were still video stores, Cats would show up on the Cult Classics shelf in 2040 with the other movies that might be terrible but are just too weird to die.
I was thinking about this in concert with having watched Southland Tales: we don't really get many full blown disasters like that anymore. Streaming produces a lot of bad movies for sure, but they're mostly bad in predictable ways. There's nothing ill-conceived on a Book of Henry type level much anymore, maybe because the budgets have gotten all out of whack.
Thanks to YouTube, everyone can now enjoy a Dreamcatcher DVD extra that is my favorite outtake of all time, with Thomas Jayne endlessly stretching out some car seat exposition while they drive to the final battle... https://youtu.be/cJuNoNqJV4Q?t=223