I just watched I Know Who Killed Me starring Lindsay Lohan and WOW was I surprised by how good the movie was. Looking at how IMDb members voted this movie is one of the most polarized movies I've come across. It's a hate or love it movie but unfortunately, it's been mostly ignored because of the focus on Lindsay's problems and that the detractors have seemed to have gained the upperhand leaving the many fans of this movie in the dust.

What really is fascinating about this movie is its nice use of visuals and non-linear chronology that fit so well into this type of movie. The emotional intensity, the raw strength of the movies, and especially, Lohan's own personal trials really enhance the substance this movie can generate. The final scene also is the most telling scene of any movie I've seen this year because it really connects to Lohan's reality with a double meaning that goes beyond all the commercial hype and media crap.

I had a friend and when we were younger, every time he saw a bad movie he would tell all of his friends to go see it. Inevitably we'd fall for it and go see some lousy movie.

This topic reminded me of that friend.

Well, I have no doubt that the opening post of this was a joke, but I do have a "serious" response to it.

There are a number of films that I liked that were little seen, but I'd say a relatively mainstream film that I thought was surprisingly good and very quirky was "Year of the Dog." I SO wanted to put this in my Best 10 list, but I think it's just going to miss it.

If you're not an "animals" person or a "dog" person, I can see not really "getting" this film, though.

Again, this isn't the greatest film of the year by any means, but I thought deserved more acclaim and better box office.

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asc85
Know-It-All
Posted 26 December 2007 06:14 AM Hide Post
Well, I have no doubt that the opening post of this was a joke, but I do have a "serious" response to it.

As much as you probably would have wanted, I have to say I was serious about my belief that I Know Who Killed Me was a good movie. Forty-Two percent of IMDb posters who rated this rated it either a 9 or 10 while a quarter rated it a 1. I'm assuming that not many people would be willing to admit to liking this film due to the controversy surrounding Lindsay Lohan. Unfortunately regardless of the personal issues of the actress, the movie itself can be judged on its own merits.

I'm not an animals person or a dog person at all, but I also loved Year of the Dog. And it was totally overlooked. I also thought The Hunting Party was one of the year's best, and it was seen by about 12 people.

Well looking at the metacritic score for this movie, I think we can let this topic die.

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Termina*
Participant
Posted 27 December 2007 09:53 PM Hide Post
Well looking at the metacritic score for this movie, I think we can let this topic die.

It's become so obvious, you are so oblivious to yourself

Thanks for the reference to metacritic. I was able to come across a Washington Post critic review that I feel accurately reflects my view on this matter at: Lindsay Gets An A. The whole nature of an under-rated means there's a potent majority that would like to sweep this movie under the rug, but along with the Boston Globe review and 3,451 other people we refuse to cave into such easy overlooked talent due, in part, to a moral majority attitude.

David Fincher's superb Zodiac has been unfairly overlooked by the academy due to its early release date.

The Lookout, a crime thriller from Scott Frank (screenwriter of Soderbergh's Out of Sight and Spielberg's Minority Report) was also ignored. Incidentally, David Fincher was attached to direct The Lookout for quite some time.

I also enjoyed Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and Danny Boyle's criminally underrated Sunshine.

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Originally posted by acorvey:
Danny Boyle's criminally underrated Sunshine.

Eh, Sunshine started out well enough. The visuals were very striking, but it had plenty of sci-fi/spaceship cliches. And the ending, I'm sorry...when the insane guy/monster first appears, it's pretty scary. But it rapidly degenerates from there. By the end I didn't really care anymore, it had slid so far off the plausibility scale. I think its MC score in the 60s was dead on.

I do agree about Zodiac, though. It's definitely one of my favorites of the year.

As far as the Lindsay Lohen flick and its imdb ratings...I'm sure you can find similar scenarios for many, many bad movies there. There will always be a bunch of people who impulsively rate something like Alien vs. Predator a 9 or 10 because they like seeing gore and things exploding. The user ratings of imdb (or Netflix) are no kind of reference, anyway. Look at their top 100 lists; plenty of mediocre-to-poor movies.

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Commontone
Apprentice Guru
Posted 27 January 2008 01:56 PM

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Originally posted by acorvey:
Danny Boyle's criminally underrated Sunshine.

Eh, Sunshine started out well enough. The visuals were very striking, but it had plenty of sci-fi/spaceship cliches. And the ending, I'm sorry...when the insane guy/monster first appears, it's pretty scary. But it rapidly degenerates from there. By the end I didn't really care anymore, it had slid so far off the plausibility scale. I think its MC score in the 60s was dead on.

I tend to agree with Commontone's assessment of Sunshine. My opinion is all the more pertinent in that this is one of those movies that I wanted to like before I even saw it and therefore I went in looking for things to like. While yes this movie was great looking, it suffered from the more classical traps of more average science fiction fare as the movie continued into its story only to become more of what we've seen before. Disappointing because it should have or could have been much better.

quote:

Commontone Apprentice Guru Posted 27 January 2008 01:56 PM

As far as the Lindsay Lohen flick and its imdb ratings...I'm sure you can find similar scenarios for many, many bad movies there. There will always be a bunch of people who impulsively rate something like Alien vs. Predator a 9 or 10 because they like seeing gore and things exploding. The user ratings of imdb (or Netflix) are no kind of reference, anyway. Look at their top 100 lists; plenty of mediocre-to-poor movies.

What you may be overlooking in the imdb rating details is how the unusual disparity spread of voting was for I Know Who Killed Me. The bimodel results where people either loved this movie or hated this movie indicates that it obviously hit some intense buttons on both sides of the aisle. Usually only controversial or arthouse, or cult, or special movies can produce results like this movie. Another huge discrepancy is the female to male ratio of female liking this movie to those male's who hated the movie - the gap is one of the largest I've seen for any movie, indicating again that film critics, in general, mostly male, who may control the critics circles again have had sexual prejudicial feelings about this movie. Other movies that have had roughly similar results include:

Aquamarine (2006)
Elektra (2005) similar but not as dramatic a difference.
Just My Luck (2006), a Lindsay Lohan movie with roughly similar results.
Uptown Girls (2003) has some similarities with his pattern, but was ranked even higher.
Untraceable (2008) is skewing the same way except without the female skewing, implying that there is some other controversial factor going on - likely the subject matter.


At the same time, imdb can be a good indicator of the quality of a movie as the high scores for such movies as:

Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Atonement (2007)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
Across the Universe (2007)
Adaptation (2002)
Akeelah and the Bee (2006)
Almost Famous (2000)
American Gangster (2007)
Babel (2006)
A Beautiful Mind (2001)
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)
Big Fish (2003)

I don't think I need to go on with this list - there a many, many examples where the popular vote and critic's vote line up very well.

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Commontone Apprentice Guru
Posted 27 January 2008 01:56 PM

I do agree about Zodiac, though. It's definitely one of my favorites of the year.

Personally, I feel that Zodiac is getting about the right amount of attention and ratings that it deserves, perhaps a bit more.

It has been nominated for the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival for David Fincher; best director and adapted screenplay by the Chicago Film Critics Association; best adapted screenplay by the Screenwriter's Guild. It has received 7.9 rating by 51,167 imdb voters, very high rating. This movie also received excellent reviews by The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Chicago-Sun Times, Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Time. No I don't think the this movie is at all under-rated, much less the most under-rated movie of 2007.

quote:

Originally posted by tabuno:
I tend to agree with Commontone's assessment of Sunshine. My opinion is all the more pertinent in that this is one of those movies that I wanted to like before I even saw it and therefore I went in looking for things to like. While yes this movie was great looking, it suffered from the more classical traps of more average science fiction fare as the movie continued into its story only to become more of what we've seen before. Disappointing because it should have or could have been much better.

I enjoyed Sunshine because it took a cue from Tom Godwin's classic short story "The Cold Equations," a story in which the real threat to the characters is the cold, unsympathetic harshness of space. It suggested that nothing is as threatening as a simple human miscalculation (or the psychoses born from the stress of deep space exploration).

The film was not about superfluous action or the gratuitous display of future technology. It was all about the psychological toll that is taken on a group of scientists and engineers who are Earth's last hope. It was about fear, sacrifice, and the moral dilemma that begs the question: is it right to tamper with fate (or God, karma, etc.) and reverse the course of nature? Even if doing so will save all life on Earth? It was questions like these that set Sunshine apart for me.

Sure, the third act implodes a bit and rehashes many of the dramatic beats we've seen before, but it doesn't invalidate the first two-thirds (for me, anyway).

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acorvey Participant
Posted 31 January 2008 01:22 AM

I enjoyed Sunshine because it took a cue from Tom Godwin's classic short story "The Cold Equations," a story in which the real threat to the characters is the cold, unsympathetic harshness of space. It suggested that nothing is as threatening as a simple human miscalculation (or the psychoses born from the stress of deep space exploration).

The film was not about superfluous action or the gratuitous display of future technology. It was all about the psychological toll that is taken on a group of scientists and engineers who are Earth's last hope.� It was about fear, sacrifice, and the moral dilemma that begs the question: is it right to tamper with fate (or God, karma, etc.) and reverse the course of nature? Even if doing so will save all life on Earth? It was questions like these that set Sunshine apart for me.

Sure, the third act implodes a bit and rehashes many of the dramatic beats we've seen before, but it doesn't invalidate the first two-thirds (for me, anyway).

Nicely done. As I recall, the movie at first did really impress me and your description seems to fit my own reactions. Unfortunately, when it comes to judging a movie, it's the whole package that counts. But I agree that the movie really did have great potential. It's too bad it couldn't maintain its integrity until the end. The movie's collapse reminds me of what happened with The Event Horizon (1997) where Sam Neill stars in this science fiction mystery thriller that starts off well with a scary intensity but then flames out with a gross transition into a horror-gore genre movie ending.

quote:

Originally posted by tabuno:
Nicely done. As I recall, the movie at first did really impress me and your description seems to fit my own reactions. Unfortunately, when it comes to judging a movie, it's the whole package that counts. But I agree that the movie really did have great potential. It's too bad it couldn't maintain its integrity until the end. The movie's collapse reminds me of what happened with The Event Horizon (1997) where Sam Neill stars in this science fiction mystery thriller that starts off well with a scary intensity but then flames out with a gross transition into a horror-gore genre movie ending.

Yeah, the Event Horizon comparison is a good one, as both films end up going the same direction.

I think our opinions are relatively consistent on the subject. I think our differences stem from the fact that I had absolutely no expectations whereas you went in hoping/thinking it was going to be good.

Never underestimate the power of expectations. I need to adjust mine accordingly so I don't ruin Indy IV come May.

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acorvey Participant
Posted 31 January 2008 02:17 AM

Yeah, the Event Horizon comparison is a good one, as both films end up going the same direction.

I think our opinions are relatively consistent on the subject. I think our differences stem from the fact that I had absolutely no expectations whereas you went in hoping/thinking it was going to be good.

Never underestimate the power of expectations. I need to adjust mine accordingly so I don't ruin Indy IV come May.

When I saw the first trailer of Sunshine months before the movie's release, I thought 2001: A Space Odyssey in technical brilliance and had great expectations that this would be one of those breakthrough movies setting new standards.

I thought Vacancy was underrated. I just enjoyed Kate Beckinsale's performance in it.

Most under-rated movie of the year: Sunshine.

Most over-rated: Zodiac.

I don't know I thought Charlie Wilson's War was a great movie.

My feeling is that it was too smart for a lot of people.

I can't really say I thought Vacancy was underrated, I paid a dollar to see it and if I had paid anymore I would have wanted a few dollars back...

I haven't seen it yet, but for anybody who has, part of me wants Lions for Lambs to be the most under-rated movie of 2007. Can anybody let me know if they feel that the movie was under-rated or was it really that average or bad?