Who is the most overrated director of all time?

[Nunyerbiz]

Ang Lee.

HULK is a failure, sure. But even Crouching Tiger Hiddden Dragon didn't impress me, and their "flying" was so patheticly obviously cables I can't believe people love it so much.

Hmm... maybe you are being sarcastic... but I dunno.. I liked the wire effects in CTHD. Call me crazy, but I usually prefer a well done, practical effect actually performed in front of a camera by human beings as opposed to movies that bonk me over the head with the "THIS IS A BIG FUCKING CGI CARTOON" clown hammer.

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

My nominee for most overrated director is:
Brian De Palma

As long as your talking about post-Phantom of the Paradise Brian De Palma....I'm right with you.  Before then, he made quirky and entertaining (although imperfect) stuff.

[Darth Geek]

Ang Lee.

HULK is a failure, sure. But even Crouching Tiger Hiddden Dragon didn't impress me, and their "flying" was so patheticly obviously cables I can't believe people love it so much.

Hmm... maybe you are being sarcastic... but I dunno.. I liked the wire effects in CTHD. Call me crazy, but I usually prefer a well done, practical effect actually performed in front of a camera by human beings as opposed to movies that bonk me over the head with the "THIS IS A BIG FUCKING CGI CARTOON" clown hammer.

No, I wasn't being sarcastic. And I like on set effects better than CGI, too. But I just thought the wire work was badly done. That, and the rest of the story didn't impress me, either.

[a pretty girl is like]

But even Crouching Tiger Hiddden Dragon didn't impress me, and their "flying" was so patheticly obviously cables I can't believe people love it so much.

Bruce Lee was spinning in his grave.   

Bruce Lee didn't make the same types of movies that Crouching Tiger was hearkening back to.

[THE QUEEN!!!]

I must say I'm sick of hearing about Ang Lee, but I loved Sense and Sensibility. But then I'm into classic literature and british cinema. And I too am sick of hearing about Quentin Tarantino. Sheesh.

[Tripe]

But even Crouching Tiger Hiddden Dragon didn't impress me, and their "flying" was so patheticly obviously cables I can't believe people love it so much.

Bruce Lee was spinning in his grave.  

Maybe they used that to generate power for their wire rig.

Reel Electrical Content

[gojikranz]

well i did enjoy crouching tiger i think Ang Lee was best when he was making films about/in taiwan.  eat drink man woman and wedding banquet are very good maybe he just needs to get back to small filmmaking.  and ya hulk sucked god know why he took that film.

david lynch im a fan of and he does have a bit of a cult to him but in all honesty he doesnt come up that much in non fan circles.  i mean hes not like tarantino where you could pull any yokel off the street and ask about and they would say they loved him. 

de palma i havent seen enough but judging by how his recent fare has come through i would agree.

[mearnest]

My nominee for most overrated director is:
Brian De Palma

As long as your talking about post-Phantom of the Paradise Brian De Palma....I'm right with you.  Before then, he made quirky and entertaining (although imperfect) stuff.

I actually haven't seen his early stuff.  My second runner-up was Spike Lee.

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

But even Crouching Tiger Hiddden Dragon didn't impress me, and their "flying" was so patheticly obviously cables I can't believe people love it so much.

Bruce Lee was spinning in his grave.   

Bruce Lee didn't make the same types of movies that Crouching Tiger was hearkening back to.

That was my point.  Lee was actively trying to take films made in Hong Kong away from the mythical stuff.  He wanted to promote a more realistic approach to martial arts in the movies.  And it worked for years. Then Crouching Tiger came out and wiped it all out.

My nominee for most overrated director is:
Brian De Palma

As long as your talking about post-Phantom of the Paradise Brian De Palma....I'm right with you.  Before then, he made quirky and entertaining (although imperfect) stuff.

I actually haven't seen his early stuff.

Find some.  Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Get To Know Your Rabbit (if you can find it)....he was good once.

[a pretty girl is like]

But even Crouching Tiger Hiddden Dragon didn't impress me, and their "flying" was so patheticly obviously cables I can't believe people love it so much.

Bruce Lee was spinning in his grave.   

Bruce Lee didn't make the same types of movies that Crouching Tiger was hearkening back to.

That was my point.  Lee was actively trying to take films made in Hong Kong away from the mythical stuff.  He wanted to promote a more realistic approach to martial arts in the movies.  And it worked for years. Then Crouching Tiger came out and wiped it all out.

Ah I see.  I agree that Bruce Lee was trying to do something more realistic but I don't know what you mean by "it worked for years".  Wuxia movies never really went away.  Tsui Hark was making his movies all throughout the 80s and 90s and those made superstars out of Jet Li and Donnie Yen (and Michelle Yeoh to a smaller extent).  The movies that made Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao  still relied on some of those older techniques but they were beginning to move away from them.  It was really their movies that were set in modern times that really eschewed the use of wire work.
If you wanna blame a movie for making wire based kung fu movies into such a fad, I'd go with The Matrix.   That's the one that really made it popular with American audiences.

[bratpop]

The wire-fu in The Matrix was a million times better than Crouching Tiger. Crouching Tiger had people moving slowly in regular motion and standing on thin tree branches. I don't think that ruined the movie by any means, but that in itself was stupid.

Though it wasn't terribly different from other Jet Li movies. It just got more exposure. He did the same things in Once Upon a Time In China, without all the trees.

[a pretty girl is like]

The wire-fu in The Matrix was a million times better than Crouching Tiger. Crouching Tiger had people moving slowly in regular motion and standing on thin tree branches. I don't think that ruined the movie by any means, but that in itself was stupid.

Though it wasn't terribly different from other Jet Li movies. It just got more exposure. He did the same things in Once Upon a Time In China, without all the trees.

Here's where it becomes really really subjective.  I think the wire work in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger are both well done.  The thing that doesn't hold up for me is the really slow kung fu in The Matrix.  It was still only their first go around and you can only train actors so much.  The fighting in that first one always seemed too stiff and didn't have any real "power" behind the punches and kicks.  You can almost see the actors counting the moves in their head.  I had the same problem with Chow Yun Fat's fight scenes.  He's not a trained movie martial artist.  Michelle Yeoh's scenes on the other hand were fast and kinetic and much more exciting for me.

[bratpop]

Well, they were in a computer program, after all.

[RobtheBarbarian]

Here's where it becomes really really subjective.  I think the wire work in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger are both well done.  The thing that doesn't hold up for me is the really slow kung fu in The Matrix.  It was still only their first go around and you can only train actors so much.  The fighting in that first one always seemed too stiff and didn't have any real "power" behind the punches and kicks.  You can almost see the actors counting the moves in their head.  I had the same problem with Chow Yun Fat's fight scenes.  He's not a trained movie martial artist.  Michelle Yeoh's scenes on the other hand were fast and kinetic and much more exciting for me.

Thing about the martial arts scenes in The Matrix is that none of the combatants react to being hit like the characters in (this is the only martial arts movie I know that fits the comparison) Enter the Dragon. I understand that having Neo and Smith be stone-faced and unaffected by the blows was meant to show their superness, but it was like playing Doom with god mode on. It didn't look like they were really doing anything to each other. I'd seen The Matrix before I saw Enter the Dragon, and seeing people writhe and gasp in the latter from being hit had me going "Holy shit, that's brutal. There must be some real power behind those punches". The scenes in The Matrix were like some kind of.... demo mode. Until one of them got thrown into a building or something, but that was just an arbitrary device to end the fucking scene.

[bratpop]

What are you even talking about? Morpheus gets the shit beat out of him and it looks like it fucking hurts. Neo and Smith's fight was a lot of blocking with a couple of chokes and gasps. Trinity didn't fight anybody. Or are you talking about the sequels which don't exist?

I wasn't even TALKING about the fight scenes. I was talking about the wire work. In Crouching Tiger, you can see people being pulled around by wires. In The Matrix, you can't. When Trinity jumps and wall runs, it looks like she's doing that. When Neo flips, it looks like Neo flipping. There really wasn't that much wire work in The Matrix. What little they used happened to be memorable. In Crouching Tiger, they're just flying.

The Matrix gave people the idea to make gun-fu movies where people do things that people can't do. Not the same as retro kung fu movies where people fly. And Ong Bak gave us parkour. APGIL is right, The Matrix gave us more craptastic movies like Push, whereas they still don't release many kung fu movies stateside.