This episode I’m going to look at 10 movies that I believe are overrated, underrated, or properly rated. I’m going to have brief summaries of each movie, so there will be spoilers. This is based on my internet habits and speaking to friends and family who are movie fans. I mostly stuck to movies that were maybe a bit under the radar – if you’re a cinephile, you’ve definitely heard of most, if not all of these. If you’re an average film goer, maybe not. My knowledge of foreign films is pretty limited, so I stuck to movies that were created in the Hollywood system, for the most part. Other than one movie on the list, I tried to stick to movies that were not nominated for Oscars. Again, I’m not a movie critic and I don’t work in the business, so these are just my opinions. Take with them a grain of salt. Let’s go!
2000 - Shadow of the Vampire – Properly Rated
This movie was a relatively small indie that has gotten a lot more buzz in the years since it was first released. I heard about it probably not that long after it was released, maybe like 2003. I watched it for the first time this year, through a streaming service. It was made for under 10M (with Nicholas Cage as a producer!) and grossed around 11 at the box office, so it was not a box office smash by any stretch of the imagination. 
It’s set in the early 1920s and is about the making of the film Nosferatu, which is a German rip-off of the novel Dracula. In the world of this movie, the character playing Orlok / Dracula, is a real vampire who makes a deal with the film’s obsessive director, played by a characteristically unhinged John Malkovich. Udo Klier, who you may remember from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and Cary Elwes, who comes in like halfway through the movie, both are good for their, relatively small, parts. 
This movie is well-done and has a unique premise but is not something I think I’m ever going to return to. My biggest gripe with the movie is that it doesn’t explore Malkovich’s character deeply enough – why he is driven to sacrifice human beings for his art. There is a feint to a drug addiction that feels tacked on. I couldn’t find anything related to a director’s cut or bonus / deleted scenes, so I think there’s only a single cut of the film. It’s only around 90 minutes, so I think the movie could have added a scene or two to flesh out the director’s character psychology a bit more.  
The set design and acting are excellent – Willaim Defoe brings his A game here but if there is anything underrated about it, it is the fact that we don’t have more memes from this movie. A still showing Defoe’s Count Orlok looking repulsed with a caption saying, “Me after scrolling Bumble” would be aces.  
The movie – properly rated; Meme Game - Underrated
2000 - Sexy Beast – Underrated
I rarely see it on best of the millennial lists. When people talk about crime movies, it seems to get nowhere the respect that Goodfellas or Casino get but, in my book, it’s better than both of them. It has one of the best opening scenes of a movie in recent memory and one of the best performances of a psychopath – Ben Kingsley goes from Gandhi to Don Logan, a terrifying gangster who is as likely to inflict psychic damage as physical pain. Talk about range! The movie also looks gorgeous: Jonathan Glazer directed music videos before doing this, probably most famously Karma Police (arrest this man) by Radiohead. If you haven’t seen the video for Rabbit in Your Headlights by U.N.K.L.E, I highly recommend it. The marriage of image to sound is evident here as the soundtrack is amazing – Peaches by The Stranglers and Lujon by Henry Mancini are two of the standouts. UNKLE returned the favor by contributing original music to the score. It only made 10M at the box office, which is probably the biggest injustice on this entire list. If you like gangster movies, you have to see this one.
Tons of memorable scenes and great acting – Ian McShane is fantastic, as is Ray Winstone. One of the best heist films I’ve ever seen. There’s almost a Greek Tragedy element to the movie, with Ray Winstone being pulled back into service as a vault specialist for one last job. I remember the commentary for the movie talking about it as if it was almost a parable: what happens when the world’s least happy man threatens the world’s happiest man. 
It was Jonathan Glazer’s first movie – he would go on to direct Under the Skin (which is one of my least favorite A24 movies) and was nominated for best director, for Zone of Interest, which also picked up a nom for best picture at the Oscars. It’s crazy to me that Sexy Beast was his first movie – it has a very cool, unique style that really fit the story he was trying to tell. A great way to start a career. 
2004 – The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – Underrated
This is a weird one. I was working at a movie theater when this came out and got a chance to watch it, probably three or four times. My favorite Wes Anderson by far – I don’t think it gets talked about nearly as much as some of his others, especially Rushmore or the Royal Tenebaums. Probably the best midpoint movie of his career – it blends the realism of his earlier movies with some of the dollhouse tendencies he would indulge in after this point. He’s a hit or miss director for me – I can’t explain why I liked Isle of Dogs so much but I also really, really enjoyed that movie. Other people didn’t seem to.
I do think that Anderson is a director whose movies take a few viewings to really appreciate. 
In The Life Aquatic, Bill Murray plays the titular Steve Zissou, a Jacques Custeau-like underwater explorer past his prime, who is on a revenge mission after one of his crew members is killed by a sea creature. He is joined by Owen Wilson’s character who believes Zissou is his father. Zissou is also trying to get funding from his ex-wife, who is married to his nemesis, played by Jeff Goldblum.
It’s a preposterous film that you have to be on the wavelength of or you’re going to bounce off really hard. I was surprised by just how emotional I was given the ridiculousness of everything that happens. To be clear, like a lot of Wes Anderson films, it’s very funny. But that humor doesn’t negate the other, more serious, feelings that he is able to evoke, especially in the ending of this movie. It should also be noted – the soundtrack is amazing, probably the best use of music on this list from my favorite use of a Stooges song in a movie (Search and Destroy) to Devo’s Gut Feeling to Sigur Ros to Seu Jorge playing David Bowie – it’s all great. 
To quote William Defoe, whose appearance here is the second appearance on this list, from his time in the Criterion Closet, “this should be seen more.”
2006 – Children of Men – Underrated
This movie lost money when it came out, which given the cast and bleak message of the movie, isn’t shocking. Clive Owen is probably the biggest star here – and I wouldn’t call him a household name in the States. That being said, I think if this had come out after COVID it would have received a much more receptive welcoming. I think dystopian movies, in the mid-2000s, were much rarer than they are today.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s about a world where a global infertility crisis has left the world a violent and dystopic hellscape. Set in the UK, Clive Owen plays a cynical former activist who has been tasked with getting a very important person safely out of the country. 
It has one of the tensest moments I’ve ever seen in a movie – and the dreary cinematography adds to the mood of the story beautifully. Michael Caine plays Clive Owen’s friend in a role that I usually don’t see him in – he’s wonderful. 
What really makes the movie is that it feels both dystopian and futuristic – like there’s an attempt to create what the future would look and sound like, given this circumstance, which I thought was cool. It turned out to be fairly accurate – I haven’t seen this movie since around the time it came out but I remember there being a lot of what I would describe as glitchcore – a lot of decaying synthesizers and really heavy electronic drum sounds. The amount of little visual touches – the television playing the news of the youngest person in the world dying, with a pub full of people clearly heartbroken and the random bombings really add to this sense of dread and misery. You can tell that Cuaron has an eye for detail and knows how to make an imaginary world feel real. If you haven’t gotten a chance, I highly recommend checking this out. I would put it on the list of best sci-fi of the new millenium. 
2008 - Be Kind Rewind – Underrated
Michel Gondry is probably best known for directing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and his music videos – which are fantastic. There was a DVD series in the early 2000s that collected his music videos. The series also included Chris Cunningham, who did a bunch of Aphex Twins videos, and Spike Jones. I had the Spike Jones DVD and it was excellent. Gondry’s best video is probably Fell in Love with a Girl by the White Stripes. The Around the World video is great too. There’s a Beck B-Side called Deadweight that he directed as well. This bought him a lot of goodwill that led to him getting to make Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is loved by a lot of people – not me but that’s besides the point. It’s probably as responsible as anything else in turning Jim Carrey into a respected actor. He followed Eternal Sunshine up with The Science of Sleep, which I’ve never seen. Then he made Be Kind Rewind a couple of years later. 
I haven’t seen the movie in a while but here’s what I remember (with some help from Wikipedia):
Be Kind Rewind is a movie about making movies, about how they can bring communities of people together. Danny Glover owns a video store and it’s declining. He wants to boost revenue and is considering switching to DVDs. However, before he does this, Mos Def, who works at the store, sees his friend, played by Jack Black, erase all the tapes. To cover this up, Jack Black and Mos Def start recording their own versions of the movies, called Swedes. The town loves this but lawyer’s get involved and they destroy the “sweded” tapes due to copyright violations. The movie ends with the store closing but the community watching a documentary that was made by the community called Fats Waller was Born Here. 
Like a lot of Gondry’s work, it’s very surreal and bizarre. It has an almost kindergarten art-class aesthetic. Tonally, this can turn people off. It only made $30M on a $20M budget, so it likely lost money. 
Aside from Mr. Show, it’s my favorite thing that Jack Black has done. Mos Def too. The energy and glee with which they Swede the films and their feeling of pride and accomplishment when people become fans is one of the best parts of the movie. 
Hollywood has a tendency to monopolize the discussion on movies and what they mean to people. I loved how this movie posits that these stories are bigger than one place and that they, after some time, regardless of copyright, enter a collective unconscious – they become stories for everyone. If you like movies with heart and charm, you’ll probably like this movie. 
Sadly, it looks like Michel Gondry is done with Hollywood. He directed the Seth Rogen-led Green Hornet, which was a tonal mess. I’ve read that the star and director had conflicting visions of what they wanted to do. I think Rogen probably wanted to make something more comedic, while Gondry wanted to make a stylish action movie. This conflict led to a dog’s breakfast of a movie – Rogen is not a convincing leading man. Gondry’s action scenes, while effective, were the best part of the film. It doesn’t utilize the strengths of Gondry, which are usually beautiful visuals that appear to be almost handcrafted. There are some shots that are homages to De Palma but otherwise, it looked very dark and generic. Using the 2X rule, the movie lost money. Since this time, Gondry has not made a major Hollywood movie, instead focusing on smaller French films. I hope there is still space in Hollywood for Michel Gondry.
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2015 – The Revenant – Overrated
Have you ever wanted to watch hours of footage of treelines? In the snow? If so, have a got a movie for you! Hollywood seems to have a rule – the more you suffer, the likelier it is that the academy will reward you with an Oscar. Hopefully, this movie will become known, in time, solely as the One Where Leo Finally Won His Oscar. I like Leonardo DiCaprio – I think he’s a good actor. I don’t think he’s a great actor and I think he, like Ryan Gosling, is a good actor who skates by on being handsome and well loved by the public. He's good here but he’s also miserable – like I was during the nearly 3 hour runtime of this movie. Somehow this movie made a ton of money – I don’t really understand the hype.  Sometimes the story of something becomes more important than the thing itself – I talked about this on the music episode where I spoke about the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. I’m sure there are technical challenges to shooting with only natural light – as someone who is not a filmmaker, I can’t deny this. However, there’s nothing about this fact that made the movie more entertaining or pleasurable to watch. It was the only thing, aside from how miserable Leo was during the shooting, that ever seemed to get talked about when people bring up this movie – which is indicative of just how bad it is. The positives: there’s a ten minute or so action scene that is cool but that was about it for me. It doesn’t justify the runtime and – unpopular opinion – I actually think that Tom Hardy steals the movie and is better than DiCaprio whenever the two of them were together. I left the movie rooting for the bear. 
2016 - Pop Star Never Stop Never Stopping – Properly Rated
This movie is fine. I liked it more than Hot Rod. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, Andy Samberg plays a pop star who was formerly in a group called the Style Boyz. They had a falling out. He went on to great acclaim as a solo artist. Then releases another solo album that bombs and he then makes up with the Style Boyz. 
The parodies are pretty good, except for the Style Boyz, who are a Beastie Boys stand in that didn’t really work for me. Lonely Island’s hit to miss ratio is pretty solid but the thing I enjoy the most and remember after seeing this movie was probably Bill Hader’s cameo as a roadie who enjoys Flatlining, a concept from the movie Flatliners, which I found so refreshingly bizarre in an otherwise rote movie. We also get Will Forte playing the bagpipes for literally one second. The fact that Johanna Newsome is married to Andy Samberg is the strangest celebrity fact ever – every time I think about them being a couple feels like the first time I’ve considered this, it’s so strange to me. She has a brief cameo here too.
I’m a big music fan so a mockumentary on the music industry, which is rife with material to parody, is going to be up my alley. This movie was funny in parts, but the movie falls into familiar tropes and just doesn’t do anything particularly memorable with them. I laughed a couple of times but this movie is not the riot that people would have you believe. Other than the general arc of the plot and one or two songs, there is nothing else about this movie that is memorable. Hot Rod is not as strong as this but the Cool Beans scene is so weird, so so weird that it sticks with you. There was nothing really like that for me in Pop Star.
I would recommend, for whoever hasn’t seen it, to check out Flight of the Conchords. The humor is a bit more English but I believe the song quality is better – their first album, even if you don’t have the TV show as a reference, is hilarious and still holds up. 
2018 - Game Night – Overrated
Admittedly, the last twenty years haven’t exactly been the golden age of Hollywood comedies. Game Night seems to get brought up as great – okay okay. People say that on Reddit but still. I found it to be incredibly average and have not wanted to see it again since I watched it in the movie theater when it first came out. 
I think people want to like this movie so much that they exaggerate how funny it actually is – it’s an okay comedy. If this has come out in the 1980s, it would have been quickly forgotten and we would have all moved on to bigger and better things. However, because we’re in such a dearth of decent material, this gets a lot of praise. To be clear. I don’t hate it – Jesse Plemons steals the show as a creepy neighbor. Everyone else is more or less hoo hum (Rachel McAdams is great if she’s in the right part – I think she is miscast here). Usually, if a comedy is great, I remember a bit or a line of dialogue or both. With this, I remember nearly nothing. The last great big screen comedy (or at least pretty good one) was probably This is the End. It was so good that it makes me sad to see Seth Rogen in the trailer for The Studio – his batting average isn’t great but he’s probably responsible for like half the decent or better Hollywood comedies of the last 15 years. If you’ve seen neither, do yourself a favor and check out This is the End.
2022 – Nope – Overrated
This movie has some images that are burned into my brain – some scenes look amazing. Peele is really good at making surreal images on the screen feel real and scary. There are a couple of different plots that Peele wants to intersect here but they don’t feel like a natural fit. The plot and theme are a bit of a mess and, ultimately, the message is muddled. The acting from Steven Yeun, in a pivotal scene where he has to provide a pretty stupid monologue about Chris Kattan and SNL, isn’t good – even though Yeun is a pretty solid actor in other stuff. I’m always happy to see Keith David, so that was nice, though I wish he had been in the movie longer. The movie ends up being about privacy invasion and about how animals are untamable (or something). At 2 hours ten minutes, it’s probably a bit too long. I think it could have been trimmed. 
To sum it up – looked really cool but didn’t land as well as Us, which is also, a bit of a mess (but a fun one) and my favorite of Peele’s movies.
I think like Game Night, people really wanted to like this movie and it was really high on some critics’ lists. It became like the dark horse critical pick and I’m still a bit baffled as to why. My guess is that part of this is genre and IP fatigue and that Peele, for whatever his faults, usually has very unique concepts that also look really good on a big screen. I think there was also good will from Peele’s earlier movies that carried over. That wasn’t enough for me to fully get onboard, though I’m interested to see what Peele does next. Between Peele, Eggers, and Ari Aster, I’m most interested in seeing what Peele does to follow this up – I wasn’t a huge fan of either Nosferatu (though it looked pretty) or Beau is Afraid (which I couldn’t get through).
2022 - Babylon - Underrated
This is Damien Chazell’s follow-up to La La Land, which nearly won Best Picture. Movie goers hated this movie – it only grossed 65M on a 80M budget – and I was at least two of those tickets. Some critics, though not a majority, were kinder – Sean Fennessy of the Ringer had this movie near the top of his list when looking at the best pictures of 2022.
For those who didn’t see the movie, it follows three main characters and a couple of ancillary ones from the dawn of the talkie to the early 1950s. 
You have a Mexican-American man who is trying to break into the movies, a young starlet at the beginning of her career, and a washed up actor who is at the end of his. There’s a lot going on – you also have an African-American trumpeter who has to wear blackface in order to keep his lucrative job in the movies and a Chinese-American lesbian who is forced out when her sexuality becomes a liability. 
Despite the lackluster box office, it wasn’t short on stars: Brad Pitt plays an aging star here but is miscast (though, to be fair, he probably has the least interesting part) but both Margot Robbie, the up-and-coming starlet, and Diego Calva, the gopher trying to break into the business, are great. 
It took me a couple of watches to really understand what Chazelle was trying to do – it is a long movie; I would still recommend everyone watch it at least twice before finalizing their opinion.
The movie is about how the industry chews people up and spits them out – the here today gone tomorrow mentality has always been with entertainment but this movie really leans into it. The ending gives a glimmer of hope – maybe there is, after all the BS, a shot at some form of permanence in the pictures.
The soundtrack is awesome – I realize that the composer, Justin Hurwitz, also did La La Land, which I found to be disposable and boring. He redeems himself here, blending the period appropriate music with a modern sensibility. 
I don’t know how it would play on the small screen but I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie slowly becomes more and more accepted – it’s not as unique or as well crafted as The Brutalist but I found it to be much more entertaining and fun. Babylon will someday become a cult classic. 
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on iTunes or YouTube. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.