Your Favorite Directors
 

I've started this thread to talk about directors we admire.

I'm personally a big fan of Danny Boyle. He's very diverse with his work and gets great performances out of his actors (Trainspotting is probably Ewan McGregor's best performance). Plus he doesn't have the desire to make big budget movies (he says he's good at making films on a smaller budget).

I also like David Fincher. He's taken possibly the stupidest subject to make a movie about (the founding of Facebook) and made something that's getting Oscar buzz. Plus he's launched the careers of Brad Pitt and Kristen Stewart.

Don't really have a favorite but Christopher Nolan seems to consistently make good films.

Nolan and P.T. Anderson. (Although, sadly, I've yet to see There Will Be Blood. I have it, I just haven't popped it in yet.)

Christopher Nolan, Danny Boyle, David Fincher, Clint Eastwood
loved all of Christopher Nolan's masterpeices
Loved 127 hours, 28 days later, trainspotting
Loved fight club, best movie ever IMHO
and clint eastwood is a badass, loved Gran Torino, Letters from Iwo Jima/Flag of our Fathers

I used to like Michael Bay until I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I then realize the bastard ignores plot, character driven scenes, and character development. He just focuses on explosions and and action sequences with slow motion. Why the hell is he still working? The only good film of his is Bad Boys.

You didn't like The Rock?

It took you until "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" to figure this out? I figured it out by the time I saw "Armageddon", and that was 12 years ago now. Of course, I know you would have been too young to watch Bay movies 12 years ago, but your post implies that you watched plenty of his movies before "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen".

I have only seen Bad Boys and Bad Boys II (the sequel was decent). When The Island was released, I wanted to see it because I was hyped on Ewan McGregor when I was 10. Me and my Dad saw Transformers when I was 12, and I enjoyed it (my dad said he liked the special effects, but he thought the plot was stupid). My little brother got the second one on DVD, I watched and thought "This was a waste of my goddamn time".

It all went downhill after Pearl Harbor. It was the most disappointing movie I ever saw in a theater, and I saw Rocky V in the theater. Pearl Harbor was so bad, they wrote a song about it.

Bay just bastardized one of the most tragic events in American history and tried to add a Titanic-esque love story to it.

James Cameron (lost some cool points because of Titanic)
Billy Wilder
Sam Peckinpah
Walter Hill
Sergio Leone
John Ford
Howard Hawks
Clint Eastwood
George Miller (Max Max 1 and 2 are great, Beyond Thunderdome blows)
Robert Rodriguez (always enjoy his work except for Spy Kids)
Quentin Tarantino (might as well throw him in here too)
John McTiernan (Predator is not my favorite film despite my username)
Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, The Batman franchise films are good, but they ain't as great as people make them out to be)
Michael Mann
Oliver Stone (his older work, new stuff not so much)
Ridley and Tony Scott (probably prefer Tony over Ridley)
Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather films are good, but more because of Apocalypse Now)
Stanley Kubrick
Martin Scorsese
John Carpenter
Cohen brothers

I'm not that much into horror or zombie flicks but,
Wes Craven (could do without all those damn Scream sequels)
George Romero

In regards to Michael Bay, I enjoyed Bad Boys and The Rock growing up. The Transformer films are fun to watch sometimes. The effects and battles are the only thing going for them.

No Danny Boyle? Blasphemy!

Trainspotting is about the only one of his I really care for.

Also I forgot to put David Fincher in the list.

At this point in my life of movie viewing one of my favorites has to be Johnny To. I loved Exiled and running out of time and Breaking news was awesome.

"Bad Boys" was enjoyable if dumb, while the sequel was extremely dumb and not very enjoyable.

Not sure you can say he "launched" Brad Pitt's career when the first movie they made together was "Seven". Pitt's career had long since taken off by that time (he had starred in "A River Runs Through It", "Interview with the Vampire", and "Legends of the Fall", all of which preceded "Seven").

Also, surprised nobody's mentioned Paul Verhoeven yet. Even though he's made some really bad movies ("Showgirls"), he also made "RoboCop" and "Starship Troopers".

Showgirls is just mainstream pornography.

Paul Verhoeven is an objectively bad director. His only "good" movies were RoboCop, Total Recall (both mindless enjoyable action films), and Basic Instinct, which was completely average and only notable for showing Sharon Stone's hoo ha. Starship Troopers was laughably retarded (he didn't even read the original book), Showgirls and Hollow Man (didn't see either of them) were savaged by the critics and are both pop culture punchlines. Everything else he's done is not notable and/or Dutch.

If you say that Danny Boyle is an objectively bad director, Robert Carlyle will smash a pint of beer into your face and then continue to kick you in the face will you're down on the ground, crying in pain.

I really doubt that but as far as I know his only stinker was The Beach. Trainspotting and 28 Days Later were really good, I haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire or Sunshine or Millions, but I've heard nothing but good things.

Sorry, but I like "Starship Troopers". It's one of the best mindless sci-fi/action movies from the '90s.

Will you at least concede that, given the original source material, it was wasted potential?

I haven't read all of "Starship Troopers" myself (tried to when the movie came out, but it wasn't the kind of novel I could read very well at age 12). However, I think Verhoeven's take on the source material was about as good as anyone could have done. I mean, how do you take a novel which (positively) depicts a quasi-fascist world order, and make a good movie out of it (especially in the 1990s, when everyone looks back on the McCarthyist era with disdain)?

He admitted to having not read the book beforehand, so you can't really call it "his take" on it so much as a reimagineering of a basic synopsis. And there was no reason for it to have been as cartoony as it was. It felt like the bastard lovebaby of Star Trek and GI Joe. Starcraft had a more realistic presentation its story.

And for mindless escapism, Aliens already had that cornered. Starship Troopers was Aliens reduced to the lowest common denominator and then multiplied to the 50th power, glossed over with a sickening sheen of 90210 "for the kids". Ironic considering that Aliens took a lot of its ideas from the original Starship Troopers novel.

Agreed, but isn't it kind of a moot point, for the reasons I mentioned?

I think of it as a "spiritual successor" to "RoboCop" in this regard: It juxtaposes absurdly bloody violence with satire and humor.

Comparing "Aliens" and "Starship Troopers" is a bit extreme. Aside from the fact that they're both sci-fi "bug hunts" and were inspired by the same novel, those two movies are completely different in every other way. (And by that, I don't mean, "Duh, 'Aliens' is good and 'Starship Troopers' sucks.")

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Darren Aronofsky.

That's because no one knows who he is

He's not exactly a member of the IMFDB pantheon. His movies are also pretty inaccessible. Let's go down the list:

Pi: nobody saw it
Requiem For A Dream: good movie, but very nihilistic, favored by film students and recovering addicts
The Fountain: normally when I find a movie that I've never heard of, I'll look it up and think "oh yeah I do remember hearing about this movie way back when it came out", that did not happen with this movie, I haven't heard a single thing about it in the 4 years since its release
The Wrestler: finally some mainstream recognition...
Black Swan: ...squandered on a masturbatory radical feminist rape fantasy, but hey at least it has some lesbian stuff

lol burt, i love this. welcome back!

Name was familiar to me, but I couldn't match his name to his movies off the top of my head (had to use IMDB).

Not to mention it was filmed within an hour of where I live.

Starship troopers is entertainment, and damn good entertainment at that, dont go looking for deep underlying morals and philosophy, watch it to see kick ass rifle/shotgun hybrids blowing bugs apart:D

I don't think Starship Troopers the book is filmable. It's a political science book with some sci fi thrown in. I think if Verhoeven simply called it "Alien Bug Hunt" or whatever, people would've seen it for what it was and enjoyed it more.

All this talk of Starship Troopers, and yet only one mention of Total Recall. But yes, Verhoeven, like Brian De Palma, have had many dry years of late.

Total Recall was awesome.

true...true...it was on the other night

I grew up with mindless action movies, so shwartzenegger was a favorite for entertainment.

Seagal and Van Damme for me. Ahnuld wasn't ever on cable where I lived in Kentucky

It's the directors thread guys.

Do you know what's a tragedy? Ewan McGregor and Danny Boyle haven't worked nor spoke to each other in years! They made such a great team!

Like you haven't gotten OT.