What Have You Done For Us Lately? 11 Directors We’re Disappointed With

A blogger friend of ours posited a question a few weeks ago that really struck us: What directors are you disappointed in this year? We had to stop in our tracks for a second and think up an answer, but then it became quite clear on some reflection. We started thinking about all the directors that have not only disappointed us in 2009, but in general. “What have you done for us lately?” as it were. We like all of these directors, it’s just that we expect more and all of them have let us down, disappointed us or possibly lead us astray in the last few years. Call it a Dear Abby piece, but we thirst for something different and in many cases something up to your promise and abilities. Some of you might not be making “pool movies” yet (though that was a pretty dumb posit), but many of you are not coming up aces of late.

Quentin Tarantino
The worst thing happened to Tarantino this year. His slow, uneven, unengaging and suspense-less “Inglourious Basterds,” became a hit and thus became yet another enabler to Tarantino’s hubris and belief that every idea he ever comes up with is utter gold. But his voice, his universe is getting tired (and the sagging ‘Basterds’ evinced this) and we expect so much more from a unique writer who should be one of our boldest and greatest filmmakers. Despite his insistence that he has no kids and therefore no responsibility to anything other than film, he’s getting soft, at least where the filmmaking techniques are concerned. ‘Basterds’ is a wickedly sharp script that proves his writing is some of the best on the planet, but the flat and dull filmed version was a letdown. He needs to hone his craft and not rush his filmmaking. Plus he just needs a complete change of pace. You know that appreciation you had for “Bright Star”? Fuck your manchild fanbase. Be a filmmaker, challenge yourself. Remember when Scorsese pissed off the fans who were happy with “Goodfellas” retreads over and over again (like the awful, “Casino”) and basically shrugged at “Kundun,” and “The Age Of Innocence”? Fuck em, Scorsese is a filmmaker first and his fans come second. We’re not sure that’s the way you see it. Quentin, we need another “Jackie Brown,” we need something that takes you out of your comfort zone.

Steven Spielberg
Everything was looking so promising. Some people looked at “Schindler’s List” as simply a brief stop in prestige-ville, but Spielberg soldiered on, and while he didn’t hit the mark every time, his interest in film projects from “Saving Private Ryan” to “Munich” showed his willingness to experiment with new genres, different concepts, and more of an uncompromising, questioning viewpoint of life. His moral evolution specifically stands out when comparing the clear-cut heroism of “Ryan” to the moral depth and existential despair at the heart of the 2005 double feature of “War of the Worlds” and “Munich.” So what did he do after this? He listened to the lame rantings and ravings of people who wanted a fourth installment of the fine-enough “Indiana Jones” series, indulging in his most base instincts as a storyteller and, worse, a showman. By doing this, he was taking a break from his busiest period, directing nine would-be blockbusters in eight years, putting off his dream project “Lincoln,” as well as the potentially subversive “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” and sci-fi project “Interstellar” to do more CGI-heavy adventure films for boys like “Tintin” and, christ goddamnit, a Will Smith-led “Oldboy.” We don’t want to put too much stock in projects we haven’t seen yet (though remaking “Harvey” and doing an “Indy 5” are seriously regressive-sounding), but even simply taking into account the embarrassing “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and his shepherding of the “Transformers” franchise, we’d have to say somebody’s sensibilities are seriously out of whack.

George Clooney
Clooney made a smashing debut with both “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and “Good Night, And Good Luck.” Still, does the guy have his own style? “Confessions” greatly benefited from another perfect Charlie Kaufman script, while “Good Luck” had that amazing cast and brilliant subject matter. Both films also utilized Clooney’s background and knowledge of television, with practical effects done on-screen, excessive crane shots and muted color schemes. “Leatherheads” was a chance to evolve his own style, and instead he merely borrowed more, adapting 1930’s screwball timing, which, combined with the quick cuts and love-affair camera angles for the likes of Renee Zellweger and John Krasinski (yikes), just felt like Clooney aping the Coens. After that failure, you’d think he’d want to try something a bit more promising, more profitable, but instead he’s diving headlong into the no-longer-topical “Hamdan V. Rumsfeld,” a true life account of a Supreme Court ruling that determined Guantanamo Bay was in violation of the Geneva Conventions, a story no one is dying to see a cinematic recreation of. He’s got an Aaron Sorkin script for that, so it will probably turn out okay, but is he just going to keep surrounding himself with geniuses, or does he have any individuality behind the camera?

Wes Anderson
With the release of “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” readers can count on each mixed/negative review including a line about Anderson’s stunted artistic growth — a criticism that started with “The Life Aquatic” and came to a head with the just-spinning-his-wheels “The Darjeeling Limited.” But the critics aren’t just being grouchy — they’re right. To us, the difference between “Darjeeling” and “Rushmore” is the difference between a cult director who makes hip, pretty movies for the Urban Outfitters set and a filmmaker who was once named “the next Scorsese” by Scorsese himself. Where his first two films were energetic little movies interested in working class, underachieving outsiders, misguidedly driven to small time greatness by a mix of naivete and extreme confidence, Anderson’s post-“Rushmore” work shows him concerned with only two basic tropes: wealthy has-beens and daddy issues. “The Royal Tenenbaums” started the trend and he hasn’t wavered from it since (reportedly even “Fox” — Anderson’s first adaptation — features similar themes). The only thing that really changes is the setting. And save for the rare lively performance that seems to defy Anderson’s style (e.g. Gene Hackman) most of the actors seem to have one job: stand there, look pretty, and deadpan for the camera–i.e. be another prop in the precious set design. The obligatory slo-mo shots, British Invasion soundtrack, etc. are all crutches at this point–pure laziness. We fear “Fox” will reveal Tim Burton levels of laziness: taking beloved stories, fitting them into his now played-out-yet-distinctive style and adding nothing valuable. When your best film is “Pee-Wee” (and “Ed Wood”) you can get away with it; when it’s “Rushmore,” get real.

Michael Mann
Okay, you want to shoot a movie with sexy movie stars down in Florida while simultaneously rebooting the television series that helped make you a household name? That’s fine. We all went and saw “Miami Vice,” even if it ended up being a grainy, hard-to-follow crime movie that seemed too low on plot, character and dynamic action set pieces and far too high on murky, faraway shots of lightning off the Florida coast and lingering close-ups of Colin Farrell and his bad hair. One $100 million movie that looks like it was shot on a cell phone camera is fine. It was lousy and we all forgot about it pretty quickly. After all, it worked for one of his better movies, 2004’s “Collateral” (which also utilized 35 mm film). But this past summer, he unleashed his colossally expensive historical epic “Public Enemies.” On paper, it looked unstoppable – Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Christian Bale as his dogged pursuer, with a wonderful supporting cast (including Lily Taylor and Billy Crudup) – with perfect thematic material for Mann, i.e. the psychological duality of criminal and cop. But the end result was a bloated, nearly unwatchable (and unlistenable, thanks to Mann’s insistence on recording all dialogue on set) turkey, with Mann’s refusal to contextualize or politicize the hunt for America’s charismatic bank robber leaving it a big, empty shell. While it may not kill him for good, it has severely depleted our enthusiasm for anything Mann has up his sleeve next.

Peter Jackson
We’ve got moderate hopes regarding “The Lovely Bones,” but the long incubation period and troubling words from the actors doesn’t breed hope. As of now, the inventive Kiwi genius has made four straight heartless films. We’ll root for the technical achievements in the “Lord of the Rings” films, and there are many (“Return of the King” is, admittedly, one of the less embarrassing Best Picture Oscar winners), but otherwise, they are chase/adventure pictures, with a bit of CGI wizardry, but no imaginative storytelling, and, in terms of his early filmography, absolutely no taboo-breaking, in style or content. It’s appropriate he’s regressing into a Spielberg collaboration with “Tintin,” because “LOTR” and “King Kong” were simple regurgitation of the Spielberg blockbuster formula. And “Kong,” for its selective scenes of admitted excitement, is the best argument ever against giving a filmmaker final cut. Some time away to recharge is nice, and Jackson getting “District 9” off the ground was certainly a good sign, so we don’t think the last decade has been a total waste for him, but Mr. Jackson’s certainly far removed from being a filmmaker we should really give a damn about.

Michel Gondry
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is obviously a cult classic and perhaps even a mainstream one as well. A perfect script, funny and heartbreaking in scientifically exact equilibrium, delivered with a perfect judgement of tone, and visuals unlike anything else we’d seen before or since, and an incredibly strong handle on the performances (Have Kate Winslet or Jim Carrey ever been better? Or anyone else in the cast, for that matter?). We’re just not sure what happened to the Michel Gondry that directed that movie. “Science of Sleep” was inventive and visually brilliant, but deeply irritating, with one of the most unlikeable central characters of recent times, a film about Gondry the man child. Hating “Be Kind Rewind“, meanwhile, is a bit like hating a puppy that’s pissed on the floor – it’s a deeply sweet, good-natured movie, but it’s made a complete mess, suffering from a terrible script which wastes an inspired premise, and the great pairing of Jack Black and Mos Def. It’s clear that Gondry is a better director than writer, but we’re not sure pairing with Seth Rogen on “The Green Hornet” is the right move for a director as big-hearted as Gondry.

Richard Kelly
“Donnie Darko” was a startling debut. Funny, scary, sad, thought-provoking, and with a great soundtrack, we connected with it hard. A year or two later saw the release of the Director’s Cut of the film, which was already gaining cult status. And it was… poor. Enough good stuff from the original remained, but it seemed like Kelly had stumbled upon the terrific original by accident – the movie was bulked up by nonsensical sci-fi snippets, and even the revised music choices sucked (INXS replacing Echo & The Bunnymen? Madness…). Kelly followed up by scripting “Domino,” where the laughs fell flat, and the serious scenes elicited hysterics. He then returned to directing with “Southland Tales,” which combines a spectacular level of miscasting, a scene literally involving two cars fucking and the fatal mistake of finding profound qualities in a Killers song, to create one of the worst films in recorded history. We pray that “The Box” delivers, but Cameron Diaz seems as ill-placed as Sarah Michelle Gellar in “Southland Tales,” and the total lack of buzz on the movie, less than a month from release, doesn’t bode well…

The Wachowskis
Oh, hey, remember the guys that were supposed to revolutionize the action movie? The Wachowskis started small with “Bound” just to show that they could handle their massive script for “The Matrix,” which apparently was originally supposed to be a trilogy before they squished the entire story into the first film. They were up shit’s creek when commerce demanded more, so they proceeded to force what was not there, burying themselves not in more eastern martial arts and western smash-cut editing and effects, but in labyrinth mythologies ill-suited to paper-thin characterizations, heady but humorless philosophy, and cripplingly dull performances. Exposing themselves as bad with story and actors, they retreated into technology, not unlike Robert Zemeckis, but without any sense of humor. It resulted in the mammoth special effects pukebowl that was “Speed Racer,” one of the most self-serious kids’ films in a long time, where again, they tried to stretch something paper-thin into epic drama. The first forty minutes deal with corporate intrigue. In a fucking “Speed Racer” movie. It lost so much money that they haven’t been attached to anything else for a long time, though people keep trying to associate them with a nonexistent “Superman” sequel, or a revival of their (again) super serious “Plastic Man” spec they wrote in the ’90s. We remember the rush of watching “The Matrix” a decade ago and thinking these guys were onto something. We’re still wondering.

Richard Linklater
That one-for-me and one-for-you strategy seems like a toughie for some to pull off, and we’re seeing guys like Linklater at their knees because of this bullshit dictum, the idea that you have to serve two separate masters through your work- the critical cognoscenti beyond the Oscars (he’s received only one nomination) and the lazy mall middlebrow. And we’re about to lose Linklater to the latter crowd, likely to claim him in the wake of a series of financial and creative misfires that canceled what would be a one-for-me-and-them project — a sequel to “Dazed and Confused.” It was also earlier this year when he strongly considered a “School of Rock” sequel after his festival entry “Me and Orson Welles” (a lightweight historical drama with Zac Efron, of all people) was barely sniffed, let alone purchased, by a sea of buyers (it sees a perfunctory release in November). He’s got Miramax‘s “Liars (A-E)” coming up, where Rebecca Hall plays a woman on the Obama campaign trail rescuing her old gifts from ex-boyfriends, because those two subplots complement each other so incredibly well- hopefully the mini-major doesn’t force him to produce some semi-topical romantic comedy mashup.

David Gordon Green
While some will cite the moment of David Gordon Green’s downfall as the release of last year’s “Pineapple Express,” one could actually go back a few months earlier to the uneven Robert Altman-aping “Snow Angels”— a film that’s even more overt in its Altman-ness than any of Paul Thomas Anderson’s own Altman-aping mosaic character pieces. “Snow Angels” exemplifies all that’s wrong with DGG’s cinema; namely, his tendency to let actors improvise and riff in an effort to create extremely quirky, left-of-center characters. The technique provided comedy in “Snow Angels,” but confused tone, and a similar excess mars the wildly overwrought, manic last act of “Pineapple Express.” But setting aside the divisive “All the Real Girls,” what has Gordon Green really done to earn him status in the first place? Certainly not the grim Southern gothicka of “Undertow,” so that leaves his only truly great film: the Malick-ian tone-poem “George Washington.” That one is such a pure and near-perfect little stunner that it’s no surprise he hasn’t topped it. Still, he should be doing better work than he has been lately.

– Gabe Toro, Olly Lyttelton, Drew Taylor, Stephen Belden, Sam C. Mac