After ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ came out, I found myself enamored of the work of Frank Darabont, which led me to immediately want to see ‘The Green Mile’ (Amazing), ‘The Majestic’ (Not Bad) and ‘The Mist’ (Oh my god, why am I crying?) The way that film ended immediately erased the trust I had in him as a creator, making me worry any time his name was part of a creative team, which is a large part of the reason I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch ‘The Walking Dead’ on television. That kind of sudden transition from favored to unforgiven is relatively rare for me, but seems more common now that everyone has a social media platform to announce their displeasure with creators, leading to today’s revolving query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) hasn’t been able to look at Frank Miller’s work the same way since the debut of ‘Sin City’, either, asking: What creators rank at the top of your unforgiven creator list?
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Frank Miller. Daredevil was great, Wolverine was good, TDKR and sin City were alright, great if you’re into that kind of stuff. After that it went downhill and fast.
In film, Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich have an uncanny ability to take a cool, fun concept and render it completely trite, stupid, and unwatchable for this viewer.
In comics, Mark Waid took a favorite book about a former child superhero finding his place in a wide and varied world of super sci-fi, with clearly defined concepts of hispowers and capabilities, and transformed it into a property with a limited focused world of super-speed with a poorly defined, as-plot-device-needed power source uninspiringly called “the speed force.”
Joel Schumacher.
St. Elmo’s Fire, The Lost Boys and Flatliners were ‘Brat Pack’ era classics.
The Client and A Time To Kill were worthy Grisham adaptations.
Then he put nipples on Batman and Robin.
Since then he’s done films such as 8MM, The Number 23 and Twelve. Except for Phone Booth, which I actually liked, he still hasn’t redeemed himself..
George Lucas:
I loved Star Wars as a kid when I saw it in a drive-in. The I loved Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then I Loved The Empire Strikes Back. Then I Loved Return of the Jedi. I Liked Willow and the other 2 Indiana Jones Movies.
When I was older, I enjoyed American Grafitti. Then came the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles which Ialso liked watching.
A few years later He redid the Star Wars Movies. That was Hit or Miss, but I still loved the movies. The came the Phantom Menace. Like a sex starved unic I went into it and loved it because I was able to cop a feel but not finish as I wished. As the others came out, I became more and more blue balled until I finally realized that he would never satisfy me again.
I am pleased that he got rid of the franchise and now has fans doing the movies. Even Gene Roddenberry couldn’t last forever and neither did Lucas.
Michael Bay:
The Rock was a fun romp but then came Armageddon which hurt my mind. How is it easier to train drillers to be Astronauts than train Astronauts to Drill. [Still better than Deep Impact – I screamed at the screen to just have the meteor kill all of them. ]
Then came Pearl Harbour. So much stupid wrapped around the hot Kate Beckinsale. Everything since is fast, loud and shite.
Frank Miller. TDKR was a complete disappointment back in the 1980s. That is has been immitated so often aggravates the deed. But there is also Daredevil: Born Again.
John Byrne still does halfway decent stuff, but he seems to have insisted on being a hack writer whenever he thought he could get away with it since “The Star Brand”, at least. His recent offerings are borderline satires that fail at even attempting to conclude a tale.
Keith Giffen, likewise, actually has talent, but seems to make a point of refusing to use it wheneven given a chance. His Defenders efforts were just wrong. His JL/JLI was purposefully wrong, albeit succesfull from a sale standpoint. His Booster Gold’s very reason for being is mishandling the character that Dan Jurgens created so carefully. I know he is talented because I saw his drawings back in the Great Darkness Saga days and there are glimpses of a skilled plotter shining through the mud that he insists on writing ever since.
John Byrne. His reinventions and rehabilitations of classic characters started strong (FF, Man of Steel), then got weird and aggressively change-y. I’ll never forgive him for what he did to the Avengers (especially Wanda and Vision) and his Doom Patrol reboot was just sad.