I believe these seven films take undeserved abuse. I had a whole other list of criminally unappreciated movies, but that’s different. And much longer. Maybe some day.

Warning: I throw a few plot spoilers in there, so if you see the name of a movie you want to watch but haven’t yet, stop reading.

• The Blair Witch Project. By now we’ve all seen parodies of the famous scene where Heather whimpers and snots up close, but when I saw this movie — on opening weekend, before all the hype — it scared the crap out of me. It was the only movie to ever do that.
• The Godfather III. Take Sofia Coppola out of the picture and it’s in the same ballpark as chapters I and II. You can’t fault Pacino — especially in the final scenes — and Andy Garcia was perfect. This isn’t a terrible movie; this is a sub-standard Godfather film, which still puts it in the top 1%.
• Mission Impossible 3. People jumped on this one because Tom Cruise’s psychosis had come to a boil around the release date, but it was probably the best of the series. The first one was overwrought and boring; the second a little too heavy on style and light on action.
• Romeo & Juliet. The Baz Luhrmann version took flak because…I dunno, people think it’s only meant to be done in floofy accents period costume, but they forget that Shakespeare was a populist writer. The man was the Stephen King, the Danielle Steele of his day. Luhrmann took a well-crafted, overly-familiar story and turned it on its ear, and it was eye-grabbing and innovative.
• Signs. People seem to dislike this movie, but I think it was Shyamalan’s best. The complaint I hear the most is about the alien, but for god’s sake, the alien was barely in it. The movie was funny, well-acted, well-paced, tense and told a far better story than the vast majority of movies that offer equal scare potential. Shit, any movie with Mel Gibson running around in the dark yelling, “I’m insane with anger!” is worth watching again.
• Starship Troopers. Is the acting terrible? No. The acting is putrid. Abhorrent. Unholy, even. But there’s more social satire in there than people remember (though not nearly as much as was in the book) and the special effects still look better than most of what you see today, even though it was made nine years ago.
• Vanilla Sky. Tom Cruise again…what the? Anyway…I admit, I have a soft spot for Cameron Crowe, but even I didn’t like this one at first. My friend Mike convinced me to give it another try, and the second time through it was like watching a whole other film. Watch it with the director’s commentary.

[tags]underrated movies, blair witch project, godfather, mission impossible, romeo, juliet, signs, starship troopers, vanilla sky[/tags]