RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

I watched DECAMERON last year or the year prior and I hated it, too. I think I rated it 1/5 or 0.5/5. My review was much more cruel than yours! However -

Il Decameron (1971)
These stories could be very funny, if done with a slapstick Benny Hill/Carry On approach.

.......That line is a masterpiece of meanness - I salute you!       It's funny 'cause it's true, too. Watching BH or CO would be more "fun" than this Pasolini arthouse movie!

[Dr. Whom]

I watched DECAMERON last year or the year prior and I hated it, too. I think I rated it 1/5 or 0.5/5. My review was much more cruel than yours! However -

Il Decameron (1971)
These stories could be very funny, if done with a slapstick Benny Hill/Carry On approach.

I didn't intend to be mean. I was just talking about the source material. Way back, when I was taking my degree in Medieval History I did a course on Chaucer's fabliaux, so I read a number of them. These are rowdy knockabout farces very much in the spirit of Benny Hill or 70s sex comedies. So if you adapt them, it should be in this spirit, and not try to make Serious Art.
It is what I like to call the Carl Orff effect. If you read the Carmina Burana, you find that they are very frivolous: about students partying, and chasing girls, or spending all their money on drink and pleading with their patron not to cut them off. Yet if you hear the orchestration of Orff, you might be forgiven for thinking that the end of the world had arrived.

.......That line is a masterpiece of meanness - I salute you!       It's funny 'cause it's true, too. Watching BH or CO would be more "fun" than this Pasolini arthouse movie!

[Rev. Powell]

DECAMERON is the weakest of that Pasolini trilogy. CANTERBURY TALES has one cool scene. ARABIAN NIGHTS is the best but none of them are great. I find Pasolini pretty overrated; TEOREMA is pretty good, and the basic plot has been imitated many times, but outside of that... eh.