Steven Spielberg – “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” (1997)
It’s almost impossible to imagine a filmmaker having a better year than Steven Spielberg had in 1993. In the summer, he made “Jurassic Park,” a blockbuster that proved to be the top-grossing movie in history up to that point, while in the fall, he released “Schindler’s List,” maybe the best-reviewed film of his career, proving once and for all that he could tackle serious subjects and which finally won him a Best Picture and Best Director Oscar. So you could forgive him for taking a little while to pick his next project, and Spielberg was gone for nearly four years, the longest gap without a movie in his career up to that point. When he returned, it was with “The Lost World,” which wasn’t just a sequel to “Jurassic Park,” but was also one of the biggest disappointments of his career. The film has a few cracking sequences (the trailer/cliff scene is a keeper) and has lots of good actors, but mostly feels like a retread of the original, delivering mostly on more dinosaurs and bigger dinosaurs without having anything close to the heart of the original film. It’s sour in the manner of “Temple Of Doom” and is dark for dark’s sake in a way that has never suited him.
John Madden – “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001)
Some think that “Shakespeare In Love” beating out “Saving Private Ryan” is one of the most profound tragedies in Oscar history. This ignores that 1.) “The Thin Red Line” was better than either, and 2.) that while it’s not the greatest film ever, “Shakespeare In Love” is a smart, witty and well-put-together romantic comedy. We have no such defenses for ‘Shakespeare’ director John Madden’s followup, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.” Originally to be directed by “Notting Hill” helmer Roger Michell, who had to drop out due to ill health, this adaptation of Louis de Bernières’ bestseller was clearly designed to be a prestige player, with a heavyweight team of Working Title Films and Miramax backing the film. But the story about a Greek woman who falls for an occupying Italian soldier feels tin-eared and misjudged when given the kind of bland, picture-postcard, inoffensive treatment that Madden does here. And while Cruz does her best (she’s more engaged than Christian Bale, who plays her dour fiancé), the film’s finally sunk by Nicolas Cage, who plays the title character like a bad improv comic doing an impression of Robert Benigni accepting his Oscar.
Mel Gibson – “The Passion Of The Christ” (2004)
Mel Gibson followed up his directorial debut “The Man Without A Face” in just two years, and did so with enormous success: Scottish epic “Braveheart” won him Best Picture and Best Director, and was a big hit in the process. A much bigger gap followed before his next movie though, with nearly nine years passing before his third film. And even excluding the very public disgrace that came after, we wish he’d waited longer. It’s not that we have issue with Gibson expressing his faith with a movie like “The Passion Of The Christ” — from Dreyer’s “The Passion Of Joan of Arc” to Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation Of Christ,” plenty of great filmmakers have made top-class religious art. But Gibson’s film was a torture-porn wallow in the bloody suffering of its title character, beautiful-looking (thanks to DoP Caleb Deschanel) and with the occasional moment of cinematic inspiration, but a grubby, ugly film at heart, one with little real spiritual value. Also, it features a scene where Jesus invents the table, which is hilarious. Though mostly negatively reviewed, the film was marketed directly to religious audiences, who ate it up, and the film became the biggest film not in the English language, taking over $600 million worldwide. The much better “Apocalypto” followed two years later, and Gibson returns to directing this year with pacifism drama “Hacksaw Ridge,” starring Andrew Garfield.
Ridley Scott – “Hannibal” (2001)
In fairness, Ridley Scott may not have realized “Hannibal” would be his follow-up to an Oscar winner when he signed up: the film was released just nine months after his Roman epic “Gladiator,” and was actually in theaters a few weeks before that movie took Best Picture (though Scott missed out on Best Director, perhaps having Norbit-ed himself out of the trophy). But Scott gets double black marks for not just following up his own triumph with a dud, but by doing it with a sequel to a beloved Oscar winner, Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence Of The Lambs.” Based on Thomas Harris’ novel, the film sees Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore, after Jodie Foster turned down the chance to reprise the role, rightly disappointed in where the story took the character) drawn into the hunt for the escaped Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), who’s now hiding out in Italy, by the machinations of grotesquely deformed Lecter victim Mason Verger (an uncredited Gary Oldman as a character who literally drinks orphan’s tears, in case you were worried he might be too nuanced). It’s a default with Scott’s film that they’ll look beautiful, and it certainly does, with Scott bringing a feel of operatic giallo to proceedings. And in fairness, Harris’ novel is an overblown mess. But the TV translation proved that you could use some of its elements effectively with the right approach, and unfortunately the film is just campy and boring. Somehow, Scott followed his Oscar triumph by making a Hannibal Lecter movie that would prove to be worse than Brett Ratner’s .
Michel Hazanavicus – “The Search” (2014)
Like the film or not, there was something irresistible about “The Artist”’s fairytale story, going from a little-known silent-movie homage from a director best known for comedy, to winning top prize from the Oscars. But not all fairy tales end happily ever after, and so three years on we got “The Search,” which did for Hazanavicius and “The Artist” what “Pinocchio” did for Roberto Benigni and “Life Is Beautiful.” A loose remake of Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 film of the same name, it’s set in the Chechen war in 1999, tracking a young Russian army draftee, a young mute Chechen boy and a French NGO worker (Berenice Bejo). You can’t fault it as well-meaning, at least, with Hazanavicius shedding light on a conflict that stretched on for a decade but didn’t get much press in the Western world, and with an ambitious scope that suggests he truly wanted to grow as a filmmaker. But he didn’t have all that much to say with it, the finished film coming across mostly as a trite ‘war is bad’ sort of way, derivative of countless other better movies, and strung together with sloppy plotting and a sanitized, PG-13 ish take on conflict. The film was poorly received at Cannes, and to this date, hasn’t yet received a U.S. release.
