Most Overrated Directors Ever
Throughout the years it seem the average movie watcher tends to watch movies featuring their favorite actor or actress. Recently however there has been a resurgence of cinema-files who watch movies for who directs them. Many times this serves as a better barometer for whether or not the movie is going to be placed in the upper echelons of movie history or be banished to obscurity. Greats like Spielberg, Scorsese and Kubrick have all but mastered cinema while others, in my humble opinion should just quit while they're ahead. Listed below are not what I consider the worst directors ever, far from it. I simply feel these particular movie makers have reached a level of acclaim that seems undeserved.

5. Tim Burton: Tim Burton has been a household name for well over a decade wowing us with blends of the surreal and quirky to bring something unusual and original to almost every onscreen outing. That being said however, some of his movies simply aren't worth all the bruhaha. Take Sweeney Todd; a pedestrian musical on stage gets a Brechtian makeover complete with fake looking blood and quickly moving camera shots that look computer animated and try to compensate for scene changes. Remakes are also not his bag. Planet of the Apes was just terrible and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was near sacrilege. Still for every Mars Attacks! there's an well engineered Edward Scissorhands. Also I blame Tim Burton for Emo kids but that's a conversation for another day.

4. Michael Bay: How this shallow self-absorbed spendthrift of a human being managed to make movies for so long is beyond me. Every time I watch a Michael Bay film in theaters I feel like I had just been tricked. Entice me with flashy cars, explosions and one liners will you? Masters of the action packed like James Cameron and Michael Mann manage to blend special effects, character development and humor or lacking that seamless editing into their movies but Michael Bay seems to throw the spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks. "Are you impressed yet?" No not really.

3. M. Night Shymalans: The master of the third act plot twist manages to somehow convince his audience that his movies are interesting. I will admit, when The Sixth Sense came out I was as dumbstruck as anyone but the film just doesn't hold up to repeated viewings. Neither does Unbreakable which is the only other movie I believe pasts muster. Some compare Shymalan favorably to Hitchcock to those people I say, "what a twist!"

2. Wes Anderson: Pretensions abound in Wes Anderson movies as every character with lines does something cooky on screen to get attention. Fans of Anderson will point to the subtle humor, sympathetic characters and gentle cinematography as the labor of their love. There is nothing subtle about the humor, its just deadpan and bone dry which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you can't fill 88+ minutes of screen time with just that. The characters aren't sympathetic, they're misanthropic and as for the cinematography...Anderson's movies look more like 70's porno than high art.

1. Quentin Tarantino: Every time I see a Tarantino film being advertised I get excited. In the trailers they look action packed, fun and very very bloody. As a movie buff I can appreciate his genre bending style, taking a host of opposing influences he seems to have just drawn out of a hat and mixing them together to see what happens. As I walk out of the theatre out 7 bucks and bloated from the popcorn, I feel a woebegone sense of dissatisfaction. Tarantino is the only director I know that can take a great idea and bore me to tears with it. Asinine segments of dialogue punctuated by flashes of violence isn't my idea of a good time. Take the highly lauded Inglorious Basterds as textbook Tarantino. After a 10 minute setup involving a British Lieutenant speaking with an unconvincingly serious Mike Myers, the Lieutenant and a fellow Basterd walk into a bar to rendezvous with their informer. Both the Lieutenant and 'Hugo' have been introduced and fleshed out with Hugo receiving his own cinematic aside. At the end of a lengthy scene filled with trite dialogue, there is a shootout where both are killed in a hail of gunfire. Two interesting characters, each with a solid back story are dispatched without so much as a goodbye. I like this storytelling tactic...sometimes, it keeps the audience guessing but a note to Mr. Tarantino, if you're going to kill off interesting characters be sure you have others to fall back on.