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I'm prepared to lose a lot of love here for this A-List, but I'm okay with it. I was inspired to talk about event movies, either from the summer movie season or elsewhere, thanks in no small part to the freight train known as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a movie that may be the biggest of this summer - only the sixth installment of the Harry Potter series has any chance of being as much of an event. Either way, there's a possibility that neither film will hit the same heights last year's The Dark Knight hit, with its gigantic box office take, critical acclaim, and positive word-of-mouth.

As I thought about some of the big event movies during my lifetime - as I figured it'd be more interesting to stick to that period when I could recount my experience at the theater as opposed to looking back (for me, it's looking back) to 1977's Star Wars: A New Hope or 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark - I realized that most of the big movies had kind of let me down...much like 2007's Transformers. Okay, in many ways, Transformers was a big jump in quality over director Michael Bay's previous films: I fell asleep during Pearl Harbor and walked out of Bad Boys II. That I stayed awake, stayed in my seat, and was able to somewhat enjoy myself is a win in my book.

Still, I didn't really like Transformers that much, and some of the more recent event movies would land under the same category. These are all movies that I and everyone else in the theater wanted to love; some did, but others, like me, did not. Some of these movies on the A-List are incredibly obvious; when it comes to event movies that disappoint, you have probably already figured out at least one of the films on this list, if not more. And yet, part of this A-List is about the experience of watching a movie with a major crowd. One of the reasons, for example, that I didn't fully appreciate how little I liked Transformers for a few days was thanks to the packed theater I saw it in, the high energy of the crowd, and the fun everyone else seemed to have. It was infectious, but the kind of infectious that I lost after some time.

Again, this A-List is confined to films that are either widely considered to be disappointments or are considered that way by me, and all have been released in the past 25 years (though, since the list discusses experiences, most are from the past 10 to 15 years). I'm sure there are some defenders of each of these movies, but I doubt there will be a dearth of people who can't believe they were ever hyped to see these movies. So, on with the list.

Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Here's the obvious choice, the choice that somewhat inspired the disappointment part of this A-List. Since I wasn't alive when the original Star Wars trilogy came out, I've never been as strident about its creator, George Lucas, destroying my childhood outright. Granted, I watched the original trilogy on VHS countless times as a kid and eagerly went to the theaters in the early months of 1997, when the films were released with digitally remastered footage in theaters everywhere. When it came to this 1999 debacle, I didn't wait in line for hours before seeing the film. I did, however, anxiously stand in line a week before the movie was released to buy tickets in advance. And so, on May 19, 1999, only hours after my day at school had ended, I sat in a theater with hundreds of other fans, young and old, to watch the newest Star Wars movie.

What I remember vividly is loving the scene when young Anakin (Jake Lloyd, in a performance that's just...well, it's slightly better than Hayden Christensen's, but that's not saying much) takes part in the pod race, and the lightsaber battle between Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jinn. The rest of the time I spent wondering when the Asian aliens would stop talking about taxes, why Jar Jar Binks existed, and why Lucas chose to hide the fact that the evil Emperor was obviously meant to be one of the "good guys." I've seen the film on VHS and I have bad news: it's the best of the new trilogy, by which I mean that it's the least terrible of them. The movie was bad, and though I walked out kind of pumped, mostly by that lightsaber fight, I knew it wasn't the same as the older and better stuff. The two follow-ups were...well, I wasn't nearly as pumped to see them, and the less said about them, the better. Let's just say, though, that disappointing event movies have, at the core, only one man and one movie to blame: George Lucas and Episode I.

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