For many of the movies on this list, there is not much surprise that they are going to be bad. Master of Disguise? It's a wacky kids movie with Dana Carvey and Brent Spiner. Corky Romano? Stars Chris Kattan. Battlefield Earth? Someone let John Travolta make a movie of a poorly-reviewed L. Ron Hubbard book. But how do you explain a movie like Twisted? It stars Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, and David Strathairn. It's directed by Philip Kaufman, who, among many big-name projects, wrote and directed The Right Stuff and with George Lucas conceived of the story for Raiders of the Lost Ark. That group has four Oscar nominations between them. Nobody doubts that each of them is talented. What happened?
One major thing that went wrong is writer Sarah Thorp, whose only other major feature film was The Bounty Hunter, which at 8% on Rotten Tomatoes is one of the worst-reviewed movies of this year. Her script manages to straddle the line between inane and tedious. I found myself getting more and more bored as the movie dragged on and the plot became more and more ridiculous. It deals with Judd as a cop who, after some laugh-out-loud kung fu movies in the opening scene, gets promoted to Homicide. She drinks a lot and has sex with random guys and later, after blacking out from drinking, the guys turn up dead. She's not sure if she has been killing them and she has to get to the bottom of it all. After no apparent detective work is done, it's all resolved in a completely unbelievable final scene that includes cops showing up to a deserted pier after nobody actually called them.
Judd's performance is really bad. Garcia's isn't much better. Kaufman doesn't seem to care, turning his location shooting in San Francisco into a contest to work as many landmarks into each shot as possible. Besides, any mystery shot in San Francisco has to draw comparisons to Hitchcock and, thus, start out behind the eight-ball. None of the other actors are big enough factors to save the day, even with pretty good character actors like Camryn Manheim, Richard T. Jones, Leland Orser, and -- in a weird twist of casting considering this movie came out in 2004 -- Mark Pellegrino and Titus Welliver. You may know them as Jacob and the Man In Black. They don't have any scenes together, but their names are next to each other in the credits.
One usually assumes that big stars can carry even a mediocre movie to quality. Get a bunch of them together and one assumes the movie is can't-miss. How many movies like this with big stars either get released with little fanfare to DVD, are hidden in the middle of winter, or never get released at all? This one came out in February of 2004 and I had never heard of it before I watched it. At least it's boring enough that I won't really remember it.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Worst of the Worst: #90, Dragonfly
There's really not much to say about Dragonfly because it is really, really boring. Probably more forgettable than bad. It deals with a doctor, played by Kevin Costner, whose wife disappears after a bus accident in Venezuela. This happens during an opening credits sequence where Costner looks TV movie-ish melodramatic and you can't quite figure out if he's also in Venezuela or not. He grieves her and starts hanging out in the area of the hospital where she worked as a child oncologist. The kids, even those who didn't know her, start having near-death experiences or comas where they see Costner's wife and tell him that she has a message for him. He starts seeing visions of her and of dragonflies, which she told him is the animal she would like to be after reincarnation. The visions eventually lead him to go to Venezuela to confront where the accident happened, leading to an ending so cheesy that it has been outlawed in seven states.
One has to wonder about Kevin Costner. He's been in some great movies and even won an acting Oscar, but he can be so wooden. This is a movie about a guy who lost his wife -- who was pregnant, by the way -- and he has a really hard time getting the emotions across. The movie takes place in Chicago and he started out with either a really bad Boston accent or a worse Chicago one, but he dropped it after a little bit, to his credit, I guess. The Untouchables is my favorite movie of all time and it doesn't get there if Costner, as the lead, isn't a big part of that. But, he's been so bad over the last, what, decade? More? He's a non-entity as an actor now and it's hard to believe that anyone would have cared enough about this movie one way or the other to bother reviewing it to get it on this list.
One has to wonder about Kevin Costner. He's been in some great movies and even won an acting Oscar, but he can be so wooden. This is a movie about a guy who lost his wife -- who was pregnant, by the way -- and he has a really hard time getting the emotions across. The movie takes place in Chicago and he started out with either a really bad Boston accent or a worse Chicago one, but he dropped it after a little bit, to his credit, I guess. The Untouchables is my favorite movie of all time and it doesn't get there if Costner, as the lead, isn't a big part of that. But, he's been so bad over the last, what, decade? More? He's a non-entity as an actor now and it's hard to believe that anyone would have cared enough about this movie one way or the other to bother reviewing it to get it on this list.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Worst of the Worst: #74, Envy
When I watched Swept Away, I said that Guy Ritchie was the best director on the list. That was a mixture of assumption and not having reviewed the list closely. I was wrong. Assuming there are no surprise Spielberg movies on the list, the best director is actually Barry Levinson, who directed Envy. In fact, the pedigree of most of the people involved in Envy is quite high. The movie has five main characters, portrayed by Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, and Christopher Walken. How could a movie with those people involved make any list of the worst movies?!
There have been a couple of movies (Broken Bridges and Boat Trip come to mind quickly) that I've said haven't really belonged on the list. In each of their places, I have said that I would put the movie Year One. That is a movie that also has a strong pedigree -- written and directed by Harold Ramis, starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, and a ton of other greats like David Cross and Paul Rudd -- but just didn't work. There were no laughs to be found. Something in it missed the mark, as if the movie had jumped the shark before it even began. With each horrible second, the chances of laughing at anything got longer and longer. Just a big miss. Year One seemed to me to be one of the worst one hundred movies I had seen in the last decade.
Envy is a million times worse than Year One.
Stiller and Black play best friends who work at 3M and try to come up with new inventions. Stiller is more grounded than Black and a little more successful. When Black comes up with an idea for a spray called Va-Poo-rize that makes dog poop disappear, Stiller laughs at him. Black's invention is a rousing success, leading to him getting millions upon millions of dollars. Stiller gets jealous and it ruins his life. After losing his family and job, Stiller ends up in a bar, where he meets a vagabond (Walken) who befriends him and tries to help him... do something... I'm lost right there. There's a plot, but I never quite understood Walken's role. More importantly, not one person in the entire movie acted the way one person in the entire real world would actually act. It's fiction and it's exaggerated for comedy's sake, but it becomes so difficult to relate to anyone in the movie that you just wish that the movie would break and they'd leave you alone.
As you can tell from the above, the script is awful. Awful. It was written by Steve Adams, whose big previous jobs had come in the 1970s (Donny and Marie) and 1981 (Fridays, which also, granted, helped start people like Larry Charles and Larry David). Adams fails. None of the jokes are funny. The lines are so bad that they actually disprove the theory that you can give anything to Walken and he'd make you laugh just by his delivery. The movie tries too hard to be like a Farrelly Brothers movie and falls way, way short. Of the Farrelly Brothers. When poop is involved in a major plot point, you know you're in for a rough time (Andy Dufresne's escape through the sewers excepted, of course). The movie isn't as poorly-directed as others on the list, but Levinson has to take blame for a) none of the actors clicking with anything and b) the movie just flat-out sucking. No homages to Animal House or Strangers on a Train were going to fix that.
I had a discussion the other day with someone over School of Rock and whether that was all Jack Black or if it was more of an ensemble movie. That doesn't really matter when you take this movie into account, because this one is an ensemble that fails, making you wonder if Tropic Thunder was more the exception than the rule when it comes to comedies with Stiller and Black of late. Anyways, I bring up School of Rock because it plays into the only thing you really need to know about Envy. Envy was made two years before it was released. It had tested so poorly with audiences that it was planned for direct-to-DVD release. When School of Rock became a huge hit, the studio saw the opportunity to release this film and sell it on Black's name. The movie, which cost $40 million to make, opened with a $6 million weekend. Word of mouth was so bad that it lasted only three more weeks in the theater and brought in $12 million total. It flopped so miserably that the studio ended up releasing it straight-to-DVD in Europe after all. Later that year, Black and Dreamworks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks made the movie) went to the Cannes Film Festival with A Shark's Tale. At Cannes, the mecca of international film, the two did something that few movie-makers ever do -- they publicly apologized for ever making Envy.
There have been a couple of movies (Broken Bridges and Boat Trip come to mind quickly) that I've said haven't really belonged on the list. In each of their places, I have said that I would put the movie Year One. That is a movie that also has a strong pedigree -- written and directed by Harold Ramis, starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, and a ton of other greats like David Cross and Paul Rudd -- but just didn't work. There were no laughs to be found. Something in it missed the mark, as if the movie had jumped the shark before it even began. With each horrible second, the chances of laughing at anything got longer and longer. Just a big miss. Year One seemed to me to be one of the worst one hundred movies I had seen in the last decade.
Envy is a million times worse than Year One.
Stiller and Black play best friends who work at 3M and try to come up with new inventions. Stiller is more grounded than Black and a little more successful. When Black comes up with an idea for a spray called Va-Poo-rize that makes dog poop disappear, Stiller laughs at him. Black's invention is a rousing success, leading to him getting millions upon millions of dollars. Stiller gets jealous and it ruins his life. After losing his family and job, Stiller ends up in a bar, where he meets a vagabond (Walken) who befriends him and tries to help him... do something... I'm lost right there. There's a plot, but I never quite understood Walken's role. More importantly, not one person in the entire movie acted the way one person in the entire real world would actually act. It's fiction and it's exaggerated for comedy's sake, but it becomes so difficult to relate to anyone in the movie that you just wish that the movie would break and they'd leave you alone.
As you can tell from the above, the script is awful. Awful. It was written by Steve Adams, whose big previous jobs had come in the 1970s (Donny and Marie) and 1981 (Fridays, which also, granted, helped start people like Larry Charles and Larry David). Adams fails. None of the jokes are funny. The lines are so bad that they actually disprove the theory that you can give anything to Walken and he'd make you laugh just by his delivery. The movie tries too hard to be like a Farrelly Brothers movie and falls way, way short. Of the Farrelly Brothers. When poop is involved in a major plot point, you know you're in for a rough time (Andy Dufresne's escape through the sewers excepted, of course). The movie isn't as poorly-directed as others on the list, but Levinson has to take blame for a) none of the actors clicking with anything and b) the movie just flat-out sucking. No homages to Animal House or Strangers on a Train were going to fix that.
I had a discussion the other day with someone over School of Rock and whether that was all Jack Black or if it was more of an ensemble movie. That doesn't really matter when you take this movie into account, because this one is an ensemble that fails, making you wonder if Tropic Thunder was more the exception than the rule when it comes to comedies with Stiller and Black of late. Anyways, I bring up School of Rock because it plays into the only thing you really need to know about Envy. Envy was made two years before it was released. It had tested so poorly with audiences that it was planned for direct-to-DVD release. When School of Rock became a huge hit, the studio saw the opportunity to release this film and sell it on Black's name. The movie, which cost $40 million to make, opened with a $6 million weekend. Word of mouth was so bad that it lasted only three more weeks in the theater and brought in $12 million total. It flopped so miserably that the studio ended up releasing it straight-to-DVD in Europe after all. Later that year, Black and Dreamworks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks made the movie) went to the Cannes Film Festival with A Shark's Tale. At Cannes, the mecca of international film, the two did something that few movie-makers ever do -- they publicly apologized for ever making Envy.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Worst of the Worst: #20, Crossover
When it comes to Chappelle's Show, I imagine that most people would point to the Rick James episode as the popular favorite. My favorite episode is the second-to-last episode of the second season, when Wayne Brady took over the show, leading to a) the line when Nick Cannon says to Dave, "Your son needs a working actor in his life," and b) the classic Training Day spoof as Dave and Wayne drive around LA. (Chappelle's Show is on Netflix Watch Instantly and I just took a break to watch that skit again. Back to the review.) The opening credits sequence of Crossover, the 20th worst-reviewed movie of 2000-2009, according to Rotten Tomatoes, involves Brady, as a street agent, driving around Detroit and collecting bets for a big streetball game later that night. He even has the goatee like he had in that skit. At one point, a cop pulls Brady over to give him some money and I was ready for Brady to jump out, sing "I Say A Little Prayer", and break the cop's neck. It's an unintentionally hilarious beginning to what turned out to be an unintentionally hilarious movie. Crossover is not only the 46th movie I've seen on the list, but it is the most entertaining.
The film follows two youngsters in Detroit, both with great basketball skill. One is working on his GED, having just gotten out of prison. The other just finished high school and is waiting to hear about a basketball scholarship to "California University of Los Angeles" so he can go to school and eventually become a doctor. (I'd be remiss if I didn't point out here that both the Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills, 90210 kids went to a California University in LA, so there is great tradition there.) Brady, the agent, fixes streetball games in Detroit and is trying to get the high school kid to go pro so he can get a percentage. The kids lose a game, need to make some money, there's some drama with women, they need to play a big game to win their dignity, etc. All very cliched.
The true joy in this movie comes in two things: a lack of attention to detail by the director and a really, historically awful script. First, the lack of attention. As I've seen in a lot of these bad movies, the director tries to make the movie look cool by using really quick cuts. That's totally the way to make a movie awesome, since nobody ever raves about long shots like the one to open The Godfather. The cuts mean that there is a decent amount of back-and-forth between wide shots and closeups. The director didn't always make sure that people were in the same position during those cuts, so you end up with a number of scenes where it looks like somebody's body jerked two inches to the side. The two main actors themselves are too old to be believable in their roles. Anthony Mackie was 27 and Wesley Jonathan was 28. Brady himself was only 34, so they don't look younger enough than him. With those three actors, you actually have some talent -- Mackie broke out in a big way last year in The Hurt Locker, Jonathan was one of the main characters on the TNBC show City Guys (and therefore had a lot of experience), and Brady's talents are well-known. The rest of the actors in the movie are awful. So bad that I even sensed some misogyny as the female characters are portrayed poorly in the story and acted even worse.
Second, we have the script. I can't knock the overall story because there have been some very good movies (Avatar, Remember The Titans) that have been chock full of cliches. The fun here is in the details and in the dialogue. One dramatic scene involves a showdown at a shoe store where we learn that the main character can't add in his head. I'm not oversimplifying that. He is very embarrassed and it's supposed to be some huge moment. Another big plot twist is when we find out that one of the girls was lying about her pregnancy and that, instead of it being by one of the heroes, she was actually pregnant by the big villain of the movie. The biggest plot twist of the movie happens off-screen. As in, one scene the facts of the movie are X and then, in the next scene, one character tells the other that Y happened and the entire plot has changed. And then, of course, we have the dialogue.
Here are some actual quotes from the movie. I played them back and wrote them down. It was hard to remember them when I was laughing so hard:
The film follows two youngsters in Detroit, both with great basketball skill. One is working on his GED, having just gotten out of prison. The other just finished high school and is waiting to hear about a basketball scholarship to "California University of Los Angeles" so he can go to school and eventually become a doctor. (I'd be remiss if I didn't point out here that both the Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills, 90210 kids went to a California University in LA, so there is great tradition there.) Brady, the agent, fixes streetball games in Detroit and is trying to get the high school kid to go pro so he can get a percentage. The kids lose a game, need to make some money, there's some drama with women, they need to play a big game to win their dignity, etc. All very cliched.
The true joy in this movie comes in two things: a lack of attention to detail by the director and a really, historically awful script. First, the lack of attention. As I've seen in a lot of these bad movies, the director tries to make the movie look cool by using really quick cuts. That's totally the way to make a movie awesome, since nobody ever raves about long shots like the one to open The Godfather. The cuts mean that there is a decent amount of back-and-forth between wide shots and closeups. The director didn't always make sure that people were in the same position during those cuts, so you end up with a number of scenes where it looks like somebody's body jerked two inches to the side. The two main actors themselves are too old to be believable in their roles. Anthony Mackie was 27 and Wesley Jonathan was 28. Brady himself was only 34, so they don't look younger enough than him. With those three actors, you actually have some talent -- Mackie broke out in a big way last year in The Hurt Locker, Jonathan was one of the main characters on the TNBC show City Guys (and therefore had a lot of experience), and Brady's talents are well-known. The rest of the actors in the movie are awful. So bad that I even sensed some misogyny as the female characters are portrayed poorly in the story and acted even worse.
Second, we have the script. I can't knock the overall story because there have been some very good movies (Avatar, Remember The Titans) that have been chock full of cliches. The fun here is in the details and in the dialogue. One dramatic scene involves a showdown at a shoe store where we learn that the main character can't add in his head. I'm not oversimplifying that. He is very embarrassed and it's supposed to be some huge moment. Another big plot twist is when we find out that one of the girls was lying about her pregnancy and that, instead of it being by one of the heroes, she was actually pregnant by the big villain of the movie. The biggest plot twist of the movie happens off-screen. As in, one scene the facts of the movie are X and then, in the next scene, one character tells the other that Y happened and the entire plot has changed. And then, of course, we have the dialogue.
Here are some actual quotes from the movie. I played them back and wrote them down. It was hard to remember them when I was laughing so hard:
- "Look, the World Series and the NBA Finals are the two most bet-on games in the country..." (Not only not true, that makes no sense)
- "But this ain't horseshoes, this is streetball. Want to know who the winner is? Count your paper at the end of the game."
- "Look, I can't front. I'm feeling you." "I can't front, neither. I can't speak to tomorrow or the day after, but right now, I don't want to be with nobody but you."
- "So she got you open like the freeway at four in the morning."
- "Cruise might not be able to play ball with a bad lung... but he sure as hell can be a doctor."
- "Vanessa's from the D, through and through. She was born with larceny in her heart."
There's more where that came from. Bad actors delivering awful lines is bad, but actors with even a little talent delivering them is laugh-out-loud funny. Instead of rolling your eyes, you actually get to appreciate the lines as written. Crossover has just enough good in it to make the bad stand out and that's what makes it so darn entertaining.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Worst of the Worst: #38, Happily N'Ever After
All of the past reviews have been posted, so we're on to the new stuff now:
As I watch these movies, it is easier to pass judgement on some genres than on others. For instance, I can confidently knock comedies and action movies. I've seen any number of these in my life and I get them. On the other hand, I don't like most romantic comedies, so I can't tell if I'm too tough on that genre. Along those lines, you wouldn't think that I could fairly evaluate kids' movies. I don't watch them often, if at all, and since I'm not the target audience it's not entirely fair to say the movie is bad if it fails to reach me. You wouldn't think that, but the quality of the best kids' movies, especially CGI ones, has been so high as of late that many adults -- me included -- have gone to see them. Rather than going to see Eclipse yesterday, I went to see Toy Story 3 for the second time (it definitely holds up, as an aside). I saw at least the first Shrek in the theater and have seen the others on DVD (besides the one that just came out, of course). I've watched every Pixar movie and own a number of them on DVD. I even pop in Aladdin and The Lion King every so often. The best kids' movies have been pretty good lately. The problem is that I'm only watching the best. In front of Toy Story 3, there are a lot of previews for movies that I had no desire to see. Disney apparently kicks out a lot of straight-to-DVD stuff, most of which I have to assume is fairly mindless garbage. So, there are a lot of weak offerings, but Happily N'Ever After, the 38th worst-reviewed movie of the last decade on Rotten Tomatoes, has to be among the weakest.
At least the first couple of Shrek movies were pretty good and Pixar puts out great film after great film. These movies didn't really have to be good, though. Maybe Pixar doesn't make $226 million in two weeks if Toy Story 3 isn't as ridiculously good as it is, but they could have made an awful lot of money by putting Woody and Buzz on the big screen and not really trying that hard to entertain. One imagines that the fact that the movie opened to $110 million was enough to make it a success financially.
Of course, Pixar has some built in capital with the movie-going public (and, of course, they refuse to squander that). Happily N'Ever After suffers from a complete lack of care in its execution. Even though it came out in 2006, it has CGI that is barely a step above Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" video. The characters have no, well, character to them. The film is narrated by its star, Freddie Prinze, Jr., so there you go with that. It's probably good that the main song is forgettable, because I vaguely remember it being annoying and nonsensical. The jokes fall flat and the plot itself is lazy. In "Fairy Tale Land" there is a wizard who watches to make sure every story goes the way they are supposed to go. There are scales that balance between good and evil and if someone tips the scales towards evil, as someone obviously does at some point, things go horribly wrong. It is never discussed what happens if the scales are tipped towards good. Cinderella and Prince Charming's servant (who has a crush on her, the prince doesn't seem to really care or be any kind of dramatic factor) have to make sure the scales are put right. I'm unclear, if all of the fairy tales are happening at the same time in this world, why the scales even exist. Once the stories end with "happily ever after" nobody should have to watch over them. It's confusing, but I'll leave it. Not worth caring about.
That's not to say that there aren't minor disappointments. Wallace Shawn does a voice and it's sad because he's in the Toy Story movies. George Carlin did a little part; it was his last movie ever. Two theme songs were performed by They Might Be Giants and Squirrel Nut Zippers and you'd hope that they'd have the sense to know this was going to be bad. And again, you could tell this was going to be bad just by looking at it. Maybe Pixar is leaps and bounds in front of everyone else visually, but this one really doesn't stand up at all. Happily N'Ever After cost $47 million to make and brought in $15 million at the box office. It opened to $6 million and quickly dropped off. People could tell it was weak.
Are Pixar -- and Dreamworks, to a lesser extent -- so strong that nobody else can realistically compete in quality when it comes to animated films? Probably not, when a movie like Focus Features' Coraline could be so well-received last year. There's a lot of money to go around with kids' movies and there's room for films of great quality to break through. I may not be a kid anymore and I may not yet have one and, at that point, realize that anything with a talking pig in it is worth putting on TV to get the brat to shut up. So, I may not know kids' movies in total, but I do know lazy and that jumps across every genre. I'm happy that people can see through that.
As I watch these movies, it is easier to pass judgement on some genres than on others. For instance, I can confidently knock comedies and action movies. I've seen any number of these in my life and I get them. On the other hand, I don't like most romantic comedies, so I can't tell if I'm too tough on that genre. Along those lines, you wouldn't think that I could fairly evaluate kids' movies. I don't watch them often, if at all, and since I'm not the target audience it's not entirely fair to say the movie is bad if it fails to reach me. You wouldn't think that, but the quality of the best kids' movies, especially CGI ones, has been so high as of late that many adults -- me included -- have gone to see them. Rather than going to see Eclipse yesterday, I went to see Toy Story 3 for the second time (it definitely holds up, as an aside). I saw at least the first Shrek in the theater and have seen the others on DVD (besides the one that just came out, of course). I've watched every Pixar movie and own a number of them on DVD. I even pop in Aladdin and The Lion King every so often. The best kids' movies have been pretty good lately. The problem is that I'm only watching the best. In front of Toy Story 3, there are a lot of previews for movies that I had no desire to see. Disney apparently kicks out a lot of straight-to-DVD stuff, most of which I have to assume is fairly mindless garbage. So, there are a lot of weak offerings, but Happily N'Ever After, the 38th worst-reviewed movie of the last decade on Rotten Tomatoes, has to be among the weakest.
At least the first couple of Shrek movies were pretty good and Pixar puts out great film after great film. These movies didn't really have to be good, though. Maybe Pixar doesn't make $226 million in two weeks if Toy Story 3 isn't as ridiculously good as it is, but they could have made an awful lot of money by putting Woody and Buzz on the big screen and not really trying that hard to entertain. One imagines that the fact that the movie opened to $110 million was enough to make it a success financially.
Of course, Pixar has some built in capital with the movie-going public (and, of course, they refuse to squander that). Happily N'Ever After suffers from a complete lack of care in its execution. Even though it came out in 2006, it has CGI that is barely a step above Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" video. The characters have no, well, character to them. The film is narrated by its star, Freddie Prinze, Jr., so there you go with that. It's probably good that the main song is forgettable, because I vaguely remember it being annoying and nonsensical. The jokes fall flat and the plot itself is lazy. In "Fairy Tale Land" there is a wizard who watches to make sure every story goes the way they are supposed to go. There are scales that balance between good and evil and if someone tips the scales towards evil, as someone obviously does at some point, things go horribly wrong. It is never discussed what happens if the scales are tipped towards good. Cinderella and Prince Charming's servant (who has a crush on her, the prince doesn't seem to really care or be any kind of dramatic factor) have to make sure the scales are put right. I'm unclear, if all of the fairy tales are happening at the same time in this world, why the scales even exist. Once the stories end with "happily ever after" nobody should have to watch over them. It's confusing, but I'll leave it. Not worth caring about.
That's not to say that there aren't minor disappointments. Wallace Shawn does a voice and it's sad because he's in the Toy Story movies. George Carlin did a little part; it was his last movie ever. Two theme songs were performed by They Might Be Giants and Squirrel Nut Zippers and you'd hope that they'd have the sense to know this was going to be bad. And again, you could tell this was going to be bad just by looking at it. Maybe Pixar is leaps and bounds in front of everyone else visually, but this one really doesn't stand up at all. Happily N'Ever After cost $47 million to make and brought in $15 million at the box office. It opened to $6 million and quickly dropped off. People could tell it was weak.
Are Pixar -- and Dreamworks, to a lesser extent -- so strong that nobody else can realistically compete in quality when it comes to animated films? Probably not, when a movie like Focus Features' Coraline could be so well-received last year. There's a lot of money to go around with kids' movies and there's room for films of great quality to break through. I may not be a kid anymore and I may not yet have one and, at that point, realize that anything with a talking pig in it is worth putting on TV to get the brat to shut up. So, I may not know kids' movies in total, but I do know lazy and that jumps across every genre. I'm happy that people can see through that.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Worst of the Worst: #35, Deal
Originally posted June 24, 2010:
Some of these "worst" movies are enjoyably bad and some of them are just plain bad. Some of them stand out in my memory and some of them are so forgettable that I'll have to refer back to the reviews to remember how I felt about them (case in point: #32, Deuces Wild, which I just looked at because I saw on the list that I watched it and couldn't remember anything about it except one actor and the setting). Unfortunately, Deal falls into the latter categories. I've pretty much already forgotten everything about this movie and I just finished it twenty minutes ago.
On the good side (sort of) for the movie, something this forgettable and boring doesn't seem to fit on the list. The movie is bad, no doubt. It cost around five million dollars to make and earned a whopping $57,000 at the box office, which is certainly more than it deserved. It's really bad, but it just doesn't seem that bad because it is so uneventfully dull. At one point, I threw a fit because I looked to see how much was left in the movie and it had only been on for half an hour. I thought I was at least an hour in.
That bad timing doesn't just come from boredom, it comes because this is one of the worst-paced movies I can remember. It clocks in at an epic 82 minutes before the credits and the measly story itself wraps up even more quickly, because the final half-hour is devoted only to the final table at the World Poker Tour championsips. Yep, it's a poker movie. And, like every poker movie in history besides Rounders, it's very obviously written by people who have never actually played poker. Every hand comes down to some monster like a full house or better. The tell is more important than any other factor in the game. All of the players say really witty things that don't make much sense and then make plays that make even less sense. The announcers and real poker players play themselves badly with awful dialogue. In this case, "the real poker players" refers mostly to just Phil Laak because the footage of Raymer, Nguyen, Negreanu, and company, looks like it was taken by someone who had hidden a camera and ran away as soon as they got a second of footage.
The camera work is maddening with its swooping motions and there is not one scene -- not one -- that doesn't include some sort of music or background noise that detracts from anything going on. It's okay, though, because the story is inconsequential. There is a young hotshot who is not yet as good as he thinks. A washed-up star who never won the big one takes the kid under his wing to teach him. He even ends up getting a prostitute to give the kid confidence, but the kid thinks the girl really likes him and then flips out when he finds the truth. Come to think of it, that's sort of the plot of Bull Durham, so I don't even have to say that this film sounds unoriginal because it actually is. Kid ends up playing teacher in the poker championship. They learn a lesson about what's important in life. They go home happy. I scream at the TV because none of the poker makes any freaking sense.
The only "redeeming" quality here is that the washed-up star is played by Burt Reynolds. I don't think most people realize what a big movie star Reynolds was back in the '70s and '80s. He's even had some decent roles as he's gotten older, such as in Mystery, Alaska and Boogie Nights. Granted, both of those movies came out over ten years ago. He was also pretty funny on My Name is Earl, though. He's kept the mustache and worn white hair pieces as he's gotten older (hard to believe he turned 74 this year). Well, wore his "hair" white except for in this movie. I can't tell whether he dyed his toupee or just dunked it in a vat of shoe polish, because it is eerily black. Like a doll's eyes. Like a strange blackness that can only be stopped if Atreyu succeeds in getting to the Ivory Tower in time. On top of the hair that actually sucked the light out of surrounding items, there is a little joy in one scene at the end that is so poorly acted that I squealed in delight and watched it twice. Awkward dialogue, weird close-ups, poorly-timed delivery.
If you needed any other reason to think that poker is just a game and not a real sport, look at the dearth of good poker movies. There are great baseball ones, football ones, basketball ones, even a great soccer one (Victory). There is one great poker movie. There is a good poker scene in The Sting, but only one scene and everyone's cheating anyway. If Hollywood is going to keep trying to use the drama of a tight card game, they need to find a way to write realistic poker. Otherwise, you'll just end up with this movie, which I can't quite remember the name of right now, but I'll eventually figure out when it comes on HBO at 2AM some night and I flip to it because it's about poker and then start screaming in agony because I'll remember I already saw it.
Some of these "worst" movies are enjoyably bad and some of them are just plain bad. Some of them stand out in my memory and some of them are so forgettable that I'll have to refer back to the reviews to remember how I felt about them (case in point: #32, Deuces Wild, which I just looked at because I saw on the list that I watched it and couldn't remember anything about it except one actor and the setting). Unfortunately, Deal falls into the latter categories. I've pretty much already forgotten everything about this movie and I just finished it twenty minutes ago.
On the good side (sort of) for the movie, something this forgettable and boring doesn't seem to fit on the list. The movie is bad, no doubt. It cost around five million dollars to make and earned a whopping $57,000 at the box office, which is certainly more than it deserved. It's really bad, but it just doesn't seem that bad because it is so uneventfully dull. At one point, I threw a fit because I looked to see how much was left in the movie and it had only been on for half an hour. I thought I was at least an hour in.
That bad timing doesn't just come from boredom, it comes because this is one of the worst-paced movies I can remember. It clocks in at an epic 82 minutes before the credits and the measly story itself wraps up even more quickly, because the final half-hour is devoted only to the final table at the World Poker Tour championsips. Yep, it's a poker movie. And, like every poker movie in history besides Rounders, it's very obviously written by people who have never actually played poker. Every hand comes down to some monster like a full house or better. The tell is more important than any other factor in the game. All of the players say really witty things that don't make much sense and then make plays that make even less sense. The announcers and real poker players play themselves badly with awful dialogue. In this case, "the real poker players" refers mostly to just Phil Laak because the footage of Raymer, Nguyen, Negreanu, and company, looks like it was taken by someone who had hidden a camera and ran away as soon as they got a second of footage.
The camera work is maddening with its swooping motions and there is not one scene -- not one -- that doesn't include some sort of music or background noise that detracts from anything going on. It's okay, though, because the story is inconsequential. There is a young hotshot who is not yet as good as he thinks. A washed-up star who never won the big one takes the kid under his wing to teach him. He even ends up getting a prostitute to give the kid confidence, but the kid thinks the girl really likes him and then flips out when he finds the truth. Come to think of it, that's sort of the plot of Bull Durham, so I don't even have to say that this film sounds unoriginal because it actually is. Kid ends up playing teacher in the poker championship. They learn a lesson about what's important in life. They go home happy. I scream at the TV because none of the poker makes any freaking sense.
The only "redeeming" quality here is that the washed-up star is played by Burt Reynolds. I don't think most people realize what a big movie star Reynolds was back in the '70s and '80s. He's even had some decent roles as he's gotten older, such as in Mystery, Alaska and Boogie Nights. Granted, both of those movies came out over ten years ago. He was also pretty funny on My Name is Earl, though. He's kept the mustache and worn white hair pieces as he's gotten older (hard to believe he turned 74 this year). Well, wore his "hair" white except for in this movie. I can't tell whether he dyed his toupee or just dunked it in a vat of shoe polish, because it is eerily black. Like a doll's eyes. Like a strange blackness that can only be stopped if Atreyu succeeds in getting to the Ivory Tower in time. On top of the hair that actually sucked the light out of surrounding items, there is a little joy in one scene at the end that is so poorly acted that I squealed in delight and watched it twice. Awkward dialogue, weird close-ups, poorly-timed delivery.
If you needed any other reason to think that poker is just a game and not a real sport, look at the dearth of good poker movies. There are great baseball ones, football ones, basketball ones, even a great soccer one (Victory). There is one great poker movie. There is a good poker scene in The Sting, but only one scene and everyone's cheating anyway. If Hollywood is going to keep trying to use the drama of a tight card game, they need to find a way to write realistic poker. Otherwise, you'll just end up with this movie, which I can't quite remember the name of right now, but I'll eventually figure out when it comes on HBO at 2AM some night and I flip to it because it's about poker and then start screaming in agony because I'll remember I already saw it.
Worst of the Worst: #24, Texas Rangers
Originally posted June 22, 2010:
The story of the Texas Rangers is a long, sad tale that may be changing as we speak. Ever since they moved from Washington before the 1972 season, they've been mediocre at best, having only made the playoffs three times and only winning one total playoff game in franchise history. Tonight, however, they won their ninth straight game and they have some pitchers for maybe the first time ever. The greatest player in Rangers history is, of course, the overrated Nolan Ryan and the franchise is otherwise famous for giving A-Rod $252 million and being the hotbed of steroids during the Jose Canseco/Juan Gonzalez/Rafael Palmeiro days. A story like this makes for a depressing movie, but nobody said this was the "Most Fun Movies Ever" list.
Wait, what?
Texas Rangers is actually a western starring James Van Der Beek, Ashton Kucher, and Usher? They fight against Alfred Molina, who looks like he'd rather be anywhere else but in the movie? They're led by Dylan McDermott, who doesn't use a Southern accent, but speaks as if he did ("I reckon I better do this.")? Nobody, except for Randy Travis and Robert Patrick, uses Southern accents? Why would you do a movie about former Confederate soldiers in Texas in 1875 and not have any of them use Southern accents? That doesn't make sense! And the dialogue is so bad that you can't tell which is worse between the acting (it's always the acting in Kucher's case) and the script? And the camera work is among the worst in movie history, with so many cuts and shots that last fewer than three seconds that you get a headache and can't follow the action? And the movie is only 81 minutes long besides the credits and includes a scene where someone juggles for no apparent reason?
No, I must have put that awful, awful movie out of my head. Bring on Chad Curtis and Rusty Greer.
The story of the Texas Rangers is a long, sad tale that may be changing as we speak. Ever since they moved from Washington before the 1972 season, they've been mediocre at best, having only made the playoffs three times and only winning one total playoff game in franchise history. Tonight, however, they won their ninth straight game and they have some pitchers for maybe the first time ever. The greatest player in Rangers history is, of course, the overrated Nolan Ryan and the franchise is otherwise famous for giving A-Rod $252 million and being the hotbed of steroids during the Jose Canseco/Juan Gonzalez/Rafael Palmeiro days. A story like this makes for a depressing movie, but nobody said this was the "Most Fun Movies Ever" list.
Wait, what?
Texas Rangers is actually a western starring James Van Der Beek, Ashton Kucher, and Usher? They fight against Alfred Molina, who looks like he'd rather be anywhere else but in the movie? They're led by Dylan McDermott, who doesn't use a Southern accent, but speaks as if he did ("I reckon I better do this.")? Nobody, except for Randy Travis and Robert Patrick, uses Southern accents? Why would you do a movie about former Confederate soldiers in Texas in 1875 and not have any of them use Southern accents? That doesn't make sense! And the dialogue is so bad that you can't tell which is worse between the acting (it's always the acting in Kucher's case) and the script? And the camera work is among the worst in movie history, with so many cuts and shots that last fewer than three seconds that you get a headache and can't follow the action? And the movie is only 81 minutes long besides the credits and includes a scene where someone juggles for no apparent reason?
No, I must have put that awful, awful movie out of my head. Bring on Chad Curtis and Rusty Greer.
Worst of the Worst: #12, Killing Me Softly
Originally posted June 14, 2010:
Now, that's what I'm talking about! Killing Me Softly, the twelfth-worst movie of the last decade according to Rotten Tomatoes, is not only really bad, but it is really funny. Really, really funny. It's the kind of movie that begs for the MST3K treatment. It shouldn't be funny, though. Killing Me Softly was made by a legit director, Chen Kaige (Farewell my Concubine) in his English language debut, and has a couple of really beautiful shots. Chen maybe should have stuck to Chinese though, as he seems to be a bit lacking in the direction of English-speaking actors.
The prime suspect here is Heather Graham. She isn't a bad actress, but she is so robotic in this one that she makes it seem like Ingrid Bergman played the Jetsons' maid. The script does her no favors. I presume that it's hard to be but so good when there is a scene where you are walking around a house and saying, out loud, "I wonder where I can find a shirt." It's hard to take an actress' performance seriously when she gets a threatening note and reads it aloud, even though she's by herself. Graham is joined by the severely overacting Joseph Fiennes. Some of the great mockable moments occur as he swings his arms widely to show disbelief and anger, often knocking harmless knick-knacks around in the process. There is little time to enjoy the show, however, as Fiennes and Graham have various forms of sex for perhaps 98 of the movie's 99 minutes. The movie is worthy of Cinemax, but only barely.
The film is based on a novel, but it must be a pretty bad novel. The plot deals with an American woman in London who is in a boring relationship and then sees a mysterious man on the street. She follows him into a bookstore and, boom, sex. Now her sex with the guy she's living with is even more boring, so she leaves him for the mysterious guy in a scene in which she wears a skirt that goes down to just slightly past her navel even though it's snowing outside. Mysterious guy finds her outside his place and, bam, sex. After beating up a mugger in somewhat of a non-sequitir, he decides they should get married and, pow, sex. This time in a cemetery. He has a locked door in his house and, upon finding the key, she discovers he has letters from an ex who disappeared at one point after falling off of a mountain (the guy's a mountain climber, but whatever). Somehow -- and perhaps I may have missed something -- this leads her to believe that he's a serial killer. Menacing music starts playing while she runs away and hides from him in various places. I was never that concerned, though, because I never understood why I should be afraid of him. I suppose that somehow the erotic asphyxiation scene was supposed to be a hint that he could strangle people, but he didn't even use his hands (it was some sort of silk thing)! She runs from him and into the arms of his sister and it's at that point that I realized that the sister was, in fact, the serial killer. There was no hint of this, but it just seemed realistic. Of course, I should have also foreseen (since sex hadn't been discussed in thirty seconds or so) that she killed his girlfriends because they used to have an incestual relationship. It's my second incest-themed movie in the last three, and that doesn't even include any assumptions about Witless Protection!
Sorry I gave away the plot, but you would have guessed it anyway. This movie isn't worth seeing for the twists and turns. It's not worth seeing because Heather Graham's breasts practically make more appearances than her face. It's not worth seeing because the end involves someone inexplicably being shot with a flare gun. Frankly, it's just not worth seeing. But, if you must(!), see Killing Me Softly for the comedy, unintentional as it may be.
Now, that's what I'm talking about! Killing Me Softly, the twelfth-worst movie of the last decade according to Rotten Tomatoes, is not only really bad, but it is really funny. Really, really funny. It's the kind of movie that begs for the MST3K treatment. It shouldn't be funny, though. Killing Me Softly was made by a legit director, Chen Kaige (Farewell my Concubine) in his English language debut, and has a couple of really beautiful shots. Chen maybe should have stuck to Chinese though, as he seems to be a bit lacking in the direction of English-speaking actors.
The prime suspect here is Heather Graham. She isn't a bad actress, but she is so robotic in this one that she makes it seem like Ingrid Bergman played the Jetsons' maid. The script does her no favors. I presume that it's hard to be but so good when there is a scene where you are walking around a house and saying, out loud, "I wonder where I can find a shirt." It's hard to take an actress' performance seriously when she gets a threatening note and reads it aloud, even though she's by herself. Graham is joined by the severely overacting Joseph Fiennes. Some of the great mockable moments occur as he swings his arms widely to show disbelief and anger, often knocking harmless knick-knacks around in the process. There is little time to enjoy the show, however, as Fiennes and Graham have various forms of sex for perhaps 98 of the movie's 99 minutes. The movie is worthy of Cinemax, but only barely.
The film is based on a novel, but it must be a pretty bad novel. The plot deals with an American woman in London who is in a boring relationship and then sees a mysterious man on the street. She follows him into a bookstore and, boom, sex. Now her sex with the guy she's living with is even more boring, so she leaves him for the mysterious guy in a scene in which she wears a skirt that goes down to just slightly past her navel even though it's snowing outside. Mysterious guy finds her outside his place and, bam, sex. After beating up a mugger in somewhat of a non-sequitir, he decides they should get married and, pow, sex. This time in a cemetery. He has a locked door in his house and, upon finding the key, she discovers he has letters from an ex who disappeared at one point after falling off of a mountain (the guy's a mountain climber, but whatever). Somehow -- and perhaps I may have missed something -- this leads her to believe that he's a serial killer. Menacing music starts playing while she runs away and hides from him in various places. I was never that concerned, though, because I never understood why I should be afraid of him. I suppose that somehow the erotic asphyxiation scene was supposed to be a hint that he could strangle people, but he didn't even use his hands (it was some sort of silk thing)! She runs from him and into the arms of his sister and it's at that point that I realized that the sister was, in fact, the serial killer. There was no hint of this, but it just seemed realistic. Of course, I should have also foreseen (since sex hadn't been discussed in thirty seconds or so) that she killed his girlfriends because they used to have an incestual relationship. It's my second incest-themed movie in the last three, and that doesn't even include any assumptions about Witless Protection!
Sorry I gave away the plot, but you would have guessed it anyway. This movie isn't worth seeing for the twists and turns. It's not worth seeing because Heather Graham's breasts practically make more appearances than her face. It's not worth seeing because the end involves someone inexplicably being shot with a flare gun. Frankly, it's just not worth seeing. But, if you must(!), see Killing Me Softly for the comedy, unintentional as it may be.
Worst of the Worst: #10, Witless Protection
Originally posted June 4, 2010:
Larry the Cable Guy's Witless Protection scored a full Blutarski on Rotten Tomatoes, 0%. 0%? Could no critic find anything redeeming about this wacky slapstick comedy? What's not to like about it? To wit:
Larry the Cable Guy's Witless Protection scored a full Blutarski on Rotten Tomatoes, 0%. 0%? Could no critic find anything redeeming about this wacky slapstick comedy? What's not to like about it? To wit:
- the movie celebrates stupidity, talking about how liberals are too wordy and having the main characters give their friend a funny look when he uses a word with three syllables;
- there are more fart jokes than any other kind of joke in the movie, until Larry the Cable Guy decides to just unleash one-liner after one-liner towards the end (example: "This is like Michael Jackson opening a day care center. It ain't right!");
- Yaphet Kotto co-stars and made me very sad that he would be in this kind of movie;
- Eric Roberts co-stars and has a Southern accent;
- Jenny McCarthy is in it;
- there are almost as many poop and vomit jokes as fart jokes;
- worst of all, the movie is explicitly racist.
Explicitly? Explicitly. Yaphet Kotto's character walks into a diner and asks for coffee, Jenny McCarthy gives him a look and replies, "Black?" Larry the Cable Guy makes a joke at one point implying that all Hispanics look like illegal immigrants. A scene involves Larry yelling at a Muslim motel owner, calling him "Omar" and "Muhammad," telling him he should go back to his training camp, accusing him of hating America, and using a wetnap to simulate wiping the counter for explosive residue. Add to that a superfluous scene where the good guys are watching a parade of troops and smiling about supporting them -- the only serious scene in the movie, mind you -- and you have this East Coast liberal elitist lumping everyone from Mississippi together as bigots.
Granted, I understand that Larry the Cable Guy doesn't in any way represent the majority of Southerners. Calling himself a redneck is probably as distasteful to many as his outward bigotry. His imbecility is probably as demeaning to the South as saying that homosexuals will struggle for equal rights as long as they are so exhibitionist in their pride parades or that African-Americans will always be looked down upon as long as gangsta rap exists. I understand that, but we all have some bias in us and mine gets perked up when I see ignorance being celebrated.
I have two more Larry the Cable Guy movies to go. Presumably, this is the worst of the three, based on rankings and reviews that I've read. I know Larry the Cable Guy is just an act. Dan Whitney grew up going to private school in Nebraska and only moved south (West Palm Beach, not like it was to Alabama) when he was 16. He tried doing regular comedy and then became famous when his "Larry" character got popular on various radio shows. In some ways, that exacerbates the problem. It makes this movie, with its racism that to me reflects more poorly on Larry and his culture than on the targets of the bigotry, into a sort of redneck minstrel show. Trying to avoid any mention of Sarah Palin or Rand Paul on a daily basis, I'm already fighting my bias against the red states. Witless Protection doesn't help.
Worst of the Worst: #51, Fascination
Originally posted May 31, 2010:
For comedy sake, I can't do better than the promotional synopsis on Rotten Tomatoes:
As described in the clumsily-worded plot summary, the main character falls for the daughter of the man who marries his mother. He falls in love with his sister. If you think I'm being too simple about it, the very last image in the movie is of a CD of a song, written by the main character, called something like "Fascination: The True Story of a Love Between a Brother And Sister".
No, I had never heard of this movie before I watched it. There are plenty of movies that I never heard of before I watched them that turned into some of my favorites. Battle Royale is one that comes to mind. The mere fact that something is unknown does not preclude it from being epic. Sure enough, Fascination, a movie nobody has ever heard of, is the dark horse candidate for the worst movie ever made. The. Worst. Movie. Ever. Made.
In its summary of reviews, Rotten Tomatoes itself says that this film is the epitome of a so-bad-it's-good movie. There were parts where I laughed. There were parts that I had fun yelling at the screen. At one point, the lead female throws something that shatters a lamp and cuts up the lead male's arm. There is blood running down his arm. They immediately start having sex. During the sex scene, you can see the blood running down his arm. I yelled, out loud, at the screen, "Don't you want to bandage that? Isn't it going to get infected?" It gets even worse at the end of the movie when the two characters are in a car accident that is caused by no particular reason. They crawl out, injured and bloody. They immediately start having sex. It's supposed to be an erotic thriller, but Cinemax laughs at this movie.
From top to bottom, this may be the worst-acted movie I've ever seen. The great Coven (as seen in American Movie) was better-acted. Three of the characters have British accents and the fourth is American. He, the American one, is actually from Australia. He does a pretty good job of hiding the accent, but has major problems with the word "secretary." The lead female is from Britain, but tries to work a little South African into her accent. The accent ends up being so funny that I, out loud, did an impersonation of each of her lines by the end of the movie. It gets worse from there, as the supporting actors are so bad that you expect them to look at the camera after delivering lines.
So the plot is ridiculous and the acting is historically bad. What else? This movie may have the worst soundtrack of any film I've ever seen. I watched it on Hulu and someone had commented that they turned the movie off after one minute because the opening song is so unlistenable. It's true. Imagine Savage Garden mixed with Sanjaya mixed with an iPod made out of monkey feces. Now imagine that sounding five hundred times worse. So bad, in fact, that I can't even find the music on YouTube for a link. If something is too bad to make it onto YouTube, we're into conspiracy-for-the-betterment-of-mankind territory.
I am confident that Battlefield Earth is the worst movie ever. Everybody's heard of that one. Some of the awfulness that goes into Travolta's pessimus opus comes from the fact that one would expect better work from something that was so hyped and involves so many big names. There are still surprises in this world, though. You haven't heard of Fascination? Forget I even wrote this and be happy about it.
For comedy sake, I can't do better than the promotional synopsis on Rotten Tomatoes:
A thriller riddled with paranoia and distrust, Klaus Menzel's FASCINATION is an acute study of a man stretched to breaking point by an egregious set of circumstances. Scott Doherty (Adam Garcia) is both stricken and confused when his mother, Maureen (Jacqueline Bisset), announces the tragic death of his father, who drowned during a curious boating mishap while the couple was on vacation. The incident seems highly irregular to Scott due to his father's considerable athletic prowess. But Scott's eyebrows are raised even further when his mother returns from the trip with a new beau on her arm in the shape of the dashing Oliver Vance (Stuart Wilson). As the newly entwined couple make astonishingly speedy wedding plans, Scott looks on in horror, although this is tempered somewhat by the eye-catching presence of Oliver's shapely daughter, Kelly (Alice Evans). Equally suspicious of the impending nuptials, Kelly joins Scott in an investigation into the foggy circumstances surrounding his father's demise. While acting on the supposition that Scott's deceased parent may have been murdered to allow his mother's new relationship to flourish, Kelly falls for Scott, and they embark on a passionate relationship together. But as Scott digs deeper, suspicions plague him, and his waning trust in Kelly disintegrates into a deep suspicion of who she is and what she wants from him. Stylistically tilting towards the dusky shadows of classic film noir, FASCINATION plays an exquisite guessing game with its viewers, who should take nothing for granted in this inventive and stimulating movie.
As described in the clumsily-worded plot summary, the main character falls for the daughter of the man who marries his mother. He falls in love with his sister. If you think I'm being too simple about it, the very last image in the movie is of a CD of a song, written by the main character, called something like "Fascination: The True Story of a Love Between a Brother And Sister".
No, I had never heard of this movie before I watched it. There are plenty of movies that I never heard of before I watched them that turned into some of my favorites. Battle Royale is one that comes to mind. The mere fact that something is unknown does not preclude it from being epic. Sure enough, Fascination, a movie nobody has ever heard of, is the dark horse candidate for the worst movie ever made. The. Worst. Movie. Ever. Made.
In its summary of reviews, Rotten Tomatoes itself says that this film is the epitome of a so-bad-it's-good movie. There were parts where I laughed. There were parts that I had fun yelling at the screen. At one point, the lead female throws something that shatters a lamp and cuts up the lead male's arm. There is blood running down his arm. They immediately start having sex. During the sex scene, you can see the blood running down his arm. I yelled, out loud, at the screen, "Don't you want to bandage that? Isn't it going to get infected?" It gets even worse at the end of the movie when the two characters are in a car accident that is caused by no particular reason. They crawl out, injured and bloody. They immediately start having sex. It's supposed to be an erotic thriller, but Cinemax laughs at this movie.
From top to bottom, this may be the worst-acted movie I've ever seen. The great Coven (as seen in American Movie) was better-acted. Three of the characters have British accents and the fourth is American. He, the American one, is actually from Australia. He does a pretty good job of hiding the accent, but has major problems with the word "secretary." The lead female is from Britain, but tries to work a little South African into her accent. The accent ends up being so funny that I, out loud, did an impersonation of each of her lines by the end of the movie. It gets worse from there, as the supporting actors are so bad that you expect them to look at the camera after delivering lines.
So the plot is ridiculous and the acting is historically bad. What else? This movie may have the worst soundtrack of any film I've ever seen. I watched it on Hulu and someone had commented that they turned the movie off after one minute because the opening song is so unlistenable. It's true. Imagine Savage Garden mixed with Sanjaya mixed with an iPod made out of monkey feces. Now imagine that sounding five hundred times worse. So bad, in fact, that I can't even find the music on YouTube for a link. If something is too bad to make it onto YouTube, we're into conspiracy-for-the-betterment-of-mankind territory.
I am confident that Battlefield Earth is the worst movie ever. Everybody's heard of that one. Some of the awfulness that goes into Travolta's pessimus opus comes from the fact that one would expect better work from something that was so hyped and involves so many big names. There are still surprises in this world, though. You haven't heard of Fascination? Forget I even wrote this and be happy about it.
Worst of the Worst: #42, House of the Dead
Originally posted May 27, 2010:
The Prince of Persia opens tomorrow and one of my friends asked me if I thought it would be any good. Lucky for them, I had done some research into the matter of movies based on video games when I watched a previous movie on this list. That research showed that the video game movie agreed upon by most people as the best is Mortal Kombat, hardly a classic. The realistic high end of hopes on The Prince of Persia is probably somewhere around the level of The Mummy. But what, pray tell, are the odds of a film breaking out of its genre to even that extreme?
So, there's my review of a movie I won't see as preface to my review of the great Uwe Boll's first video game movie, House of the Dead. That game was a first-person zombie shooter with little plot to speak of, so Boll made his movie as a prequel to the game. I'm glad I read the Wikipedia entry on what the game was so that the end of the movie made any kind of dramatic sense to me, but plot doesn't matter in a Boll film; it's all about the violence and the bad acting. There's plenty of both in this one. Various limbs getting chopped off, a bunch of actors we'd never see again, Clint Howard cheesing it up and eventually becoming a zombie, Jurgen Prochnow acting all Jurgen Prochnow-y.
Since this was an early Boll movie, he seems to have actually cared about what he was doing, evidenced by the artistic shooting style. That's not quite right. "Artistic." There you go. Boll's dearth of talent means that his attempt at art falls just a bit short. As in he tries to intersperse scenes from the video game (mind you that this game is not new, so the graphics are not that good) with the movie. He uses clips as cuts between scenes and, in the grand ten-minute long battle sequence, he actually has the people shooting the zombies and the images of exploding zombies melting in and out with similar shots from the game. Flawless editing. He also uses slow-motion excessively, including shots during the big battle sequence where the camera pans around each combatant like in that crappy video that Van Halen shot with Gary Cherone. (Holy crap, that song was awful.) My favorite scene in the movie, the one I watched three times, is when the main character is watching his friend be killed by zombies. As she screams, the camera zooms on his face and he looks pensive and then begins to have memories of their time together. Those memories come in the form of a montage of various shots from earlier in the movie, set to techno music. As the beat speeds up, the images fly by faster and faster. Unfortunately, it didn't give me a seizure and knock me out for the rest of the movie, but I thought and hoped that it might. You can actually see that sequence at the 3:53 mark of this amusing video (with an amusing spelling error in the title) that also features some of the other "artistic techniques" I discussed.
Unlike The Prince of Persia, House of the Dead was made on a low budget. Low budget, like Boll emptied out his pocket and made the movie for $2.17, lint, a button, and a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Rita's. With a bigger budget, the newest video game movie may be bad on an even grander scale! Maybe someday, someone will make an Oscar-caliber Crash Bandicoot film or Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo will each take home awards when they reprise their famous roles in Super Mario Galaxy: The Movie. Until then, we'll have Mortal Kombat and multiple Street Fighter movies and Uwe Boll. Thank heaven for small favors.
The Prince of Persia opens tomorrow and one of my friends asked me if I thought it would be any good. Lucky for them, I had done some research into the matter of movies based on video games when I watched a previous movie on this list. That research showed that the video game movie agreed upon by most people as the best is Mortal Kombat, hardly a classic. The realistic high end of hopes on The Prince of Persia is probably somewhere around the level of The Mummy. But what, pray tell, are the odds of a film breaking out of its genre to even that extreme?
So, there's my review of a movie I won't see as preface to my review of the great Uwe Boll's first video game movie, House of the Dead. That game was a first-person zombie shooter with little plot to speak of, so Boll made his movie as a prequel to the game. I'm glad I read the Wikipedia entry on what the game was so that the end of the movie made any kind of dramatic sense to me, but plot doesn't matter in a Boll film; it's all about the violence and the bad acting. There's plenty of both in this one. Various limbs getting chopped off, a bunch of actors we'd never see again, Clint Howard cheesing it up and eventually becoming a zombie, Jurgen Prochnow acting all Jurgen Prochnow-y.
Since this was an early Boll movie, he seems to have actually cared about what he was doing, evidenced by the artistic shooting style. That's not quite right. "Artistic." There you go. Boll's dearth of talent means that his attempt at art falls just a bit short. As in he tries to intersperse scenes from the video game (mind you that this game is not new, so the graphics are not that good) with the movie. He uses clips as cuts between scenes and, in the grand ten-minute long battle sequence, he actually has the people shooting the zombies and the images of exploding zombies melting in and out with similar shots from the game. Flawless editing. He also uses slow-motion excessively, including shots during the big battle sequence where the camera pans around each combatant like in that crappy video that Van Halen shot with Gary Cherone. (Holy crap, that song was awful.) My favorite scene in the movie, the one I watched three times, is when the main character is watching his friend be killed by zombies. As she screams, the camera zooms on his face and he looks pensive and then begins to have memories of their time together. Those memories come in the form of a montage of various shots from earlier in the movie, set to techno music. As the beat speeds up, the images fly by faster and faster. Unfortunately, it didn't give me a seizure and knock me out for the rest of the movie, but I thought and hoped that it might. You can actually see that sequence at the 3:53 mark of this amusing video (with an amusing spelling error in the title) that also features some of the other "artistic techniques" I discussed.
Unlike The Prince of Persia, House of the Dead was made on a low budget. Low budget, like Boll emptied out his pocket and made the movie for $2.17, lint, a button, and a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Rita's. With a bigger budget, the newest video game movie may be bad on an even grander scale! Maybe someday, someone will make an Oscar-caliber Crash Bandicoot film or Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo will each take home awards when they reprise their famous roles in Super Mario Galaxy: The Movie. Until then, we'll have Mortal Kombat and multiple Street Fighter movies and Uwe Boll. Thank heaven for small favors.
Worst of the Worst: #98, Cheaper By The Dozen 2
Originally posted May 20, 2010:
There are five sequels on this list of the 100 worst movies of the last decade and I've seen the first movie in three of those cases. Unfortunately, this was one of them. I was dragged to see Cheaper By The Dozen in the theater (not by my wife, to be fair to her) and hated every last second of it. So how excited was I to watch Cheaper By The Dozen 2? I checked back to my brilliant review of Big Momma's House 2 to see how I dealt with a movie I hated so much. Because, yes, I hated Cheaper By The Dozen 2. There are bad movies on this list that I find enjoyable, but this one was just not up my alley. Slapstick, slapstick, and more slapstick. Lots of Super Dave-ish shots of obvious stunt doubles of Steve Martin getting dragged through the water when trying to water ski or falling through weak railings into the water.
There are some good actors in the movie -- Bonnie Hunt has a nice scene, but only one -- but they are all wasted. The family with which Steve Martin's clan has a rival includes Taylor Lautner, who would go on to be a bigger star than anyone else in the film, but has Eugene Levy and Carmen Electra for parents. A weird dichotomy regarding Levy occurred to me while watching. He is great in the Christopher Guest movies, but if you are walking into a random movie and you see his name in the credits, the first thought is that you picked the wrong movie. How is it possible that he could be so good and so bad from picture to picture? As for Electra? I talked about her earlier in regards to the ____ Movie franchise and Jenny McCarthy's awful Dirty Love. Electra is in six of the one hundred movies and I've now seen all of them. Which is great, but I've yet to see any of the three that feature Larry The Cable Guy, who is probably dumber and certainly less pleasing to look at.
There are five sequels on this list of the 100 worst movies of the last decade and I've seen the first movie in three of those cases. Unfortunately, this was one of them. I was dragged to see Cheaper By The Dozen in the theater (not by my wife, to be fair to her) and hated every last second of it. So how excited was I to watch Cheaper By The Dozen 2? I checked back to my brilliant review of Big Momma's House 2 to see how I dealt with a movie I hated so much. Because, yes, I hated Cheaper By The Dozen 2. There are bad movies on this list that I find enjoyable, but this one was just not up my alley. Slapstick, slapstick, and more slapstick. Lots of Super Dave-ish shots of obvious stunt doubles of Steve Martin getting dragged through the water when trying to water ski or falling through weak railings into the water.
There are some good actors in the movie -- Bonnie Hunt has a nice scene, but only one -- but they are all wasted. The family with which Steve Martin's clan has a rival includes Taylor Lautner, who would go on to be a bigger star than anyone else in the film, but has Eugene Levy and Carmen Electra for parents. A weird dichotomy regarding Levy occurred to me while watching. He is great in the Christopher Guest movies, but if you are walking into a random movie and you see his name in the credits, the first thought is that you picked the wrong movie. How is it possible that he could be so good and so bad from picture to picture? As for Electra? I talked about her earlier in regards to the ____ Movie franchise and Jenny McCarthy's awful Dirty Love. Electra is in six of the one hundred movies and I've now seen all of them. Which is great, but I've yet to see any of the three that feature Larry The Cable Guy, who is probably dumber and certainly less pleasing to look at.
Worst of the Worst: #65, Swept Away
Originally posted May 16, 2010:
Who's the worst-acting musician? I've had reason to ponder this lately for a couple of reasons. When I went to see The Losers, I knew the movie was going to be weak during the previews because there were trailers for one movie that starred Bow Wow and one that starred both T.I. and Chris Brown. Of course, Glitter was on this list of the worst movies of the last decade. I also finally watched Precious the other night and that had Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, both who did wonderful jobs. So who is the worst-acting musician? Off-hand, a few that occur to me are T.I. in American Gangster, Eminem in The Wash (he redeemed himself later in 8 Mile), and I've never seen From Justin to Kelly but that can't be good. It's at this point, for comic relief, that I have to insert Mase's acting job in the "Mo Money Mo Problems" video. I bring this up because I think, when you factor the greater implications of this movie, Madonna deserves more hate than any musician I can remember in the #65 film, Swept Away.
In a good premise, for which this film deserves no praise because it is a remake of a 1974 Italian film, Madonna plays a wealthy woman who goes on a private cruise from Greece to Italy with her husband and two other couples. She berates the boat's crew, particularly the fisherman, calling him names and constantly yelling at him. At some point, in an especially unbelievable turn of events, she and the fisherman end up stranded on a deserted island. Now that she is dependent on him for food, he turns the tables, essentially turning her into a slave. Once her will is broken (hello, disturbing rape fantasy), they fall madly in love and he wonders if she will still love him once they are rescued and back in regular life. Madonna deserves hate in this role because of her bad acting, for one. She starred in this movie after she had already begun to affect her fake British accent. With every "can't" that she turned into "cahn't" in this film, I kept wanting to yell at the screen, "You're from freaking Michigan!" She plays a character that is supposed to be hated and I hated her, all right, but when she's supposed to be more sympathetic later in the movie, I still hated her. More than the acting, though, Madonna deserves hate because she single-handedly ruined (or, at best, derailed) a promising career.
With this film, Guy Ritchie is the best director to appear on this list. When he made this in 2002, he had only made two feature films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Both are among the great post-Pulp Fiction/ post-Clerks independent films of the late-'90s/ early-'00s. Ritchie showed a talent for witty scripts and quick-moving plots with plenty of twists. And then he wrote and directed Swept Away which is neither witty, quick-moving, nor very interesting. I'm going to assume that Madonna, then married to Ritchie, led him astray in making a starring vehicle for her. You can see his touch towards the beginning of the movie in some quick-cutting scenes where the boat's crew laughs about the rich Americans, but the second two-thirds of the movie are very, very unlike Ritchie's style. It's hard to imagine that he would have made this film without her influence. Yes, I have no evidence to back up this claim other than a few press videos where he looked hen-pecked, but Lock, Stock and Snatch were so good. And after Swept Away? He's made a couple of inconsequential films and finally got back in the spotlight with last year's Sherlock Holmes.
In Swept Away, dealing with a bad actress (by my count, there are three actors in the movie that are light years ahead of her, as Bruce Greenwood, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Elizabeth Banks, all have smaller roles), Ritchie goes out of his way to put his wife in a good light. She's famous for singing and dancing? Okay, we'll make some scenes where she can either sing or lip-sync and dance in fancy clothes as the fisherman has a fantasy about her. In juggling this whole mess, Ritchie's screenplay entirely misses the political and social points of the original film. In the end, I didn't think or learn one thing about gender or class roles. None of it makes a difference by the closing credits. It ends up as a way to mock rich Americans, throw in the only rape-to-consensual-sex scene since James Bond and Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and generally confuse the audience as to whether it's supposed to be a comedy or we're just laughing because it's so bad.
There have been musicians who have done well at acting. Meat Loaf in Fight Club, Eminem in 8 Mile, Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, and more. I don't want everyone to keep their day jobs, but I'll have a certain amount of trepidation whenever someone decides to switch careers. I mean, have you heard Scarlett Johansson's singing?
Okay, I'll be fair here before we finish. Ritchie uses a snippet of some bad Madonna song during the opening credits, but he has an inspired music choice later in the movie. As the two shipwrecked characters fall in love towards the end, a montage is graced with a much more palatable song that can't help but make you enjoy the moment a little bit. So I'll wrap this up the same way with that song, "Fade Into You" by Mazzy Star:
Who's the worst-acting musician? I've had reason to ponder this lately for a couple of reasons. When I went to see The Losers, I knew the movie was going to be weak during the previews because there were trailers for one movie that starred Bow Wow and one that starred both T.I. and Chris Brown. Of course, Glitter was on this list of the worst movies of the last decade. I also finally watched Precious the other night and that had Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, both who did wonderful jobs. So who is the worst-acting musician? Off-hand, a few that occur to me are T.I. in American Gangster, Eminem in The Wash (he redeemed himself later in 8 Mile), and I've never seen From Justin to Kelly but that can't be good. It's at this point, for comic relief, that I have to insert Mase's acting job in the "Mo Money Mo Problems" video. I bring this up because I think, when you factor the greater implications of this movie, Madonna deserves more hate than any musician I can remember in the #65 film, Swept Away.
In a good premise, for which this film deserves no praise because it is a remake of a 1974 Italian film, Madonna plays a wealthy woman who goes on a private cruise from Greece to Italy with her husband and two other couples. She berates the boat's crew, particularly the fisherman, calling him names and constantly yelling at him. At some point, in an especially unbelievable turn of events, she and the fisherman end up stranded on a deserted island. Now that she is dependent on him for food, he turns the tables, essentially turning her into a slave. Once her will is broken (hello, disturbing rape fantasy), they fall madly in love and he wonders if she will still love him once they are rescued and back in regular life. Madonna deserves hate in this role because of her bad acting, for one. She starred in this movie after she had already begun to affect her fake British accent. With every "can't" that she turned into "cahn't" in this film, I kept wanting to yell at the screen, "You're from freaking Michigan!" She plays a character that is supposed to be hated and I hated her, all right, but when she's supposed to be more sympathetic later in the movie, I still hated her. More than the acting, though, Madonna deserves hate because she single-handedly ruined (or, at best, derailed) a promising career.
With this film, Guy Ritchie is the best director to appear on this list. When he made this in 2002, he had only made two feature films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Both are among the great post-Pulp Fiction/ post-Clerks independent films of the late-'90s/ early-'00s. Ritchie showed a talent for witty scripts and quick-moving plots with plenty of twists. And then he wrote and directed Swept Away which is neither witty, quick-moving, nor very interesting. I'm going to assume that Madonna, then married to Ritchie, led him astray in making a starring vehicle for her. You can see his touch towards the beginning of the movie in some quick-cutting scenes where the boat's crew laughs about the rich Americans, but the second two-thirds of the movie are very, very unlike Ritchie's style. It's hard to imagine that he would have made this film without her influence. Yes, I have no evidence to back up this claim other than a few press videos where he looked hen-pecked, but Lock, Stock and Snatch were so good. And after Swept Away? He's made a couple of inconsequential films and finally got back in the spotlight with last year's Sherlock Holmes.
In Swept Away, dealing with a bad actress (by my count, there are three actors in the movie that are light years ahead of her, as Bruce Greenwood, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Elizabeth Banks, all have smaller roles), Ritchie goes out of his way to put his wife in a good light. She's famous for singing and dancing? Okay, we'll make some scenes where she can either sing or lip-sync and dance in fancy clothes as the fisherman has a fantasy about her. In juggling this whole mess, Ritchie's screenplay entirely misses the political and social points of the original film. In the end, I didn't think or learn one thing about gender or class roles. None of it makes a difference by the closing credits. It ends up as a way to mock rich Americans, throw in the only rape-to-consensual-sex scene since James Bond and Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and generally confuse the audience as to whether it's supposed to be a comedy or we're just laughing because it's so bad.
There have been musicians who have done well at acting. Meat Loaf in Fight Club, Eminem in 8 Mile, Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, and more. I don't want everyone to keep their day jobs, but I'll have a certain amount of trepidation whenever someone decides to switch careers. I mean, have you heard Scarlett Johansson's singing?
Okay, I'll be fair here before we finish. Ritchie uses a snippet of some bad Madonna song during the opening credits, but he has an inspired music choice later in the movie. As the two shipwrecked characters fall in love towards the end, a montage is graced with a much more palatable song that can't help but make you enjoy the moment a little bit. So I'll wrap this up the same way with that song, "Fade Into You" by Mazzy Star:
Worst of the Worst: #71, College
Originally posted May 9, 2010:
In which we wonder whether the bigger tip-off that this movie will not be good is the originality of the title or the fact that Verne Troyer plays himself.
I still watch reruns of Saved by the Bell, but when I was younger I used to watch a lot of the live action kid/teen shows. I watched the crap on "TNBC" like California Dreams, Hang Time, and City Guys. I'd spend some time with "TGIF": Full House, Family Matters. Even earlier, I would come home from school and watch You Can't Do That on Television, Hey Dude, and maybe a little Kids Incorporated, on Nickelodeon. In time, I got older -- I didn't say matured -- and refined my taste as it pertains to tasteless adult comedies. I'm not referring to Curb Your Enthusiasm adult, I'm talking about things like Animal House, Anchorman, There's Something About Mary, and Superbad. I see the shows that the kids watch nowadays on Nickelodeon like Hannah Montana, That's So Raven, and Drake & Josh, and I've wondered how these kids tastes will move towards the profane. If College, starring Drake Bell from Drake & Josh, is any portent, I'm frightened for kids' intelligence.
There's a high school buddy movie. It deals with a trio of high school losers. One is a totally average guy who seems to be the leader. One is an overweight foul-mouthed gentleman who talks a big game but is horribly insecure. One is a skinny nerd who is the butt of the other two guys' jokes. The three buddies decide that they're going to let loose, get drunk or maybe high, meet loose women, and go somewhere where nobody knows them and they can escape their stereotypical mediocrity. Superbad, right? Shoot, maybe it's even Dazed and Confused. No, this is the plot of College, which came out in 2008. And people thought Superbad, which came out in 2007, was derivative.
And the comparisons end there. The totally average guy is played by the aforementioned Nickelodeon star, who was 22 when the movie was made and looks every day of 28. Even dropping the f-bomb, Bell plays the character with as much Jonas Brothers panache as he can muster. The overweight guy, as opposed to the quick-witted Jonas Hill, is so stupid and unlikeable that they may as well had one of the "O'Doyle Rules!" kids from Billy Madison in the role. The skinny nerd is played by Kevin Covais.
Wait. What? Kevin Covais. Yes, that Kevin Covais.
I could stop there, but why? Because the high school students look like they are in their mid-twenties, the college students have to look like they are approximately 42. There have to be multiple poop jokes, even more binge-drinking jokes, and main female characters that are written with no personality. Remember in Animal House when we saw the Delta guys prepare for the parade stunt at the end? Preparation is a waste of important story time! In College, they show the guys putting together a prank that would take days to prepare in no more than ten minutes. And they don't even wake any of the bad guys up! How cool is that?! And so on and so on with the poop and the vomit and the masturbation jokes and the homophobic jokes and the comic male nudity and the straight-out-of-Penthouse-Forum sex scenes.
Having never seen any of the straight-to-DVD American Pie Presents movies, the worst "adult" college movie I've seen of late is Approved, with Justin Long and Jonah Hill. It had its moments, but it was very stupid. I like it more now. College can't hold Approved's beer-soaked, head-worn jock. College tries to be Superbad, but it only succeeds in being super bad.
In which we wonder whether the bigger tip-off that this movie will not be good is the originality of the title or the fact that Verne Troyer plays himself.
I still watch reruns of Saved by the Bell, but when I was younger I used to watch a lot of the live action kid/teen shows. I watched the crap on "TNBC" like California Dreams, Hang Time, and City Guys. I'd spend some time with "TGIF": Full House, Family Matters. Even earlier, I would come home from school and watch You Can't Do That on Television, Hey Dude, and maybe a little Kids Incorporated, on Nickelodeon. In time, I got older -- I didn't say matured -- and refined my taste as it pertains to tasteless adult comedies. I'm not referring to Curb Your Enthusiasm adult, I'm talking about things like Animal House, Anchorman, There's Something About Mary, and Superbad. I see the shows that the kids watch nowadays on Nickelodeon like Hannah Montana, That's So Raven, and Drake & Josh, and I've wondered how these kids tastes will move towards the profane. If College, starring Drake Bell from Drake & Josh, is any portent, I'm frightened for kids' intelligence.
There's a high school buddy movie. It deals with a trio of high school losers. One is a totally average guy who seems to be the leader. One is an overweight foul-mouthed gentleman who talks a big game but is horribly insecure. One is a skinny nerd who is the butt of the other two guys' jokes. The three buddies decide that they're going to let loose, get drunk or maybe high, meet loose women, and go somewhere where nobody knows them and they can escape their stereotypical mediocrity. Superbad, right? Shoot, maybe it's even Dazed and Confused. No, this is the plot of College, which came out in 2008. And people thought Superbad, which came out in 2007, was derivative.
And the comparisons end there. The totally average guy is played by the aforementioned Nickelodeon star, who was 22 when the movie was made and looks every day of 28. Even dropping the f-bomb, Bell plays the character with as much Jonas Brothers panache as he can muster. The overweight guy, as opposed to the quick-witted Jonas Hill, is so stupid and unlikeable that they may as well had one of the "O'Doyle Rules!" kids from Billy Madison in the role. The skinny nerd is played by Kevin Covais.
Wait. What? Kevin Covais. Yes, that Kevin Covais.
I could stop there, but why? Because the high school students look like they are in their mid-twenties, the college students have to look like they are approximately 42. There have to be multiple poop jokes, even more binge-drinking jokes, and main female characters that are written with no personality. Remember in Animal House when we saw the Delta guys prepare for the parade stunt at the end? Preparation is a waste of important story time! In College, they show the guys putting together a prank that would take days to prepare in no more than ten minutes. And they don't even wake any of the bad guys up! How cool is that?! And so on and so on with the poop and the vomit and the masturbation jokes and the homophobic jokes and the comic male nudity and the straight-out-of-Penthouse-Forum sex scenes.
Having never seen any of the straight-to-DVD American Pie Presents movies, the worst "adult" college movie I've seen of late is Approved, with Justin Long and Jonah Hill. It had its moments, but it was very stupid. I like it more now. College can't hold Approved's beer-soaked, head-worn jock. College tries to be Superbad, but it only succeeds in being super bad.
Worst of the Worst: #30, Fear Dot Com
Originally posted April 30, 2010:
I don't believe in guilty pleasures because of a piece that Chuck Klosterman wrote in Esquire and re-printed in one of his books. The piece ends with this sentence: "These things that give us pleasure, they are guilty of nothing. And neither are we." For instance, some might describe my watching of these movies as a guilty pleasure, but I gladly accept -- and trumpet -- that I'm doing it. So, I can't knock anyone for liking anything. That's not to say that I understand everyone's taste. I don't like most romantic comedies, but I suppose I'm not "wired" to get them. I don't particularly like horror movies and I really, really don't get the love for movies like Saw and Hostel. I watched Saw when it came out on cable some years ago to see what all of the fuss was about. I braced myself for what I thought would be scary and ended up alternating between laughter and yawns. So you can imagine how I might feel about a movie that tried to be Saw and failed.
Fear Dot Com tries to use shocking imagery like Saw, but couldn't quite get all the way there. Even more, it is a nearly straight rip-off of an actually good recent horror movie, The Ring. I can't quite make fun of this movie without spoilers, but I suppose nobody will complain. There is a detective who used to chase some serial killer, but could never catch him. Now, people are turning up dead from a stroke exactly forty-eight hours after they visit the site at www.feardotcom.com. Seriously, that's the actual address of the site. When they visit the site (all through a browser that doesn't look like any web browser that has ever been invented, but rather through something like you might find as an interface for some old role-playing game), they see disturbing images and then they hallucinate the thing that scares them most until they eventually die of fear. Note: none of the death-by-fear scenes are scary in any way. The detective assumes it's the work of the serial killer, so he and an investigator from the Department of Health (not sure why she is working on this case once disease is ruled out at the beginning of the movie) are trying to end the hunt once and for all. The investigator becomes especially interested when her boss dies from the site and eventually figures out that the website actually is unleashing the psychic energy of the serial killer's first victim. She realizes that the only way to stop the site from killing is to get the serial killer to look at it so he dies from fear (note: that scene also not scary and actually quite indecipherable). This is pretty much the same plot as The Ring with only slight differences.
The writer spent so much work on the details of the plot that they forgot to include any reality to balance the unoriginal supernatural story. The cops routinely move evidence as soon as they stumble on a crime scene, including handling a newly-found dead body with their bare hands. The Department of Health is apparently in a dirty building where the staff is allowed to chain-smoke. The director helps out by leaving every scene so dark that you often can't actually tell what's going on. It makes the lighting on C.S.I.: look like the lighting in REM's "Shiny Happy People" video.
And, of course, the writer and director tried to bring a lot of disturbing gore, but they seemed to only be willing to go so far and stopped short of anything memorable. I don't like these movies that are only about showing people doing horrible things to other people, but I suppose I can't complain about other people wanting to see it. It's their right to watch crap. I just hope it's better-done crap than Fear Dot Com.
I don't believe in guilty pleasures because of a piece that Chuck Klosterman wrote in Esquire and re-printed in one of his books. The piece ends with this sentence: "These things that give us pleasure, they are guilty of nothing. And neither are we." For instance, some might describe my watching of these movies as a guilty pleasure, but I gladly accept -- and trumpet -- that I'm doing it. So, I can't knock anyone for liking anything. That's not to say that I understand everyone's taste. I don't like most romantic comedies, but I suppose I'm not "wired" to get them. I don't particularly like horror movies and I really, really don't get the love for movies like Saw and Hostel. I watched Saw when it came out on cable some years ago to see what all of the fuss was about. I braced myself for what I thought would be scary and ended up alternating between laughter and yawns. So you can imagine how I might feel about a movie that tried to be Saw and failed.
Fear Dot Com tries to use shocking imagery like Saw, but couldn't quite get all the way there. Even more, it is a nearly straight rip-off of an actually good recent horror movie, The Ring. I can't quite make fun of this movie without spoilers, but I suppose nobody will complain. There is a detective who used to chase some serial killer, but could never catch him. Now, people are turning up dead from a stroke exactly forty-eight hours after they visit the site at www.feardotcom.com. Seriously, that's the actual address of the site. When they visit the site (all through a browser that doesn't look like any web browser that has ever been invented, but rather through something like you might find as an interface for some old role-playing game), they see disturbing images and then they hallucinate the thing that scares them most until they eventually die of fear. Note: none of the death-by-fear scenes are scary in any way. The detective assumes it's the work of the serial killer, so he and an investigator from the Department of Health (not sure why she is working on this case once disease is ruled out at the beginning of the movie) are trying to end the hunt once and for all. The investigator becomes especially interested when her boss dies from the site and eventually figures out that the website actually is unleashing the psychic energy of the serial killer's first victim. She realizes that the only way to stop the site from killing is to get the serial killer to look at it so he dies from fear (note: that scene also not scary and actually quite indecipherable). This is pretty much the same plot as The Ring with only slight differences.
The writer spent so much work on the details of the plot that they forgot to include any reality to balance the unoriginal supernatural story. The cops routinely move evidence as soon as they stumble on a crime scene, including handling a newly-found dead body with their bare hands. The Department of Health is apparently in a dirty building where the staff is allowed to chain-smoke. The director helps out by leaving every scene so dark that you often can't actually tell what's going on. It makes the lighting on C.S.I.: look like the lighting in REM's "Shiny Happy People" video.
And, of course, the writer and director tried to bring a lot of disturbing gore, but they seemed to only be willing to go so far and stopped short of anything memorable. I don't like these movies that are only about showing people doing horrible things to other people, but I suppose I can't complain about other people wanting to see it. It's their right to watch crap. I just hope it's better-done crap than Fear Dot Com.
Worst of the Worst: #14, Beyond A Reasonable Doubt
Originally posted April 25, 2010:
Every type of movie is represented in this list of the 100 worst movies of the last decade. There are dramas (Broken Bridges), period pieces (Pavilion of Women), gross-out comedies (Dirty Love), horror films (Thr3e), romantic comedies (Down to You), action films (Bloodrayne), sci-fi movies (Battlefield Earth), ___ Movie movies (thankfully done), Larry the Cable Guy movies (unfortunately haven't started on these yet). Beyond assuming the movie I'm about to watch is awful, I go into each with a preconcieved notion about the genre. For instance, I don't particularly like period pieces, so I was particularly dreading Pavilion of Women. Tonight, I watched my first movie from the list that fell under the category of courtroom drama and that brought with it a different bias.
I love courtroom dramas. I don't know if it's the inherent tension of the cross-examination or the idea that what is at stake is always immediately clear. A Few Good Men is in my top three favorite movies of all time and I go crazy for everything from classics (12 Angry Men, To Kill A Mockingbird) to even little court scenes at the end of movies (The Untouchables, Pleasantville). So I will be biased towards a courtroom drama and my review of this movie should be seasoned by that grain of salt.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a movie from July of last year, starring Jesse Metcalfe (some kid from Desperate Housewives), Amber Tamblyn (some kid from Joan of Arcadia), and Michael Douglas. I was surprised to learn that this was a remake of a classic 1950s film noir thriller, because the premise is ridiculous. In Shreveport, the DA (Douglas) is winning murder case after murder case and about to run for governor. A reporter (Metcalfe) is almost positive that these convictions are being won with planted evidence. In order to expose the DA, the reporter finds a random murder and frames himself so that the DA will plant evidence and the reporter can prove that everything is a fake. Meanwhile, he's dating someone who works for the DA and she has to decide whether he really committed the murder or not. To add to the intrigue, there are three major plot twists: one which is merely head-scratching, one which is pure deus ex machina, and one which is obvious from approximately the first minute of the movie.
Even though the movie takes place in Louisiana, not one character talks with even the slightest Louisiana accent, with the exception of a detective played by Orlando Jones, who acts so much better than everyone else in his few scenes that he seems out of place in the movie. To be sure, the acting is bad. The two main actors are too young to take seriously in their roles and Douglas displays a gravitas which is inappropriate for the rest of the film. The side actors, those with only one or two lines, really stand out for their failure to seem like they're doing anything except reading cue cards.
The real loser here is the script. There's a great moment in one of this past Thursday's 30 Rock episodes when Liz rolls her eyes so dramatically that they get stuck. That's how I felt with some of the back-and-forth dialogue here. The characters almost stumble over each over to deliver their bad lines, leading to conversations that involve a rapid succession of crap, as if someone had built a machine gun that fired cheese and had opened up on the audience. I love great last lines, such as in Casablanca or Chinatown, and Hollywood needs to create a special award for the last line from this movie (actual quote): "I don't have anything more to say to you. [pause] Oh wait, I thought of something. [Expletive deleted] you."
Having said all that (!), the movie is still a courtroom drama and I still get a little geeked up for the courtroom scenes, even if everything about them is weak. No doubt, it's a bad movie. I thought at one point that it wasn't so bad, only to realize that much, much less time had passed than I had thought. In addition, the worst part of the movie is the last third, so it builds you up to a point of relative pleasant surprise, only to make you crash harder. Granted that I understand that the movie's position on the list is based on its Rotten Tomatoes score and not some subjective ranking, but is it the 14th worst movie of the last ten years? Maybe it's my bias, but there's no way.
Every type of movie is represented in this list of the 100 worst movies of the last decade. There are dramas (Broken Bridges), period pieces (Pavilion of Women), gross-out comedies (Dirty Love), horror films (Thr3e), romantic comedies (Down to You), action films (Bloodrayne), sci-fi movies (Battlefield Earth), ___ Movie movies (thankfully done), Larry the Cable Guy movies (unfortunately haven't started on these yet). Beyond assuming the movie I'm about to watch is awful, I go into each with a preconcieved notion about the genre. For instance, I don't particularly like period pieces, so I was particularly dreading Pavilion of Women. Tonight, I watched my first movie from the list that fell under the category of courtroom drama and that brought with it a different bias.
I love courtroom dramas. I don't know if it's the inherent tension of the cross-examination or the idea that what is at stake is always immediately clear. A Few Good Men is in my top three favorite movies of all time and I go crazy for everything from classics (12 Angry Men, To Kill A Mockingbird) to even little court scenes at the end of movies (The Untouchables, Pleasantville). So I will be biased towards a courtroom drama and my review of this movie should be seasoned by that grain of salt.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a movie from July of last year, starring Jesse Metcalfe (some kid from Desperate Housewives), Amber Tamblyn (some kid from Joan of Arcadia), and Michael Douglas. I was surprised to learn that this was a remake of a classic 1950s film noir thriller, because the premise is ridiculous. In Shreveport, the DA (Douglas) is winning murder case after murder case and about to run for governor. A reporter (Metcalfe) is almost positive that these convictions are being won with planted evidence. In order to expose the DA, the reporter finds a random murder and frames himself so that the DA will plant evidence and the reporter can prove that everything is a fake. Meanwhile, he's dating someone who works for the DA and she has to decide whether he really committed the murder or not. To add to the intrigue, there are three major plot twists: one which is merely head-scratching, one which is pure deus ex machina, and one which is obvious from approximately the first minute of the movie.
Even though the movie takes place in Louisiana, not one character talks with even the slightest Louisiana accent, with the exception of a detective played by Orlando Jones, who acts so much better than everyone else in his few scenes that he seems out of place in the movie. To be sure, the acting is bad. The two main actors are too young to take seriously in their roles and Douglas displays a gravitas which is inappropriate for the rest of the film. The side actors, those with only one or two lines, really stand out for their failure to seem like they're doing anything except reading cue cards.
The real loser here is the script. There's a great moment in one of this past Thursday's 30 Rock episodes when Liz rolls her eyes so dramatically that they get stuck. That's how I felt with some of the back-and-forth dialogue here. The characters almost stumble over each over to deliver their bad lines, leading to conversations that involve a rapid succession of crap, as if someone had built a machine gun that fired cheese and had opened up on the audience. I love great last lines, such as in Casablanca or Chinatown, and Hollywood needs to create a special award for the last line from this movie (actual quote): "I don't have anything more to say to you. [pause] Oh wait, I thought of something. [Expletive deleted] you."
Having said all that (!), the movie is still a courtroom drama and I still get a little geeked up for the courtroom scenes, even if everything about them is weak. No doubt, it's a bad movie. I thought at one point that it wasn't so bad, only to realize that much, much less time had passed than I had thought. In addition, the worst part of the movie is the last third, so it builds you up to a point of relative pleasant surprise, only to make you crash harder. Granted that I understand that the movie's position on the list is based on its Rotten Tomatoes score and not some subjective ranking, but is it the 14th worst movie of the last ten years? Maybe it's my bias, but there's no way.
Worst of the Worst: #9, Redline
Originally posted April 18, 2010:
About a year ago, I happened to have a couple of hours to kill on my own and, looking for something that would require little to no thought, I decided to go see Fast and Furious. I had seen the first movie in that series and knew what to expect. After seeing the newer one, I remarked to someone that it was essentially "car porn." There were extensive scenes of racing as the camera lovingly hugged the curves of the cars, interspersed with short scenes of mediocre acting. I enjoyed myself because that's pretty much what I was seeking. If you're looking for porn and you get porn, you're going to like the porn. Unless you wind up finding some sick fetish film. Enter Daniel Sadek and Redline.
Meet Daniel Sadek and put yourself in his shoes for a second. Sadek was born in Lebanon and came to California, where his acute business sense helped him make money quickly, initially by buying some 7-11 stores. As the housing market boomed, he decided to start a company that took advantage of the consumer hunger for real estate by selling subprime mortgages. Sadek got rich. Millions and millions of dollars rich. He loved cars and used his money to start a large collection of exotic cars (e.g., the $1.1 million Ferrari Enzo that Eddie Griffin famously crashed when doing promotional work for Redline). Sadek became famous for gambling huge amounts at Vegas casinos and he parlayed his money into dating a ridiculously hot soap opera star. He was on top of the world.
So what do you do when you're on top of the world? You assume that everyone wants to be you. Why not? You have everything! So Sadek decided to finance a movie that would have everything that he liked, because if everyone wanted to be him than they would like that stuff, too. Fast, exotic cars. Karate. Loud rap music. Sexy shots of hot women. Millionaires throwing around money like its water, gambling on cars and playing poker with the likes of David Williams and Gus Hansen. Name-checking himself by having a wealthy character talking to him on the phone near the end. Shoot, we can even add some gratuitous violence against women because, hey, we're a man's man, right? And our hot girlfriend, regardless of any talent, can take the leading role. Put this all together and you have Redline, the fetish video of car porn. Very short scenes of a miserable script and really, really awful acting (I did say that Eddie Griffin was in it) that are meaningless next to the orgy of everything a young, obscenely rich man with no reason to control his impulses would like. You can watch this whole scene, but I want you to specifically watch from the 2:21 mark to the end:
I mean, that's horrible. And, even with Sadek's apparently enormous ego, people saw right through it. Sadek raised $26 million for the film and it made $6.8 million domestically, falling out of the theaters quickly. Things went south from there. As the housing market collapsed, the government cracked down on subprime lenders like Sadek. He lost everything. He's broke; he's under investigation from the government; he has ruined people's lives with his predatory lending and, as such, is vilified by numerous consumer groups; he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to Vegas casinos where he borrowed money. Maybe his downfall didn't start with Redline, but the movie is people's exhibit number one in the effort to prove that the kind of lifestyle Sadek was leading is bound to lead to ruin.
I'm going to have to create new levels of bad as I watch each of these movies on the list of Rotten Tomatoes' worst 100 films of the last decade. I had ranked The Master of Disguise (#18) as the worst movie I had ever seen, but it might be better to call it the least entertaining. Battlefield Earth (#27) is probably the worst-made. Redline inhabits a whole new level of bad. It's a movie that truly never should have been made.
About a year ago, I happened to have a couple of hours to kill on my own and, looking for something that would require little to no thought, I decided to go see Fast and Furious. I had seen the first movie in that series and knew what to expect. After seeing the newer one, I remarked to someone that it was essentially "car porn." There were extensive scenes of racing as the camera lovingly hugged the curves of the cars, interspersed with short scenes of mediocre acting. I enjoyed myself because that's pretty much what I was seeking. If you're looking for porn and you get porn, you're going to like the porn. Unless you wind up finding some sick fetish film. Enter Daniel Sadek and Redline.
Meet Daniel Sadek and put yourself in his shoes for a second. Sadek was born in Lebanon and came to California, where his acute business sense helped him make money quickly, initially by buying some 7-11 stores. As the housing market boomed, he decided to start a company that took advantage of the consumer hunger for real estate by selling subprime mortgages. Sadek got rich. Millions and millions of dollars rich. He loved cars and used his money to start a large collection of exotic cars (e.g., the $1.1 million Ferrari Enzo that Eddie Griffin famously crashed when doing promotional work for Redline). Sadek became famous for gambling huge amounts at Vegas casinos and he parlayed his money into dating a ridiculously hot soap opera star. He was on top of the world.
So what do you do when you're on top of the world? You assume that everyone wants to be you. Why not? You have everything! So Sadek decided to finance a movie that would have everything that he liked, because if everyone wanted to be him than they would like that stuff, too. Fast, exotic cars. Karate. Loud rap music. Sexy shots of hot women. Millionaires throwing around money like its water, gambling on cars and playing poker with the likes of David Williams and Gus Hansen. Name-checking himself by having a wealthy character talking to him on the phone near the end. Shoot, we can even add some gratuitous violence against women because, hey, we're a man's man, right? And our hot girlfriend, regardless of any talent, can take the leading role. Put this all together and you have Redline, the fetish video of car porn. Very short scenes of a miserable script and really, really awful acting (I did say that Eddie Griffin was in it) that are meaningless next to the orgy of everything a young, obscenely rich man with no reason to control his impulses would like. You can watch this whole scene, but I want you to specifically watch from the 2:21 mark to the end:
I mean, that's horrible. And, even with Sadek's apparently enormous ego, people saw right through it. Sadek raised $26 million for the film and it made $6.8 million domestically, falling out of the theaters quickly. Things went south from there. As the housing market collapsed, the government cracked down on subprime lenders like Sadek. He lost everything. He's broke; he's under investigation from the government; he has ruined people's lives with his predatory lending and, as such, is vilified by numerous consumer groups; he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to Vegas casinos where he borrowed money. Maybe his downfall didn't start with Redline, but the movie is people's exhibit number one in the effort to prove that the kind of lifestyle Sadek was leading is bound to lead to ruin.
I'm going to have to create new levels of bad as I watch each of these movies on the list of Rotten Tomatoes' worst 100 films of the last decade. I had ranked The Master of Disguise (#18) as the worst movie I had ever seen, but it might be better to call it the least entertaining. Battlefield Earth (#27) is probably the worst-made. Redline inhabits a whole new level of bad. It's a movie that truly never should have been made.
Worst of the Worst: #99, Glitter
Originally posted April 7, 2010:
When I first studied this list of Rotten Tomatoes' 100 worst movies of the last decade, three movies towards the end of the list jumped out at me for their ratings. Gigli (#73), The Adventures of Pluto Nash (#79), and Glitter (#99) are all more famous for being bad than the average movie on this list. One would think, considering the hoopla that went around the critics' bashing of the movies, that they would be a bit higher (lower?) in the rankings. For Glitter to only barely be on the list surprised me. The consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says that the film is bad (a 7% rating), but that it's not bad enough to warrant so-bad-it's-good status. I find that sentiment amusing since the movies I've seen at the very top (bottom?) of the list have been bad beyond any possible sense of sick enjoyment. I hit play on the remote, wondering if it would be funny-bad or just lame.
It's just lame. I suppose there are parts that could be laughed at, but only if you're really going out of your way to find something to laugh at. There is also one sequence that is simply baffling, but not really funny in any way. We'll get to that. I was surprised to see that only one of the performances was potentially funny, but a) it is not even slightly amusing compared to Chris Klein's comic brilliance in that Street Fighter movie and b) the performance is not, in fact, Mariah Carey's.
Mariah is actually okay in the movie. She tries hard to act and mostly succeeds. I have no complaints at all about her role or performance. She doesn't have a show-stopping moment like Jennifer Hudson did in Dreamgirls, but neither do most actors in a given movie. Carey did win the Worst Actress Razzie, but I think that's because they like to make a splash with big names -- for instance, this year's Worst Picture winner was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, when that movie was Casablanca compared to All About Steve -- and the real criminals of the movie (we'll get to it) didn't win anything. The film also has one great actor in it, Terrence Howard, who essentially plays the same sort of role that he would later play so brilliantly in Hustle & Flow. All of the credit for this movie's failure goes to three people: actor Max Beesley, director Vondie Curtis-Hall, and writer Kate Lanier.
Max Beesley is a British actor who plays Mariah's DJ beau/ producer, who is supposed to be from Brooklyn. His fake accent in this movie, simply put, is the worst fake accent I've ever seen on screen. I can't find video of it on YouTube and I can only suspect that this is because any evidence of that accent has been wiped from the internet. The best way I can describe it is if you imagine a British accent that tries to add a bit of New York and somehow some Boston works its way in as well. There's more to it, but it defies description.
The script is bad with plenty of eye-roll-inducing lines, but it's mostly just a bunch of cliches. I like that someone is credited with the story on imdb, as if I couldn't predict everything that was about to happen every second of the way, down to even some of the actual words spoken. Maybe the cliches wouldn't have been so bad if the director had decided to give even an attempt at respectable film-making. The direction is awful. The shots are too choppy and city scenes are interspersed at inopportune times, giving the movie a frenetic feel as if you are watching it on cocaine, but cocaine that also bores you. Doesn't make sense? Neither does the direction! More than anything, the movie suffers from an incredible lack of attention to detail by the director and writer.
The movie takes place in 1983. Mariah's big song throughout the movie is a cover of "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On", originally recorded by Cherrelle and made famous by Robert Palmer. Cherrelle released it in 1984. At one point, the bad-accented DJ/ producer/ boyfriend is shown on the cover of Spin Magazine. Which was started in 1985. Maybe the director and writer didn't have Google when the movie was made back in 2001, so they couldn't look this stuff up. But wait, there's more! A city street shot in Glitter has some of the passers-by talking on cell phones. Towards the end, someone uses a wireless remote control with a modern-looking TV set. The DJ talks at one point about how Quincy Jones has won Academy Awards when he has a grand total of zero.
The greatest lack of attention to detail involves the end of the movie. It's perhaps the one laughable part, but only after you really think about it, which I don't recommend. I guess I need to put a "SPOILER ALERT" here, but you're not worried about me spoiling Glitter for you. I'm going to end this review with a recounting of the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie, with my commentary on it:
Mariah and The Accented Wonder have broken up because she feels like he resents her success and is jealous that she recorded a song with Eric Benet. Her record hits big and she sells out Madison Square Garden, which is a dream that the two had discussed when they first met at the beginning of the movie. On the day of the Garden concert, Mariah decides to write lyrics for a new song based on her life. At the same exact time on the other side of town, the DJ writes the music that would go with Mariah's lyrics. They never talked about this song. She goes to the Garden, but stops by his apartment on the way. He's not home, but she leaves him a ticket and kisses some sheet music, making a red lipstick stain even though she's wearing pink lipstick. She leaves and he walks in, having just missed her. He picks up the ticket and walks out the door, where he is confronted by Terrence Howard's character, who shoots the DJ because of some money that was owed. Mariah gets to the Garden to find out that the DJ is dead. She then goes on and sings the song that she and the DJ wrote together that afternoon (apparently psychically) and the band has all of the music to provide the background. When the concert is over, Mariah returns to her dressing room backstage to find a rose and a note from the DJ, talking about how he's happy she stopped by that afternoon and was looking forward to seeing her. Even though he was killed immediately upon getting the ticket and would never have been able to get anything to the Garden. He also says that he has miraculously found Mariah's estranged mother who was formerly homeless and drug-addicted and is now inexplicably living a clean and successful life in a country house in Maryland. She jumps in a limo and, never having changed, rides to Maryland (which apparently takes somewhere longer than eight hours because it's light when she gets there) and has a warm reunion with her mother. The end.
When I first studied this list of Rotten Tomatoes' 100 worst movies of the last decade, three movies towards the end of the list jumped out at me for their ratings. Gigli (#73), The Adventures of Pluto Nash (#79), and Glitter (#99) are all more famous for being bad than the average movie on this list. One would think, considering the hoopla that went around the critics' bashing of the movies, that they would be a bit higher (lower?) in the rankings. For Glitter to only barely be on the list surprised me. The consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says that the film is bad (a 7% rating), but that it's not bad enough to warrant so-bad-it's-good status. I find that sentiment amusing since the movies I've seen at the very top (bottom?) of the list have been bad beyond any possible sense of sick enjoyment. I hit play on the remote, wondering if it would be funny-bad or just lame.
It's just lame. I suppose there are parts that could be laughed at, but only if you're really going out of your way to find something to laugh at. There is also one sequence that is simply baffling, but not really funny in any way. We'll get to that. I was surprised to see that only one of the performances was potentially funny, but a) it is not even slightly amusing compared to Chris Klein's comic brilliance in that Street Fighter movie and b) the performance is not, in fact, Mariah Carey's.
Mariah is actually okay in the movie. She tries hard to act and mostly succeeds. I have no complaints at all about her role or performance. She doesn't have a show-stopping moment like Jennifer Hudson did in Dreamgirls, but neither do most actors in a given movie. Carey did win the Worst Actress Razzie, but I think that's because they like to make a splash with big names -- for instance, this year's Worst Picture winner was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, when that movie was Casablanca compared to All About Steve -- and the real criminals of the movie (we'll get to it) didn't win anything. The film also has one great actor in it, Terrence Howard, who essentially plays the same sort of role that he would later play so brilliantly in Hustle & Flow. All of the credit for this movie's failure goes to three people: actor Max Beesley, director Vondie Curtis-Hall, and writer Kate Lanier.
Max Beesley is a British actor who plays Mariah's DJ beau/ producer, who is supposed to be from Brooklyn. His fake accent in this movie, simply put, is the worst fake accent I've ever seen on screen. I can't find video of it on YouTube and I can only suspect that this is because any evidence of that accent has been wiped from the internet. The best way I can describe it is if you imagine a British accent that tries to add a bit of New York and somehow some Boston works its way in as well. There's more to it, but it defies description.
The script is bad with plenty of eye-roll-inducing lines, but it's mostly just a bunch of cliches. I like that someone is credited with the story on imdb, as if I couldn't predict everything that was about to happen every second of the way, down to even some of the actual words spoken. Maybe the cliches wouldn't have been so bad if the director had decided to give even an attempt at respectable film-making. The direction is awful. The shots are too choppy and city scenes are interspersed at inopportune times, giving the movie a frenetic feel as if you are watching it on cocaine, but cocaine that also bores you. Doesn't make sense? Neither does the direction! More than anything, the movie suffers from an incredible lack of attention to detail by the director and writer.
The movie takes place in 1983. Mariah's big song throughout the movie is a cover of "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On", originally recorded by Cherrelle and made famous by Robert Palmer. Cherrelle released it in 1984. At one point, the bad-accented DJ/ producer/ boyfriend is shown on the cover of Spin Magazine. Which was started in 1985. Maybe the director and writer didn't have Google when the movie was made back in 2001, so they couldn't look this stuff up. But wait, there's more! A city street shot in Glitter has some of the passers-by talking on cell phones. Towards the end, someone uses a wireless remote control with a modern-looking TV set. The DJ talks at one point about how Quincy Jones has won Academy Awards when he has a grand total of zero.
The greatest lack of attention to detail involves the end of the movie. It's perhaps the one laughable part, but only after you really think about it, which I don't recommend. I guess I need to put a "SPOILER ALERT" here, but you're not worried about me spoiling Glitter for you. I'm going to end this review with a recounting of the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie, with my commentary on it:
Mariah and The Accented Wonder have broken up because she feels like he resents her success and is jealous that she recorded a song with Eric Benet. Her record hits big and she sells out Madison Square Garden, which is a dream that the two had discussed when they first met at the beginning of the movie. On the day of the Garden concert, Mariah decides to write lyrics for a new song based on her life. At the same exact time on the other side of town, the DJ writes the music that would go with Mariah's lyrics. They never talked about this song. She goes to the Garden, but stops by his apartment on the way. He's not home, but she leaves him a ticket and kisses some sheet music, making a red lipstick stain even though she's wearing pink lipstick. She leaves and he walks in, having just missed her. He picks up the ticket and walks out the door, where he is confronted by Terrence Howard's character, who shoots the DJ because of some money that was owed. Mariah gets to the Garden to find out that the DJ is dead. She then goes on and sings the song that she and the DJ wrote together that afternoon (apparently psychically) and the band has all of the music to provide the background. When the concert is over, Mariah returns to her dressing room backstage to find a rose and a note from the DJ, talking about how he's happy she stopped by that afternoon and was looking forward to seeing her. Even though he was killed immediately upon getting the ticket and would never have been able to get anything to the Garden. He also says that he has miraculously found Mariah's estranged mother who was formerly homeless and drug-addicted and is now inexplicably living a clean and successful life in a country house in Maryland. She jumps in a limo and, never having changed, rides to Maryland (which apparently takes somewhere longer than eight hours because it's light when she gets there) and has a warm reunion with her mother. The end.
Worst of the Worst: #44, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Originally posted April 1, 2010:
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is the long-awaited reboot of the glorious Street Fighter film franchise. You may remember the original 1994 version as the fitting final feature film of Raul Julia and for John-Claude Van Damme's tour de force performance as Colonel Guile. The producer (note: also executive producer on Battlefield Earth) decided to make this new version because his kids liked the video game and wanted to see a movie of it. Always a good idea to trust kids' judgement with millions of dollars. This one focuses on the female fighter from Hong Kong as she tries to rescue her father from a crime syndicate in Bangkok. The syndicate's leader, Bison, is also being investigated by the Bangkok police and Interpol as the cops join forces with Chun-Li to save the city.
There are two cardinal rules regarding a movie based on a video game. Such movies should never:
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is the long-awaited reboot of the glorious Street Fighter film franchise. You may remember the original 1994 version as the fitting final feature film of Raul Julia and for John-Claude Van Damme's tour de force performance as Colonel Guile. The producer (note: also executive producer on Battlefield Earth) decided to make this new version because his kids liked the video game and wanted to see a movie of it. Always a good idea to trust kids' judgement with millions of dollars. This one focuses on the female fighter from Hong Kong as she tries to rescue her father from a crime syndicate in Bangkok. The syndicate's leader, Bison, is also being investigated by the Bangkok police and Interpol as the cops join forces with Chun-Li to save the city.
There are two cardinal rules regarding a movie based on a video game. Such movies should never:
- A) change the plot of the game in any way.
- B) exist.
Unfortunately, SF: TLoC-L breaks both of these rules. At the end, there's a setup for a sequel (oh, please, happen!) that involves a martial arts tournament, but the plot of this movie might as well be any crappy action film that just has some familiar character names plugged in. Kristin Kreuk (Smallville) plays the title character ("Chun-Li", not "Street Fighter") and is entirely unbelievable as an action star. Also, even though Chun-Li is supposed to be from Hong Kong and they throw some dumb bone about how she was born in San Francisco so her English is perfect, Kreuk is from Vancouver and her Canadian accent pops up weirdly in one of her many poorly-read voice-overs. Neal McDonough (Minority Report) plays Bison. McDonough is from Massachusetts, but seems to have some sort of bad Irish accent in the film, even though his daughter turns out to be Russian. Best to not worry about it. Michael Clarke Duncan continues his ability to show up in crappy films by playing Balrog. Some guy from the Black Eyed Peas plays Vega and thankfully he's barely in it.
That's it for the video game characters, but some extra attention needs to be paid to the "work" done by Chris Klein as the Interpol agent. Klein was pretty good as the goofy nice guy in American Pie and Election. Sure, he was in the awful Rollerball remake, but I don't remember him being particularly bad in it. None of that could have prepared me for this! Klein plays the stereotypical bad-ass cop. He has stubble, but they seemed to have neglected makeup because the actual beard never grew in and it mostly looks like he's trying to grow a mustache. He puts on a New York accent (he's from Illinois), but only intermittently, and somehow a little Southern twang works its way in at the end of the movie. After seeing Battlefield Earth, I had proclaimed that John Travolta's performance in that was the worst acting performance in the history of cinema. Klein seriously challenges that notion. The movie is pretty boring, but every Klein scene is laugh-out-loud fantastic. In fact, someone did an homage to Klein's performance:
Video game movies... Just remember as you see all of the trailers for Jake Gyllenhaal's Prince of Persia that no video game movie has ever worked. I'm not quite sure why that's the case, because some of the storytelling in games has reached the level of at least weak movie scripts, but it's the way things are. Maybe some day there will be a hidden treasure in Guitar Hero: The Movie or Paper Mario: The Legend of Princess Toadstool. Maybe some day...
Worst of the Worst: #5, National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
Originally posted March 31, 2010:
I seem to remember National Lampoon magazine as being that dirty magazine that, as kids, we'd look at in the library for a laugh. Don't know if it was actually funny. National Lampoon did present Animal House and the Vacation series, but what happened? Apparently, the company got re-formed around eight years ago to produce their own entertainment and it's been miserable. Supposedly their website is funny, but I follow their sports jokes on Twitter and they are horribly unfunny. In fact, I'm now going to unfollow them because of this piece of crap movie. I don't know that this was ever a great brand name, but it now stands for garbage.
The older brother from Boy Meets World and the Sherminator from American Pie (how's that for pedigree?) star as two loser friends who decide to marry two older women in order to steal their money. The older women don't actually have any money and marry the two younger men to take out insurance and kill them. What follows is such an incredible menagerie of failed gags that, by the end, I alternated between counting the minutes until the movie was over (out loud) and slamming the remote against the couch in frustration. I'm not joking; I did both those things. Garbage.
Somehow, this movie opened on 1,000 screens back in 2004 and it made around $400,000 in its first weekend and an additional $120,000 in its second and final weekend. $400 per screen. The average movie ticket price in 2004 was $6.21, so that works out to 64 people per screen. I don't know how this didn't go direct to DVD. I don't know how this didn't go direct to the toilet. One critic on Rotten Tomatoes said, "If you watch this movie, you are an idiot." Guilty.
I seem to remember National Lampoon magazine as being that dirty magazine that, as kids, we'd look at in the library for a laugh. Don't know if it was actually funny. National Lampoon did present Animal House and the Vacation series, but what happened? Apparently, the company got re-formed around eight years ago to produce their own entertainment and it's been miserable. Supposedly their website is funny, but I follow their sports jokes on Twitter and they are horribly unfunny. In fact, I'm now going to unfollow them because of this piece of crap movie. I don't know that this was ever a great brand name, but it now stands for garbage.
The older brother from Boy Meets World and the Sherminator from American Pie (how's that for pedigree?) star as two loser friends who decide to marry two older women in order to steal their money. The older women don't actually have any money and marry the two younger men to take out insurance and kill them. What follows is such an incredible menagerie of failed gags that, by the end, I alternated between counting the minutes until the movie was over (out loud) and slamming the remote against the couch in frustration. I'm not joking; I did both those things. Garbage.
Somehow, this movie opened on 1,000 screens back in 2004 and it made around $400,000 in its first weekend and an additional $120,000 in its second and final weekend. $400 per screen. The average movie ticket price in 2004 was $6.21, so that works out to 64 people per screen. I don't know how this didn't go direct to DVD. I don't know how this didn't go direct to the toilet. One critic on Rotten Tomatoes said, "If you watch this movie, you are an idiot." Guilty.
Worst of the Worst: #77, Date Movie
Originally posted March 27, 2010:
This was the last of the ____ Movie franchise that I have to watch. Thank God. I think it was the worst one, if it's possible to differentiate between varieties of crap.
This was the last of the ____ Movie franchise that I have to watch. Thank God. I think it was the worst one, if it's possible to differentiate between varieties of crap.
Worst of the Worst: #97, Boat Trip
Originally posted March 21, 2010:
You probably haven't heard of a lot of the movies on this list of the worst movies of the last decade, but you have probably heard of this one. Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Horatio Sanz star as two guys who go on a cruise to meet women. When they anger the travel agent, they are booked on a gay cruise, much to their surprise. Somehow they don't realize it at first, but then Gooding has to pretend to be gay to get close to the only woman on the boat, the dance instructor. She falls for him, he reveals he's straight, she's pissed, blah, blah, blah. Everyone knew it would be awful, to the point that I actually tried to rent it when it first came out on DVD. Funny enough, the box was mislabeled and I ended up with Daddy Day Care instead. Daddy Day Care, which had a few laughs thanks to Jeff Garlin and Steve Zahn, isn't on this list but Boat Trip is. So, much like Sam Beckett, I was given the opportunity to put right what once went wrong and watch the movie.
You know the premise is awful. Bad, to the point that the "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" appears on the boat at one point to tempt Sanz' character. I googled "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" to see if it actually exists -- yes, I already knew the answer -- and it only returned links for Boat Trip. Towards the end, the filmmakers inexplicably finish the cruise with no real wrap-up, just so they can just get the story over with. It feels like ten minutes were just cut out, which, believe me, I'm not complaining about. On top of the bad plot, the homophobic jokes are shocking in their extremity. Almost the entire movie is gay jokes and, while the gay characters obviously are the heroes in the end and the two main characters obviously learn that gay people can be real people too (actual plot point), the movie doesn't quite seem to shy away from stereotypes. It's on the list, we know it's bad, whatever. As you know, here's where the "but" comes in.
But...
I actually laughed a couple of times. Will Ferrell has a cameo towards the beginning where he ad-libs with Artie Lange and made me chuckle. There's a joke involving bodily fluids at one point that caught me off guard and made me chuckle. Horatio Sanz overall just kind of makes me chuckle. He's definitely lame but a) it's unfair to pin the crapiness of SNL on him as I think I even used to do myself and b) I can sort of tell why he gets these parts. He's not that funny on film, but I bet he's funny as hell in person. The kind of guy who comes to a bachelor party and makes everyone die laughing all night even though you wouldn't want to spend any time with him when alcohol and/or strippers aren't involved. Sanz tries too hard, which doesn't work in a good comedy, but works just fine when everything else around him is junk.
The movie was #97, so it barely made the list with a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I know the list comes from the ratings, so it's not a completely subjective ranking of every film from the last decade against each other. I'm sure I've said before that there is one movie, Year One, that belongs on the list. It was a wide enough release and there was not one laugh in the entire movie. I could also make a case for last year's The Ugly Truth, which was also embarrassingly bad. I'm not sure I'd put Boat Trip on the list because at least I chuckled a couple of times. I come in to every movie on this list with low expectations, but for some, you can't go low enough. I went in to this one with expectations as low as the Dead Sea and I was (only barely) pleasantly surprised. Bravo.
You probably haven't heard of a lot of the movies on this list of the worst movies of the last decade, but you have probably heard of this one. Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Horatio Sanz star as two guys who go on a cruise to meet women. When they anger the travel agent, they are booked on a gay cruise, much to their surprise. Somehow they don't realize it at first, but then Gooding has to pretend to be gay to get close to the only woman on the boat, the dance instructor. She falls for him, he reveals he's straight, she's pissed, blah, blah, blah. Everyone knew it would be awful, to the point that I actually tried to rent it when it first came out on DVD. Funny enough, the box was mislabeled and I ended up with Daddy Day Care instead. Daddy Day Care, which had a few laughs thanks to Jeff Garlin and Steve Zahn, isn't on this list but Boat Trip is. So, much like Sam Beckett, I was given the opportunity to put right what once went wrong and watch the movie.
You know the premise is awful. Bad, to the point that the "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" appears on the boat at one point to tempt Sanz' character. I googled "Swedish Sun-Tanning Team" to see if it actually exists -- yes, I already knew the answer -- and it only returned links for Boat Trip. Towards the end, the filmmakers inexplicably finish the cruise with no real wrap-up, just so they can just get the story over with. It feels like ten minutes were just cut out, which, believe me, I'm not complaining about. On top of the bad plot, the homophobic jokes are shocking in their extremity. Almost the entire movie is gay jokes and, while the gay characters obviously are the heroes in the end and the two main characters obviously learn that gay people can be real people too (actual plot point), the movie doesn't quite seem to shy away from stereotypes. It's on the list, we know it's bad, whatever. As you know, here's where the "but" comes in.
But...
I actually laughed a couple of times. Will Ferrell has a cameo towards the beginning where he ad-libs with Artie Lange and made me chuckle. There's a joke involving bodily fluids at one point that caught me off guard and made me chuckle. Horatio Sanz overall just kind of makes me chuckle. He's definitely lame but a) it's unfair to pin the crapiness of SNL on him as I think I even used to do myself and b) I can sort of tell why he gets these parts. He's not that funny on film, but I bet he's funny as hell in person. The kind of guy who comes to a bachelor party and makes everyone die laughing all night even though you wouldn't want to spend any time with him when alcohol and/or strippers aren't involved. Sanz tries too hard, which doesn't work in a good comedy, but works just fine when everything else around him is junk.
The movie was #97, so it barely made the list with a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I know the list comes from the ratings, so it's not a completely subjective ranking of every film from the last decade against each other. I'm sure I've said before that there is one movie, Year One, that belongs on the list. It was a wide enough release and there was not one laugh in the entire movie. I could also make a case for last year's The Ugly Truth, which was also embarrassingly bad. I'm not sure I'd put Boat Trip on the list because at least I chuckled a couple of times. I come in to every movie on this list with low expectations, but for some, you can't go low enough. I went in to this one with expectations as low as the Dead Sea and I was (only barely) pleasantly surprised. Bravo.
Worst of the Worst: #84, Thr3e
Originally posted March 12, 2010:
One word: Finally!!! When I set out to watch the worst movies of the last decade, I knew there would be some really awful movies. Some movies (Three Strikes, All About Steve, The Master of Disguise) are so bad that it is actually painful to watch them, but my tolerance for pain is pretty high. I expected a great number of funny bad movies. So far, that has not really happened. I found Uwe Boll and I laughed at the historic ineptitude of Battlefield Earth but these movies have generally been considerably less entertaining than I thought they would be. Until now!
When The Passion had such great box office success, studios thought there might be a future in faith-based movies. To take advantage of that, 20th Century Fox created a subsidiary called Fox Faith, designed to green-light movies with a Christian bent. Along those lines, Fox Faith produced an adaptation of a Christian thriller novel, Thr3e.
An aside, regarding faith-based entertainment. Perhaps I am prejudiced, but I am very wary about anything based around religion. It's hard to completely buy into anything that has an obvious agenda, be it Michael Moore's movies or Fox News. On top of that, religion-based entertainment tends towards family-friendly, so there's no edge. Matisyahu's rap is cool, but he's rapping about the Messiah and I just can't relate. Ditto Christian rock (Note: Kanye gets a pass on "Jesus Walks" because a) the beat is sick and b) he doesn't do exclusively religious stuff). Could someone make a religious movie that I'd like? Possibly, so long as it approaches its topic from a philosophical nature. But, let's say someone tried to make a rip-off of Saw but made it family-friendly and with Christian themes. Does that sound like a good idea?
Thr3e is about a seminary student who is stalked by a serial killer. The killer had previously killed the brother of a police psychologist who, with her personal interest in the case, inserts herself into the life of the student in order to help him and catch the killer. The killer works by using riddles to give his victims the chance to get themselves out of the situation. He also wants the student to confess to some sin. He kills exclusively with bombs -- well, "kills" is a strong word because, besides the police psychologist's brother, nobody actually dies in the bombs. Here's that family-friendly part. Forget there being no cursing, there is no gore. It's a horror movie, a Saw rip-off, that has no blood in it. Basically, nobody gets hurt. What a horror film! The plot rolls on until the end, where there is a twist that is so out-of-the-blue and so cliched that I actually had to pause the movie because I was laughing so hard.
But, fear not, you don't have to wait until the end to laugh your ass off at the absurdity of this movie! The actors deliver their lines with a passion that reminded me of the acting in those Sprint commercials that they show before movies in the theater. Of particular note is Justine Waddell as the psychologist, who delivers her lines in this faux-serious manner that brings chuckles every time she opens her mouth. Many of the actors are a little too young or a little too pretty for the characters they are supposed to be portraying. Also, do you cherish non-disabled actors playing mentally-challenged characters and failing miserably as much as I do? Then step right up, because you'll get the most ridiculous pair of those since Mark Holton (Francis from Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Chubby in Teen Wolf) played one in Leprechaun. The special effects in the film are amazing in their cheapness, including a scene where a bus is on fire except you can easily see that the bus is okay and the flames were super-imposed on the print in editing (I can't find a video of it or I'd show it). Laughs all around!
The religion does play into it a little bit. A few of the killer's riddles turn out to be lines from Romans in the New Testament. Near the end of the movie, the psychologist turns to a professor at the seminary and asks if we can fight evil by coming to grips with the potential for good and evil that is in all of us. The professor responds that this is not the case, we can only fight evil by accepting the power of God. I rolled my eyes. As I said, I'm probably prejudiced to it but, as I also said, I could probably like a religion-based movie. It would just help if they didn't make one that's so easy to mock.
One word: Finally!!! When I set out to watch the worst movies of the last decade, I knew there would be some really awful movies. Some movies (Three Strikes, All About Steve, The Master of Disguise) are so bad that it is actually painful to watch them, but my tolerance for pain is pretty high. I expected a great number of funny bad movies. So far, that has not really happened. I found Uwe Boll and I laughed at the historic ineptitude of Battlefield Earth but these movies have generally been considerably less entertaining than I thought they would be. Until now!
When The Passion had such great box office success, studios thought there might be a future in faith-based movies. To take advantage of that, 20th Century Fox created a subsidiary called Fox Faith, designed to green-light movies with a Christian bent. Along those lines, Fox Faith produced an adaptation of a Christian thriller novel, Thr3e.
An aside, regarding faith-based entertainment. Perhaps I am prejudiced, but I am very wary about anything based around religion. It's hard to completely buy into anything that has an obvious agenda, be it Michael Moore's movies or Fox News. On top of that, religion-based entertainment tends towards family-friendly, so there's no edge. Matisyahu's rap is cool, but he's rapping about the Messiah and I just can't relate. Ditto Christian rock (Note: Kanye gets a pass on "Jesus Walks" because a) the beat is sick and b) he doesn't do exclusively religious stuff). Could someone make a religious movie that I'd like? Possibly, so long as it approaches its topic from a philosophical nature. But, let's say someone tried to make a rip-off of Saw but made it family-friendly and with Christian themes. Does that sound like a good idea?
Thr3e is about a seminary student who is stalked by a serial killer. The killer had previously killed the brother of a police psychologist who, with her personal interest in the case, inserts herself into the life of the student in order to help him and catch the killer. The killer works by using riddles to give his victims the chance to get themselves out of the situation. He also wants the student to confess to some sin. He kills exclusively with bombs -- well, "kills" is a strong word because, besides the police psychologist's brother, nobody actually dies in the bombs. Here's that family-friendly part. Forget there being no cursing, there is no gore. It's a horror movie, a Saw rip-off, that has no blood in it. Basically, nobody gets hurt. What a horror film! The plot rolls on until the end, where there is a twist that is so out-of-the-blue and so cliched that I actually had to pause the movie because I was laughing so hard.
But, fear not, you don't have to wait until the end to laugh your ass off at the absurdity of this movie! The actors deliver their lines with a passion that reminded me of the acting in those Sprint commercials that they show before movies in the theater. Of particular note is Justine Waddell as the psychologist, who delivers her lines in this faux-serious manner that brings chuckles every time she opens her mouth. Many of the actors are a little too young or a little too pretty for the characters they are supposed to be portraying. Also, do you cherish non-disabled actors playing mentally-challenged characters and failing miserably as much as I do? Then step right up, because you'll get the most ridiculous pair of those since Mark Holton (Francis from Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Chubby in Teen Wolf) played one in Leprechaun. The special effects in the film are amazing in their cheapness, including a scene where a bus is on fire except you can easily see that the bus is okay and the flames were super-imposed on the print in editing (I can't find a video of it or I'd show it). Laughs all around!
The religion does play into it a little bit. A few of the killer's riddles turn out to be lines from Romans in the New Testament. Near the end of the movie, the psychologist turns to a professor at the seminary and asks if we can fight evil by coming to grips with the potential for good and evil that is in all of us. The professor responds that this is not the case, we can only fight evil by accepting the power of God. I rolled my eyes. As I said, I'm probably prejudiced to it but, as I also said, I could probably like a religion-based movie. It would just help if they didn't make one that's so easy to mock.
Worst of the Worst: #50, Dirty Love
Originally posted March 6, 2010:
In the fourth season of 30 Rock, there was a series of episodes where Jon Hamm guest-starred as Liz's love interest. She eventually broke up with him when she realized that he was incredibly stupid, but got away with it because of his looks. No matter what he did, people just said he was right or smart or talented. This must be the story of Jenny McCarthy's life.
McCarthy wrote and starred in Dirty Love, the #50 movie on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the worst movies of the last decade. She became famous in Playboy, but got her mainstream start as the co-host of MTV's Singled Out. She left to get her own not-so-good sketch comedy show on MTV, replaced by Carmen Electra who co-starred in this movie (it should be noted that Electra stars in every single last entry of the ____ Movie franchise). Hmm, what else? I remember her being not particularly funny in Baseketball. Anyways, she parlayed a lot of entertainment execs nodding agreement to her contracts while not exactly staring into her eyes into the opportunity to get a movie made of her script. Now, I can't find anywhere how much it cost to make this movie and my impression is that it didn't cost much. But "not much" by movie standards is still potentially quite a bit. The great low, low, low-budget movies Swingers and Halloween cost $200,000 and $300,000 to make, respectively. Dirty Love opened on forty-four screens (because the advance word-of-mouth was so bad) and made $23,281 in its opening weekend. It stayed open (on only two of those screens) for one more weekend. When it made $822. No, I didn't miss a comma there.
McCarthy's script is bad. I don't just mean in the way that there are no laughs -- not one -- in the entire movie. I mean in the way that there are glaring errors in verb tense and pronoun use. It's not slang; the grammar is noticeably wrong. Besides that, it's racist (Electra's prolific acting chops are put to use in a white character that inexplicably acts as stereotypically black as possible to the point that it comes off as a minstrel show) and anti-Semitic (two movie execs with big noses, glasses, and New York accents, are compared to Woody Allen). It's a gross-out movie that includes graphic scenes of vomit, sex, and a menstruation "joke" that a thirteen-year-old wouldn't find funny. Thanks to the over-the-top script, even a talented comic actor like Guillermo Diaz is forced to play over-the-top and comes out looking the worse for it. The attention to detail is so poor that at one point a sign on a studio audition room reads "Quite Please". I kid you not. I only wish I could find a picture of it.
Much like with my review of The New Guy, where I lamented Zooey Deschanel's inclusion in the movie, I lament here Eddie Kaye Thomas as the guy who is in love with McCarthy's character but she won't see it. Thomas was very good in American Pie and he and David Krumholtz together were great in Harold and Kumar. Of the people in this movie, he's the only one who looks like he's trying (or capable) at all. He also doesn't fit because he plays a peer to McCarthy but he's actually eight years younger than she is. And, look, she's very pretty, but it's obvious. Aside from him (and he couldn't do anything with that script), the acting is exactly what you would expect when you let a bunch of Playmates star in a movie. When porn stars have bit parts in mainstream movies like He Got Game, it is barely acceptable because of how bad they are. Build a movie around them? You can see how that goes.
Male gross-out comedies are huge. The Hangover was one of the biggest movies of last year, following in the footsteps of Old School, Anchorman, and even as far back as Animal House. I think we generally believe that the female counterpart to that type of movie is a romantic comedy, movies which mostly have little to no edge. I don't blame someone for trying to make a female gross-out comedy. Perhaps there's a market out there for that. Perhaps someone like Sarah Silverman could pull one off. If we're going to be blazing new trails, though, let's leave it to someone whose talent extends to above their shoulders.
In the fourth season of 30 Rock, there was a series of episodes where Jon Hamm guest-starred as Liz's love interest. She eventually broke up with him when she realized that he was incredibly stupid, but got away with it because of his looks. No matter what he did, people just said he was right or smart or talented. This must be the story of Jenny McCarthy's life.
McCarthy wrote and starred in Dirty Love, the #50 movie on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the worst movies of the last decade. She became famous in Playboy, but got her mainstream start as the co-host of MTV's Singled Out. She left to get her own not-so-good sketch comedy show on MTV, replaced by Carmen Electra who co-starred in this movie (it should be noted that Electra stars in every single last entry of the ____ Movie franchise). Hmm, what else? I remember her being not particularly funny in Baseketball. Anyways, she parlayed a lot of entertainment execs nodding agreement to her contracts while not exactly staring into her eyes into the opportunity to get a movie made of her script. Now, I can't find anywhere how much it cost to make this movie and my impression is that it didn't cost much. But "not much" by movie standards is still potentially quite a bit. The great low, low, low-budget movies Swingers and Halloween cost $200,000 and $300,000 to make, respectively. Dirty Love opened on forty-four screens (because the advance word-of-mouth was so bad) and made $23,281 in its opening weekend. It stayed open (on only two of those screens) for one more weekend. When it made $822. No, I didn't miss a comma there.
McCarthy's script is bad. I don't just mean in the way that there are no laughs -- not one -- in the entire movie. I mean in the way that there are glaring errors in verb tense and pronoun use. It's not slang; the grammar is noticeably wrong. Besides that, it's racist (Electra's prolific acting chops are put to use in a white character that inexplicably acts as stereotypically black as possible to the point that it comes off as a minstrel show) and anti-Semitic (two movie execs with big noses, glasses, and New York accents, are compared to Woody Allen). It's a gross-out movie that includes graphic scenes of vomit, sex, and a menstruation "joke" that a thirteen-year-old wouldn't find funny. Thanks to the over-the-top script, even a talented comic actor like Guillermo Diaz is forced to play over-the-top and comes out looking the worse for it. The attention to detail is so poor that at one point a sign on a studio audition room reads "Quite Please". I kid you not. I only wish I could find a picture of it.
Much like with my review of The New Guy, where I lamented Zooey Deschanel's inclusion in the movie, I lament here Eddie Kaye Thomas as the guy who is in love with McCarthy's character but she won't see it. Thomas was very good in American Pie and he and David Krumholtz together were great in Harold and Kumar. Of the people in this movie, he's the only one who looks like he's trying (or capable) at all. He also doesn't fit because he plays a peer to McCarthy but he's actually eight years younger than she is. And, look, she's very pretty, but it's obvious. Aside from him (and he couldn't do anything with that script), the acting is exactly what you would expect when you let a bunch of Playmates star in a movie. When porn stars have bit parts in mainstream movies like He Got Game, it is barely acceptable because of how bad they are. Build a movie around them? You can see how that goes.
Male gross-out comedies are huge. The Hangover was one of the biggest movies of last year, following in the footsteps of Old School, Anchorman, and even as far back as Animal House. I think we generally believe that the female counterpart to that type of movie is a romantic comedy, movies which mostly have little to no edge. I don't blame someone for trying to make a female gross-out comedy. Perhaps there's a market out there for that. Perhaps someone like Sarah Silverman could pull one off. If we're going to be blazing new trails, though, let's leave it to someone whose talent extends to above their shoulders.
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