Worst of the Worst: #69, The Cookout

As I go through this list, fifty-four movies down now with The Cookout, I'm finding more and more movies that are just sort of lame more than they are really awful. The Cookout is supposedly a comedy, though it has only one funny part, but the right sentiment is there in the movie and that means that it can only be but so bad. It's the type of film that you watch and know that somebody, somewhere, liked the movie. I'm not just talking about the 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but that someone in the audience liked it. Nobody liked Battlefield Earth. Nobody liked Master of Disguise.

The Cookout deals with a kid who has just been drafted #1 overall by the New Jersey Nets and grapples with his newfound money and what his family means to him. He moves into a house he can't afford with his gold-digging girlfriend and, upon learning that he needs an endorsement in order to keep the things he's bought, his agent sets up a meeting with a company. Of course, the company's representative comes over as the family decides to have a cookout. Hilarity ensues. It's all rather formulaic.

The main star is a nobody and the woman who plays the strong matriarch who keeps the family together is vaguely familiar, though not Tyler Perry. Ja Rule is top-billed, but thankfully barely in it. The supporting cast of Jonathan Silverman, Frankie Faison, Tim Meadows, and Danny Glover is just Terry Crews short of comedy armageddon. It's a little distressing to see two Wire vets (Faison and Reg E. Cathey) have scenes together, but they're okay and Tim Meadows is not horrible, as one would imagine.

Hard to get too worked up. Not good by any means, but not hate-worthy. I think I need a kick start with a really, really awful movie next week. We're going to go near the top of the list. Two words: Scott Baio.

Worst of the Worst: #68, Yu-Gi-Oh: The Movie

It's a cartoon and involves an hour straight of two characters playing a card game where the rules seem to be made up as it goes along. I didn't care and I'm not the target demo by a long shot so I'm sure the producers aren't concerned. I imagine they were able to sell lots of cards from this. It doesn't belong on a list of real movies. But it's on the list and, therefore, I had to watch it. Done and done.

Worst of the Worst: #53, Modigliani

Biopics are generally pretty boring because there can only be but so much really interesting drama in someone's life. Modigliani, to worsen the blow, is a biopic about the last days of an Italian artist who died in 1920. Not really my cup of tea. The film follows the artist's final days in Paris as he is about to die from tuberculosis worsened by drugs and alcohol. I learned lots of great stuff from the movie. He had a heated rivalry with Picasso (he didn't actually), the two artists entered into a great competition to see who was the best artist in Paris (there was actually no such competition), in said competition Picasso entered a portrait of Modigliani (he never actually painted one), Modigliani won the competition but was not there because he was being beaten by robbers and that led to his death (again, no actual competition and he actually died solely from the disease and was not beaten by robbers). So a truly factual and interesting biopic, albeit with direction that fed off of needless melodrama and looked like I might have shot it on my Nikon Coolpix. At least, with the movie taking place in 1920, all of the techno music during the montage scenes made sense. To be honest, I could barely pay attention to the movie because it was so boring. If they were going to make so much crap up, couldn't they at least have had him fight Godzilla or something?