The Bottom '08
Even a very good year has its share of very bad movies
By Andy Klein
From a film critic’s perspective, most years seem like bad years ... or at least worse than they’re likely to seem to the rest of you. You all get to use us (and hopefully friends’ reactions and word of mouth) as a guide to filter out some real atrocities. Critics generally have no such guide, and even when there is “buzz” – positive or negative – it’s a professional responsibility to try to ignore it and view the film without prejudice. (I’d be lying to say that’s always possible.) When you have to see a couple hundred movies, largely selected by criteria that have more to do with practical realities (deadlines, screening time conflicts, illness, burnout) than interest, the chances that the good will outnumber the bad are pretty slim.
By that standard, I’m shocked to realize, 2008 has been a very good year. I didn’t feel that way as it was unfolding, but at year’s end, as I plowed through my list, there were roughly 30 titles that survived the first cut for my Top 10 list, while I couldn’t even scrape together 10 pieces of rotting cinematic garbage for my worst films of 2008 list. Who woulda thunk?
These are not the absolute worst. That list would include films that have already disappeared into the void; it would also quickly grow dull, with half the titles being marked “big-budget Hollywood stupidity” and the other half “no-budget indies that make you wish the video revolution had never happened.” I’d rather spotlight different kinds of bad.
But let’s start with Pure Undistilled Plain-Vanilla Wretched Why-Didn’t-I-Die-on-the-Way-to-the-Theater Awful, in the form of The Hottie and the Nottie, a romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comic. Its main selling point – or, for many, avoiding point – was the presence of Paris Hilton in what I believe to be her first starring role – in, like, an actual feature distributed to actual theaters. How bad is this feature from deservedly unknown director Tom Putnam? It’s a blot on Paris Hilton’s dignity. Negatives: a witless script that alternates between the irritating and the incomprehensible; a moral stance that fails egregiously at its attempts to find decent values. Positives: competent editing; competent lighting ... wait: on reflection, that last item ends up being a negative: I would gladly have seen less.
In the category of Can’t They Find Better Projects?, we have the one-two punch of 88 Minutes and Righteous Kill. The first stars a great actor (Al Pacino); the second, two great actors (Pacino and Robert De Niro). They were shot two years apart but came out within six months of each other. Why? Because 88 Minutes deservedly stayed on the shelf for a couple years.
88 Minutes isn’t just another bad thriller. While it’s mostly bad in the same ways as all the other lousy thrillers, it is additionally bad in other ways rarely seen. There are a million little plot stupidities, but we’re used to that. Where it goes beyond your average imbecilic suspense movie is its utter lack of understanding of the plot requirements or the genre ... or of narratives in general.
Jon Avnet directed both of these, and one can kindly assert that he seems to be improving: Righteous Kill is a solid D- to 88 Minutes’s F. Its script is built around a trick, one that is simultaneously too clever by half and not clever at all (which itself is quite a trick). It’s an act of extreme bad faith with the audience.
Worst TV Show Puked Up on a Big Screen: Speed Racer, in a walk. And it wasn’t just a big screen, it was an IMAX screen. Two hours and 15 minutes of eye candy so sugary that it makes your jaw ache and your temples throb. If The Wachowski Brothers hadn’t eased the transition with the last two Matrix films, the plunge from The Matrix to Speed Racer might have set some sort of steepness record for career arcs.
Most Pointless Remake of a Classic: The Day the Earth Stood Still. You could argue there are justifications for redoing the 1951 Robert Wise favorite – to do it in color, to take advantage of vastly more sophisticated special effects, to update the central threat from Cold War atom bomb concerns to environmental irresponsibility. It’s not a great argument, but it becomes moot when you view the result. The changes are all for the worse: the storytelling is so muddled that I’m not sure quite what motivates Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) toward the end.
It Should Be Possible to Make an Ideologically Right Wing Movie That Doesn’t Suck ... Really: But you wouldn’t know it from Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and David Zucker’s An American Carol. Hollywood used to occasionally cough up a Gabriel Over the White House or Red Dawn – even as recently as Independence Day – not to mention films that more subtly put forth values associated with the right end of the political spectrum. Maybe the increased polarization of recent years has made it more difficult to bridge the gap between right wing filmmakers and my left wing brain.
Or maybe it’s just been a fluke. But Stein’s “intelligent design” documentary has all the red flags – inadequate or misleading identification of interviewees, aggressively manipulative editing, extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence, and extreme leaps of logic ... particularly suggesting guilt by association, even to the point of laying blame for the Holocaust on Darwin. And in Zucker’s comedy the jokes are lame and the caricatures too removed from any defensible reality; the physical humor is clunkily staged; and the story festooned with irrelevant putdowns. (“Ew, Michael Moore is fat. He’s a big, fat, slobby fatty. Ew!” Har de har.)
And, for the grand finale, we have Movies of Undeniable Skill But Loathsome Intent: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Michael Haneke’s scene-for-scene American remake of his earlier Funny Games. In Haneke’s mind, it’s a film so nice, he had to make it twice. To a healthy human mind, however, it’s one of the most repugnant, unpleasant, sadistic movies ever made. No matter what virtues of craft one can find within, no matter what themes lie beneath, Funny Games is indefensible. The intent is to torture the audience, and, by that criterion, it’s a roaring success.
I’m far from averse to dark content or squirm-inducing movies. I don’t believe there is some single golden criterion that all films must meet. Movies can provide knowledge; they can give us laughter, cleansing tears, excitement, crystallized reality, intellectual stimulation, transcendent moments of emotional catharsis, fresh perspectives, and a finite number of other worthwhile reactions. Few films do all of these, but I do believe that a work of art has to serve at least one of these many goals.
Not on my list is “rubbing the audience’s noses in a hopeless world of shit” – which is all Funny Games comes up with.
Published: 12/30/2008
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