Everybody Loves Lists!

Due to my recent relocation, I've been unable to finish this week's Twilight update. So, in the meantime, I thought, well, everybody loves lists! They're meaningless and people always think they're wrong, but we keep making them anyway. They generate discussion, at least, and if there's one thing this blog needs, it's decent writing and something insightful to say. Sorry, that's two things. Well, amongst the things this blog needs is discussion, so I'm putting forward a number of my own personal top five lists. You'll note that, with the rare exception, all choices are mainstream with (allegedly) A-list talent. The obvious reason for this is it's hard to get discussion going when I'm tossing out people and films no-one's heard of. The less obvious reason is that, especially for the "worst of" lists, it's no fun beating up on small fry with no money and lots of heart. I mean, if I didn't have this rule, the Five Worst Movies could be any random sample of Uwe Boll films. I thought it would be more interesting to take the piss out of films with millions of dollars made by people from whom, rightly or wrongly, we expect better. So here goes:

Best Movies of All Time, Ever, Objectively True and Correct:
5. Blade Runner--Possibly the most visually influential film of all time. (Yes, I've seen Citizen Kane.) Also has the dubious honor of popularizing the "director's cut".
4. The Road Warrior--The template for seemingly every post-apocalyptic genre film of the last 40 years. Only The Road Warrior's apocalypse looks more likely with each passing decade.
3. Dr. Strangelove, Or, How I Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb--For years, I heard this was the greatest satire of all time. It is.
2. The Godfather--The Mafia never looked so cool. Brando gives the greatest performance of his career, and his isn't even the strongest in the film.
1. Memento--Great acting, great mystery, and a twist ending that's both shocking and unexpected and completely believable and in keeping with the rest of the film. Seen it eight times, and every time I caught new nuance. Even the Gap-Toothed Woman of CSI fame can't ruin this movie.

The Worst Movies of All Time:
5. Wanted--An adolescent male fantasy for sociopaths. Forces Morgan Freeman to share the screen with Angelina Jolie's lips.
4. Princess Aurora--If your child is murdered as a result of your neglect, you're perfectly justified in killing everyone the child encountered that day to assuage your own guilt.
3. The Constant Gardener--A morality play about how if your politics are right, you can't do anything immoral.
2. Goodfellas--Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci playing gangsters? You don't say! I wanted the main character to die throughout the film. He never does.
1. Southland Tales--See my review here.

The Worst Movies I Had the Best Time Watching:
5. Lady Terminator--A blurry photocopy of The Terminator, only the Terminator is an Indonesian sex demon who humps men to death with her serrated sawblade-vagina. Or shoots them. Both methods work.
4. The Room--You're tearing me apart, intarwebs!
3. Dragonball: Evolution--Definitive proof that crappy anime should never be done in live-action. Shockingly offensive example of Lead Actors are White. I laughed at the villain's bad make-up job every single time he appeared onscreen.
2. Birdemic: Shock and Terror--Hands down, the worst acting you've ever seen. And special effects. And everything else. Deserves to make the next list, but it's just too funny.
1. The Happening--Who knew tree-induced suicide could be so hilarious?

The Most Incompetent Excuses for Movies That Hardly Deserve to be Called Movies:
5. The Last Airbender--See my review here.
4. Any of those Resident Evil things--The only entertainment to be had from this abominable series is figuring out which real movie each entry is ripping off. Subsists entirely on young boys obsessed with somewhat-attractive women in tight black leather shooting machine guns. (See also the Underworld series. Better yet, don't.)
3. Redline--Made me appreciate the care and craft that went into The Fast and the Furious films. Yes, I'm fully aware of what that statement entails.
2. Jack and Jill--Less a movie than a scam to bilk investors out of $70 million. More product placement than The Price is Right. A worse Adam Sandler movie than Going Overboard.
1. Disaster Movie--I only intended to watch maybe 15 minutes of this but resolved to continue until I saw a scene that wasn't worse than the previous one. I finished the whole movie.

The Most Overrated Directors:
5. Quentin Tarantino--A screenwriter of talent, if limited range. Would love to see a screenplay of his directed by anyone but himself. Wait, that was True Romance. Never mind.
4. David Fincher--Disowned Alien 3, easily the best film he made. Yeah, I went there.
3. Oliver Stone--Revealed by the films he makes to be insane. Allowed Kevin Costner to be in his film.
2. Peter Jackson--The Frighteners was decent, but everything else he's made has been the worst piece of crap ever produced (Bad Taste) or unbelievably dull (Lord of the Rings) or that godawful King Kong remake (Godawful King Kong Remake).
1. Martin Scorsese--Making films dirty does not make them good. Michael Mann does everything people keep telling me Scorsese does, only Mann doesn't suck. Best work of his career: Michael Jackson's "Bad" video.

Three-Name Actors Who Earn the Right to Use Three Names:
5. HBC--The best there is at playing the role of HBC.
4. Jada Pinkett-Smith--I have three words, one for each of your names: Fire your agent.
3. James Earl Jones--I'm a big fan, even if he did assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. Makes even a Tennessee Williams play watchable.
2. Tommy Lee Jones--Is there anything the man can't do? (Answer: He can't be bad in a role, even when directed by Joel Shootmenowmacher.)
1. Edward James Olmos--God walks among us.

Three-Name Actors Who Haven't Earned the Right to Use Three Names:
5. Sarah Gellar--Even fans tell me she's the weakest part of Buffy. (What? Like I'd watch that.)
4. Catherine Jones--Gives a good performance as an elitist socialite who isn't half as brilliant or witty as she thinks she is. But any actor can play herself.
3. Richard Anderson--Who needs charisma to headline not one but two TV dramas?
2. Stiffler--This is the only role he plays, so why not credit him as such?
1. Jennifer Hewitt--"Love" isn't the four-letter "L" word that explains her career.

The Worst Actors to Pollute My Movie Screens:
5. Sam Worthington--See any of his films--Whatever of the Titans, Terminator: Enough Already, pick any one you want--and see if you can distinguish him from the CGI backgrounds. Ha-ha! I'm kidding, you can't.
4. Clooney--I refuse to use his full name. Plays the role of "smug, vaguely handsome jerk" in Every Film Clooney Has Been In. Thinks smiling and nodding constitutes acting. Is generally a horrible person.
3. Sean Penn--Someone tell this man that shouting your lines is not the same thing as giving a dramatic performance. Also generally a horrible person.
2. Kevin Costner--Will be remembered long after his death for delivering the worst Robin Hood of all time. Russell Crowe weeps nightly that his awful Robin Hood will be forgotten while Costner's lives on. "Because I'm a survivor" indeed.
1. William Hurt--This man won an Oscar. That sound you hear is the award's credibility going down the toilet.

The Bestest Actors Ever:
5. Guy Pearce--From action hero to insurance investigator to dopehead to Andy Warhol, he just oozes screen presence, sex appeal, and sensitive-guy machismo. American accent was so good I got the vapours when I found out he's Australian. Oy!
4. John Malkovich--He's weird, he speaks fluent French, and he starred in Being John Malkovich. Oh, and his surname is Malkovich. Come on, that's just evil-sounding and wicked.
3. Samuel L. Jackson--Known for shouting, obscenities, and shouting obscenities, yet he can deliver subtle performances in great films (Unbreakable) and terrible films (Sphere), no matter how badly directed he is. Well, okay, except by George Lucas.
2. Jack Nicholson--Yeah, I'm a sucker for Jack doing Jack. Still, for the haters, see Wolf or About Schmidt. He's capable of subtlety when he bothers to act. (See also Brando, Marlon.)
1. Christopher Walken--Does just fine giving a normal performance, but for my money, give me that old Walken Weird! How many times has he walked into an otherwise crap film and Walkenised, giving the audience a respite of awesome for that brief moment he's on screen? (Answer: Uncountable.)

Most Underrated Films:
5. Cube--An English-language Canadian film that's taut, suspenseful, chilling, and thought-provoking. Hey, where are you going? Yes, this is a real film! Oh, come on, get back here! It's got Ezri Dax not sucking!
4. Save the Green Planet!--Features a towering performance from Paek Yun-sik. Pays homage to a number of different films--both good and bad--yet still has its own voice. A truly subtle and fascinating ending.
3. The Ref--Stars Kevin Spacey as Kevin Spacey, Denis Leary as Denis Leary, and Judy Davis as HotSexyAwesome!!!. A funny black comedy about a couple that hate each other. (Alternate title: The Movie The War of the Roses Tried to be And Failed.)
2. Prophecy--Christopher Walken as the archangel Gabriel, lots of Bible-quoting, an almost-priest with a crisis of faith, and Amanda Plummer? How could I resist? (Hint: I couldn't.) I was happy to see this movie ripped off by that atrocious Ghost Rider sequel. Hey, it means somebody saw it besides me!
1. Demon Knight--Great performances from William Sadler, Billy Zane (stop laughing), and Jada Pinkett-Smith Pinkett. Also okay are Thomas Haden Church, Dick Miller, and CCH Pounder. The demons look good, the backstory is straightforward and clear, the villain's motivations are suitably nefarious and simple, and the final showdown shows some moxie from a sassy heroine.

Most Overrated Films:
5. Se7en--M0rg4n Fr33m4n i$ gr34t 4$ 4lway4$, but th3 r3$t i$ ju$t unr3m4rk4bl3. Oh, and the "twist" is as shocking as a closet homosexual Republican. Remember what I said about the twist in Memento? Yeah, this is nothing like that.
4. Equilibrium--Noteworthy if you've never encountered dystopia. For everyone who has, the only fun is figuring out the sources the film's pilfering from. Oh, and Sean Bean dies (by which I mean, Sean Bean is in this movie).
3. Jacob's Ladder--The ending not only renders the entire movie pointless, but it's cheap and derivative. Plus, Tim Robbins sucks.
2. The War of the Roses--Thinks it's a sharp, witty deconstruction of marriage, but it's really just a crass exercise in misogyny and unfunny. An utterly unbelievable exercise in ludicrous violence and Michael Douglas "acting".
1. Every film Martin Scorsese has ever made. Yes, including the ones I haven't seen (i.e., most of them).

There! I hope you enjoyed this installment of "Things I Like or Dislike Arranged into Groups of Five". If you agree with any of my choices--and God help you if you do--please leave a comment. If you don't, then I kindly invite you to leave a long, angry rant explaining that I'm fat and stupid and probably gay and/or a furry that in no way addresses anything I said. And for the one reader out there for whom making lists like this accounts for approximately 42.7% of our conversations--and you know who you are--I know you're thinking, "Alas! What will we bicker pointlessly about now?!" Fear not! Print a copy of these lists, along with your own annotations, and bring them to our next meeting for further pointless bickering.

Southland Tales

Last night, I saw the worst movie I've ever seen in my life.

I don't say that lightly. I don't have a new "worst movie ever" every other week. The worst movie I ever saw was for fifteen or so years Peter Jackson (yes, that Peter Jackson)'s Bad Taste. It wasn't until 2005 that I saw the execrable Princess Aurora, a well-shot film that made me want to smack its writer/director upside the head for its depraved moral message and ludicrous ending. Now, five years later, we have a new world champion of suck.

My readers, I give you Southland Tales (2006).

This movie earned a whopping $350,000 worldwide, on a budget of about $17 million. One would hope this would be enough to ensure writer/director Richard Kelly will never work again, but if his previous pretentious sewage Donnie Darko is any indication, this film is bound to be seized upon as a work of genius by pseudo-intellectual hipster halfwits on DVD. The film is anti-government, filled with cryptic dialogue, and doesn't make any sense, the perfect movie for anyone who wants to maintain the illusion of deep thought without all that bothersome thinking. If a film is impossible to understand, every interpretation of it can be 'deep'.

I'm no stranger to bad movies. I've seen two and a half films by Uwe Boll. (In the Name of the King was putting me to sleep halfway through so I turned it off and played with my guinea pigs for an hour.) Three by Ed Wood. Two by Michael Bay. I'm sorry to tell you this, Kim Ki-duk, but you have been dethroned as the most godawful director in the history of human civilization. Mr. Kelly has taken your crown.

It's bad, folks. Shockingly bad. Not bad in a way that's fun or entertaining. Not bad in a way that's fascinating and impossible to look away from, like the aftermath of a terrible automobile accident or an unbelievable terrorist nuclear attack on Texas. No, it's bad in a way that makes you long for the directorial mastery of Coleman Francis. Whenever I hear the song "My Humps", I shed a single tear as a tiny piece of my soul dies. After ten minutes of this movie, I searched for a straight razor to run across my jugular. After watching the whole movie, I was ready to blanket the planet in nuclear weapons, rendering it uninhabitable to remove the danger of anyone else's ever seeing it.

What's it about? Don't ask me, I only watched it. I can't give you a plot synopsis. I can't even confirm that the film has a plot. All I can tell you is the background, which the film takes great pains to explain since it doesn't have any impact on the events about to unfold. Two cities in Texas have been nuked by terrorists...I guess. The narrator claims this started World War III against the Axis of Evil, but the two cities aren't strategic targets or even population centers and seem more like the kind of place a terrorist group would choose to bomb because they can't reach anywhere vital.

In the wake of these attacks, the government goes full on fascist with an even Patrioty-er Patriot Act. Well, kind of. "Clinton" is running for president (Barack who?) against guy-who-isn't-named-Bush-but-is-still-Republican-and-therefore-the-fascist-guy-we-don't-want-to-win-the-election. So apparently we aren't fascist yet, but we will be if Hilary doesn't win. So the Neo-Marxists want Clinton to beat the fascist candidate, even though we already appear to be fascist, what with the new Orwellian government agency USIDent keeping tabs on everyone and cops gunning down unarmed people in their own homes in front of witnesses. Or maybe not. Resisting the fascism of the not-yet-fascist government are the "Neo-Marxists", who also operate as terrorists. No, really. Because Marxist terrorism is a grave threat in today's world. How prescient this film is! The Neo-Marxists don't kill people, though. Instead, they blackmail the fascists by taking pictures of an actor who supports the fascist candidate making out with a porn star instead of his wife, which will cause them to lose the election. Clever, eh? How could the fascist guy win if a famous guy who supports his campaign cheated on his wife? Brilliant! Writer/director Kelly, my hat's off to you, sir. You have your finger on the pulse of current events.

What else has this dastardly fascist government been doing? Anyone faint of heart had better leave the room....okay, ready? They've invented environmentally-safe perpetual motion technology. Those bastards! This technology, dubbed "Liquid Karma", uses the movements of the ocean to power the country in a way that doesn't cause any harm to the surrounding environment and removes the need to use any other natural resource to generate energy. Now you see why the Neo-Marxists simply must bring this government down! Viva la revolution! Vote Clinton '08!

If you think this synopsis is confusing, try watching the film. Better yet, don't.

The performances are terrible, with only one exception: Wallace Shawn, in full Christopher Walken mode. (Meaning, he either didn't get any direction from Kelly or recognized the direction he got as the codswallop it was, so he just fell back on his default quirky performance.) Fortunately, Wallace Shawn is extremely good at doing Wallace Shawn, and his every appearance on screen lifted me up just a little from the morass of crap I was drowning in. Everyone else is either terrible or forgettable. The Rock is a capable actor, but he either didn't realize that Kelly's direction would make him look like an ass on camera or he didn't have the decency to give Kelly a People's Elbow instead of listening to him. Cheri Oteri reminds me why Saturday Night Live hasn't been relevant in 15 years. Stifler looks lost, whether because the script is a half-baked collection of ideas stolen from actual artists or because he himself is a cretinous sub-human with no more sense than God gave a turnip, I couldn't tell you. Sarah Michelle Gellar is convincing as a skanky pornstar until she attempts to act. Jon Lovitz is as expressive as a wax dummy of Keanu Reeves. Mandy Moore is unrecognizable and Not In This Film anyway. Christopher Lambert (seriously?) is along for the paycheck. Bai Ling is dressed in a sexy outfit and given a disastrous hair and make-up job that nullifies her sexiness entirely. John Larroquette gamely tries to give a performance but is constantly sabotaged by how inconsistently dopey his character is. I didn't know Miranda Richardson played the film's antagonist until I read its Wikipedia page; certainly the film itself gives no such indication.

No piece of overlong, pretentious tripe would be complete without a dream sequence that comes out of nowhere, has nothing to do with anything, and has no effect on subsequent events. Because God hates me, Kelly's got us covered: Justin Timberlake's inexplicable musical number that is somehow "the film's heart and soul", according to Kelly. Timberlake also narrates the film, but nothing he says helps us understand it. He is a soldier who mans a giant gun turret on the southern California beach. Yep, if the North Korean navy evades our entire Pacific fleet, bypasses Japan, and chooses a crowded public beach as the focal point of its amphibious invasion of America, by gum, we've got soldiers there to defend it! Timberlake's character is also a user of Substance D--err, I mean, Liquid Karma. Wait, what's that you said? Liquid Karma is the technology that allows the movement of the tides to power the country, so how can it be a narcotic? Because drug use was a big part of some of Philip K. Dick's great works, so Kelly shoehorns it into his Dickwankery whether it makes sense or not. Actually, Kelly does anything whether it makes sense or not.

Now, I don't quibble when people say something is the best or the worst in the world. I don't say to them, "Don't you mean, the worst movie that you've seen?" It's a silly thing to say. Of course I mean the worst movie I've seen. That doesn't even need to be stated. In this case, however, I did specifically start off this rant by saying it was the worst movie I've seen rather than the worst movie ever made. Why?

This movie seemed tailor-made to piss me off.

First, it's post-apocalyptic, one of my favorite genres and a genre that's very hard to do well (Zardoz, Waterworld) but can be very powerful when it is (The Road Warrior, Wall-E). This one isn't.

Second, it's a storytelling mess. Nothing makes any sense. Scenes begin and end at random. Some characters speak entirely in non sequiturs. The rest speak in circles. There's no identifiable protagonist or main story thread. Characters enter and exit the film without rhyme or reason. There's an annoying narrator who adds nothing and is not involved in the story. There is no sense the film is building to anything. The scenes could be reshuffled in any order and I don't see how it would make a difference. The ending implies (I think, I'm just guessing here) that everything that came before it was pointless.

Third, it's nothing but a pastiche of better stories. The dialogue is yet more tiresome aping of Tarentino, all discursive ramblings about nothing or discursive ramblings that appear to be about nothing but are really about something. (Christ, people, Pulp Fiction came out sixteen years ago!) Two of the characters (Taverner, Luft) have names from Dick's works, and then the Jon Lovitz character actually quotes half the title of one of Dick's books (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said). The whole style and feel of the film--the drug use, the multiple people, the anti-government paranoia--are all imitation Dick. The non-linear nature is very faux-Gilliam. There are a few halfhearted attempts to rip-off Blade Runner, but Kelly can't even figure out Ridley Scott's film, much less figure out how to copy it. Ah, Ridley Scott, before he caught Oliver Stone-itis and starting making big, dumb Braveheart clones....

Wait, where was I? Oh yes--fourth, Kelly profanes two of my personal greats by invoking them in a vain attempt to salvage this trash. The embarrassing attempts to ape Dick have already been noted. Then, just to pile on the insults, Kelly includes a snippet of my favourite piece of music. That's right, he pisses on Beethoven's grave by including a bit of the Ninth Symphony, Second Movement. Not just my favorite symphony, but my favorite movement of that symphony.

I about lost it at that point. I don't remember much of the last ten minutes of this absurdly long film. (Two hours and twenty-four minutes, really?) I can tell you that it's badly-acted, nonsensical, and doesn't resolve anything. So, in keeping with the rest of the film. Oh, and it included an out-of-nowhere dance sequence and an explosion that meant...something.

Or nothing, if I understood the ending. I wouldn't bet on it.