These are the weekends that try my soul.

Crappy movies are one thing.  When a Freddy Got Fingered hits the screen, you have to just bite down and eat the excrement sandwich and know that someone thought something about it was funny.  But when you have three major releases, slick and shiny and deeply flawed… there is something that feels far more hypocritical about that. 

I’m going to start with Disney’s Big Trouble since I haven’t seen the film.  But it’s one of those intuitive situations.  I’m sure that the film is not hideously bad.  After all, there are a lot of talented people involved.  On the other hand, this is a film that had trouble getting into production, trouble during production and trouble getting a release date.  Like Sidewalks of New York, Big Trouble is one of the movies that seemed to use 9/11 as an excuse not to go to market.  It had already moved out of a summer slot into the low rent district of September. 

Once the film, which to be fair does involve the threat of a plane bombing, was on the move, it ended up in April, the cheapest time to release a movie with the outside chance of having a big opening weekend.  But compared to a “normal” release, Big Trouble has been awfully quiet.  Everyone involved seems ready to move on.  Tim Allen has already had a stiff in Joe Somebody and doesn’t need another one.  Rene Russo is having a rough year.  And Barry Sonnenfeld is hard at work, trying to finish up Men in Black II, which had to be re-jiggered to not include the World Trade Center as a set. 

But it is Disney that, smartly, seems to have taken the write-down on the film even before it opens.  There are TV ads, but not nearly as many as you might expect.  The noise has been held to a low roar compared to something with less commercial elements, but which Disney seems to really believe, like The Rookie.  If Big Trouble opens to $6 million… which seems likely… it won’t be a real shock.  The only question then will be why Disney didn’t save the $6 or so million in interest that sitting on the movie this long has cost.

On the other hand, High Crimes is a petty theft of anyone who lays out dollar one to see it on a big screen.  Just when I thought that there could never be a worse Ashley Judd programmer than the one that made her an eight-figure star, Double Jeopardy, here comes this… thing.  Normally, my advice to someone like Ms. Judd, who has made enough money to start making better choices, would be to work with better directors.  But that is the greatest irony here.  Bruce Beresford made Double Jeopardy.  And Carl Franklin is the man behind the camera on High Crimes. 

The trouble is that everyone is slumming.  Judd has brought in good directors who desperately needed to do something commercial.  I mean, how ugly is it for Franklin, who did his best work in the dramatic, non-ethnic, powerful One True Thing, to follow it up with this crap?!?!  But that film was four years ago!!!  The guy needed work!  (Fortunately, buddy Denzel Washington had enough juice to bring him aboard or to get Franklin’s project financed – I don’t know which way it worked – for/as Washington’s next film.)  Beresford hadn’t made a studio film in six years when he made Double Jeopardy.  And after making a film a year for most of his career, it was two years after he had made the high-quality, low-box office film Paradise Road that he got the Double Jeopardy gig.  Slumming. 

Just as Tommy Lee Jones suffered a big payday for Double Jeopardy, so it goes for Easy Reader aka Morgan Freeman on High Crimes.  I suspect that the results will not be as good at the box office this time around.  Franklin does an acceptable job moving the pieces around the board, but perhaps as a way of keeping the budget lower, Director of Photography Theo Van De Sande seems to use a lot of overhead lighting, which is not good for Ms. Judd, whose only problem as a film actress has always been imperfect skin.  Van De Sande is quite capable of creating warm, rich lighting that makes movie stars look like movie stars.  And he does it a few times here.  But the inconsistency is stunning.

But the inconsistent look of the film is nothing compared to the careening story points in the screenplay.  Judd’s women-in-jeopardy films, as many others in this generation, have spun off of the late Richard Marqand’s Jagged Edge.  That was 17 years ago and, man, has this premise become shopworn!  The evolution of the aging, often comic, sidekick who seems to be a problem, but always comes through in the end reaches near parody as Freeman manages to choke out lines like, “I love being the wild card.”  Juan Carols Hernandez, who we all know is supposed to be a bad guy because of the evil, healed-over eye injury he sports, does a good job of acting.  And never gets paid off for his effort.  Adam Scott as the could-be-dangerous geek is still waiting for his first major film role that isn’t embarrassing.  At least he gets to bed Amanda Peet… whose role is also inexplicable.  If the slutty sister is attracted to the military geek because he gives/obeys orders, couldn’t the film have a little fun with the kink of it all?  I guess not.  It’s too busy trying to twist us into interest in the story.  Yawn.

Virtually every major story point in this film was ridiculously predictable.  I predicted many of them, whispering about the first act action that was clearly going to pay off in the third act, but was conscious about making noise in a movie, even one as bad as this one.  (The guy who kept checking his cell phone messages behind me had no such problem.)  But you know that predictability is a problem when it is not only obvious, but when you can tell that the film is leaving obvious things out in order to get to the predictable outcome.  You know, questions unasked, characters lingering but unidentified, etc. etc. 

And then there is National Lampoon’s Van Wilder… oy.  The most surprising thing about this film is that they are actually releasing it into theaters.  The last few “National Lampoon’s Fill-In-The-Blank” films have gone right to video.  (Did you even know that there was a “National Lampoon’s Golf Punks” or a “National Lampoon’s Favorite Deadly Sins?”  I didn’t, until I researched this piece.) 

I suppose this is the wrath of Dude, Where’s My Car? (which I liked, in spite of my better instincts and which grossed almost $48 million domestically) and Super Troopers (which I did not like but grossed $18 million domestically).   Both were cheap.  (Troopers was a $2 million acquisition.) Both were marketed prudently.  Both made a great return on the dollar.  Van Wilder must have been made with this in mind, using whatever juice the National Lampoon tag has left in order to turn a quick buck before releasing a DVD that claims to have “extra” material too wild for the theaters. 

Let’s look back to the great days of National Lampoon comedies, shall we?  Let’s look back to 95% of comedies that work, shall we?  They are based in some level of reality.  The grossest of gross jokes are still based in your belief that they could, in a wilder world than we live in, actually happen.  Is it likely that a girl, looking to spit her boyfriend’s semen out, might spit it into a cup of beer on the nightstand?  Sure.  Haven’t we all – over 21 – picked up and at least almost drunk a beer at a party that turned out to have a cigarette butt in it?  Sure.  So the American Pie gross-out gag worked.  Are there men who become orgasmic through anal stimulation?  Yes. So the Road Trip gross-out gag worked. 

What about Van Wilder?  Well, one of the few laughs in the screening I attended (and I was not one of the laughers) was when Van Wilder (the great, still-needs-“the”-role Ryan Reynolds) engages in sex with an unattractive, aging, horny college clerk.  But did I believe that he would have actually gone through with it?  No.  Did I believe that Otter (Tim Matheson) actually wanted to show his cucumber to Dean Wormer’s wife (Verna Bloom)?  Absolutely.  The more subtle joke was funnier because it was real, if not a little surreal.

When Pinto (Tom Hulce) ends up with a handful of tissue after taking off Clorette DePasto ‘s (Sarah Holcomb) bra, did I believe it?  Absolutely.   Was it in any way real when Taj (Kal Penn) greases up his date, catches fire and slides out of a second story window into a pond?  No.  Is all that a broad enough gag to make a teenager laugh the way my pre-teen nephew and niece laugh at Viva Rock Vegas?  Maybe.  Is it anything but the lowest comic dreck?  No. Sorry.

I was planning on scalding the team that made the movie, but I will restrain myself.  Between the director, the writers, the editor and the Director of Photography, they have a grand total of one theatrical release in the last five years… and that one grossed less than $5 million.  There are, however, three produced features in the group that were not good enough to get released into theaters.   I’m not saying that they have to try to resurrect John Landis in order to try to make a National Lampoon cheapo college comedy.  But how about hiring some people who at least give the indication of being able to do something worth watching.  I’m sure these are all great guys and some are clearly solid TV pros, but… oy!!!  Hire Cameron Crowe’s first A.D.  Give it to a lunatic like Don Hertzfeld.  Let Screech direct!  Anything!  If it’s just going to be a stop on the home video trail, take a freakin’ chance for God’s sakes! 

At least the baseball season is here…

READER OF THE DAY:  Not The Old Aussie, Who’s Really Belgian writes:  “I read the ROTD that complained about how dumb it is for studios to release similarly themed movies so close together. Here are more examples:

I have not been able to bring myself to see either No Man's Land or Harrison's Flowers, two movies I would probably like, because between Black Hawk Down, Hart's War, and We Were Soldiers, I am pretty burned out on war movies.

Last weeks discussions about the troubles with Oscars failed to mention my biggest complaint about the Oscars which also falls in this same category. Studios cater to Oscar by releasing all their best films in December and January.

Of the 29 movies released nationwide that garnered at least one nomination, 16 of them were released nationwide in December or January. If a studio's goal is to get nominations, the strategy obviously works, but if studios actually want to maximize profits, they are going about it all wrong.

From those 16 films with nominations, I only found time to watch 9 of them, and I am an avid moviegoer. That does not include many other quality films released in December and January hoping for Oscar gold that failed to get any nominations. Had they been spread out over the rest of the year, I probably would have seen them all. I easily managed to see all 14 nominated films released prior to December.

By overcrowding the marketplace, good movies are getting squeezed out early, never find an audience, and thus go unwatched. The summers are always filled with mind numbing kids fare and special effects, but films like Ali and A Beautiful Mind would have worked quite well as an alternative and probably would have done better as a summer release than a holiday release. Studios blame the poor showing of quality films on public taste, rather than the real culprit: catering to Oscar.

With all of this talk about Dr. Nash's deep dark secrets, apparently no one in Hollywood has even bothered to study the economic theory that got him the Nobel Prize. If they did they would understand that if studios released quality films year around, they would find audiences easier, and the public would develop a better taste for them. (Remember that scene in A Beautiful Mind about the strategy for picking up women? Think of the beautiful blonde as Oscar.)”

E ME:  Will you be paying to see this crap?