Week Of December 27, 2006 - Wed / Fri

December 29, 2006

I have more than 40 films I want to write about in the discussion of my best of 2006. Embarrassingly, my list is particularly light on foreign language films this year. Part of that is my fault for not seeing as many foreign films. Part of it is that I am not as in love with the few titles that are not being released by American studio Dependents that some critical colleagues are.

But that's another conversation.

I barely have the energy to do this column, but the end of the year is coming fast and my intense urge towards self-indulgence is freaking me out a little. So…

THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2006.

Even more than in past years, I have protected my soul from most of the dreckiest dreck in the multiplex basket. There is only one title in the 20 top grossers of the year that I simply didn't bother with - Failure To Launch - but after that, they start to pile up… The Pink Panther, Saw III, RV, Underworld: Evolution, The Shaggy Dog, The Lake House, etc.

And I don't particularly take any pride or joy in ripping into crappy little indies that I hated (even when "Others seem to put them high On their Lists, JuDY").

Falling out of the Bottom 10 are The Road to Guantanamo - which is well enough made but to my sensibility a dangerous form of manipulating the truth - and Rocky Balboa, which is more mediocre than capital-B Bad.

The 10 that are that bad are so unique in their own ways that I feel incapable of putting them in order. Just when I think one is worse than another, some moment of horror hits my brain pan and the list screams for change like a TLC series.

American Dreamz
Wow. Aside from the carved out shape of Willem Dafoe's Chaney cut and Dennis Quaid's take on George Bush that could have been one of the year's best performances in a movie that had some small idea of how to take advantage of it, it was shocking to see how badly a guy as smart and talented as Paul Weitz could miss.

The idea of the film was grand and daring and very 1970s… a Michael Ritchie or Bob Altman kind of film with a strong scent of Garry Trudeau. But where Weitz probably failed most completely was in the choice to make the story so complicated. It was as though he felt he had to tell every joke in the story when, basically, a President going on American Idol would, in the great films of this style that proceeded it, be a foundational premise that never, ever had to call attention to itself. The audience would have said, "Oh my God… this is so stupid… but it could really happen," instead of the film telling them to think that in no uncertain terms.

As I just wrote, I hate to call out a filmmaker that was so ambitious and got a studio to make his movie. But when the opportunity is blown this badly, it makes the path for others trying to get the chance very narrow indeed.

The Da Vinci Code
One of four movies on this list that cost more than $150 million to produce, this film was the least troubled, most cleanly achieving what the filmmakers were hoping to achieve without all kinds of reasons why it might not work. It is also the most financially successful of the films. And it sucked harder than a tornado in Kansas.

There are the small, petty issues - is there a single person on the planet Earth who actually thought Tom Hanks' hair wasn't painful to look at? As brilliantly as Sir Ian did it, has any character in the history of the movies been forced to spit out more gobbledygook exposition than he did in this film? Was Paul Bettany's mad monk character meant to get laughs?

Then there are the big issues - Would someone please buy me a GPS for Christmas so I can get the slightest idea what happened in this storyline? How many times can a film claiming to be a drama allow its characters to be in immediate jeopardy only to escape not by cleverness, but by left-of-reality escape hatches? Why was this movie so afraid of the very controversial ideas that generated all those book sales and that box office?

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
Y ou can live with bad and you can live with pretentious, but the combination is deadly. Steven Shainberg had the good taste to hire Robert Downey, Jr. to play The Man Upstairs in this film. But pretty much every other decision involved was a misstep. Doing a Diane Arbus film that isn't really about Diane Arbus… duh. Hiring an lead actress who is too old to be emotionally and intellectually devirginized on screen… duh. Using a metaphor that already went wrong for Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry… duh. A movie that opens with naked people, obsesses on sex, shears the hairy beast, but fails to allow its leads any real sexual communication… duh.

Hostel
The failure of Hostel is that it is tame. It's a slasher movie for people who think the cinematography is what you need to be watching. Much as I hated it, any two minutes of the second half of Wolf Creek was more disturbing and scary that the entirety of Hostel.

The idea of Hostel actually appeals to me… European Road Trip runs into truly hostile natives. But the light part wasn't as funny as Road Trip or any of those kinds of films. And the horror part was muted and generally uninspired.

It's as simple as this for me… if you are in the middle of a movie that you know is supposed to be horrifying, seeing the guy's head sitting on a table is not horrifying… seeing a guy you know having his head cut off, especially in like of the beheadings in Iraq, is horrifying.

Do I really think I'd like that movie? Probably not. But I would respect it for delivering what it said it wanted to deliver.

Mission Impossible: III
Dumb dumb dumb-dumb, dumb dumb dumb-dumb… Dumb- dumb-dumb… Dumb-dumb-dumb... Dumb-dumb-dumb… Stu-pid!

It's real simple. There is not one stunt that matches the skylight break-in from M:I or the rock climbing or the bike chase form M:I2. Phil Hoffman is a great actor, but his character was not really the villain and his return in the third act seemed like a re-write/re-shoot. The real villain was pathetically bad.

Why does Tom have to break in to every place like he was Spider-Man and then see the rest of the M:I team walk in with fake ID? Why isn't the M:I team a team…. this time, they even added yet another body in the form of Tom's movie wife, taking even more away from the value of having an on-screen team. Why is the only person who seems to get the joke on screen Ving Rhames, whose grin is the grin of a man who can hear gold coins jingling out of the pockets of every set-up?

JJ Abrams may be a great guy. He is certainly brilliant about developing television concepts that change the face of the game. But he cannot direct a movie any better than any hour-long director in the business. The movie looked like shit. And the script was so smug and pleased with itself, that it would never deign to let us have any of the fun.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend
Painfully bad work on every level. Ivan Reitman was at his worst. Uma Thurman was abused by a script that made her a perfect choice for the concept and a terrible piece of miscasting for the specific story. Luke Wilson got shived by a script that made his character an absolute piece of shit of a guy and still wanted him to charm us all. Anna Farris was the sole survivor of this cast.

But as is so often the case, this film was destroyed by its script, which simply refused to make up its mind.. It felt like the ultimate how-a-studio-development-department-kills-a-cool-idea story. I have no way of knowing if that is true. But the Frankenstein monster of a story, which tried to have it every possible way, was agony.

Poseidon
The casting disaster movie of the year. The great casting pros, Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins, whose book "A Star Is Found" I highly recommend as a fun inside read, smashed into a brick wall on this one. Freddy Rodriguez, in this and Bobby, is the "one guy in a painful ensemble you actually want more of." But aside from him… BLECH!

Josh Lucas or Kurt Russell might have made a good leading man… having both was a disaster, to the point where the film actually splits them up in the third act for a while, obviously aware that two heads are worse than none. Jacinda Barrett is a very pretty actress who just doesn't pop on screen… ever! She was more charismatic on The Real World than she is in any of her films… and she wasn't all that interesting there. Emmy Rossum has terminal teen disease and she is just going to have to grow out of it. She needs to look at the energy that was in Mystic River for those few minutes and get there again. Richard Dreyfuss as a gay old man might have been great… had they written anything remotely interesting for him to do after his first scene.

Of course, Wolfgang Petersen is a master of the tight squeeze movie. But here, the geography of the upside down ship was so unclear and so uninteresting that it became a chore and soon, every scene was noting but a placeholder for the next scene. This is a truly horrible film and the sooner I forget it, the sooner I can be happy to see all of those involved do better work.

Running Scared
How do you follow up an interesting, intimate character study that got you the kind of attention in Hollywood that most directors would kill for? Why of course, you write and direct a hyperactive, aggressively violent, ugly, unpleasant, abusive clock movie about a parade of characters that mage to be clichéd and disgusting at the same time. And you top it off with a comedic child molestation and murder sequence.

Wayne Kramer needs a spanking. And his movie gave him one ($9 million worldwide).

Superman Returns
I actually do think that Bryan Singer is a lot more talented than this. But in a serious rush to get rolling, this was the best work he could crap out. And it stinks of rushing. It stinks of youth obsession. And it stinks of pretentious, un-thought-out bad ideas that no one really needed.

Let's hope Brandon Routh opens the sequel-that-probably-won't-happen in the shower when Lois brings him a towel and he explains this crazy dream he had. She was a 23-year-old with a 5-year-old son and a Pulitzer. She ended up fucking the boss' son, but actually allowed herself to get sentimental about it and let him raise her son even though they hadn't married after years of being together. He stalked their son, sneaking into a young boy's room at night without anyone complaining. And the boy had super powers that only work once a movie.

Phew. Glad that was just a dream!

How do you challenge an invulnerable man? This is the dramatic trouble with any Superman movie. Maybe, with less pressure on writing a script on speed, they will figure it out. For God's sake, let's hope so. Clearly, there is an audience for this character. If it's just as good as an average comic book, that will be good enough for most.

You Me, And Dupree
Owen Wilson is a great supporting character and not really a leading man. Wedding Crashers may have suggested otherwise, but really, with Vince Vaughn on one side and Rachel McAdams on the other, there was no losing. And then came Dupree.

The internal logic of this film was just thrown out any time someone had an idea to go do something funny. And that's a crappy way to run a railroad. Matt Dillon would have made a great Dupree, but was a terrible long-suffering guy. The only time Kate Hudson was interesting was when we were ogling her crocheted bikini… which we might not have bothered to do had we not already been so bored. And Owen just phoned this one in.

There were some truly crappy comedies this summer, but Dupree was the worst of them… beating out the midget baby, the absurd relationship comedy, the remote control comedy with a gruesome death wish, and Lindsay Lohan with her panties on. Impressive.

E Me.

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