December 16th, 2008
The Women Film Critics Circle has released its annual awards, and while the picks for Best Movie About Women (CHANGELING) and Best Movie By A Woman (FROZEN RIVER — which is supposed to be very good, but don’t hold your breath waiting for it to play in Rockford) are interesting, what’s really interesting are the anti-awards, like the selections for the group’s Hall of Shame. Drumroll, please…
ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED
HOUSE OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES
THE WOMEN
THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES
THE HOTTIE AND THE NOTTIE
SAVAGE GRACE
MADE OF HONOR
THE FAMILY THAT PREY
HOUNDDOG
ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO
I confess, I haven’t seen any of these movies (though, being a big fan of Paris Hilton’s acting career, I’m of course dying to see THE HOTTIE AND THE NOTTIE), but I did get a screener copy of the supposed-t0-be-terrible THE WOMEN last week. I’ll let you know how it is. Don’t get your hopes up.
December 16th, 2008
Today, the gang over at the Onion AV Club gives their rundown of the worst movies to hit screens in 2008. It’s a list that includes everyone from Indiana Jones to Eddie Murphy to Jessica Alba, but the top spot is saved for none other than Larry the Cable Guy and his cinematic non-masterpiece, WITLESS PROTECTION. As bad as the movie apparently was (heck, I didn’t see it. Did you?), the write-up ends on a hopeful note, predicting that maybe, just maybe, this sort of bad movie will be a thing of the past…
“Larry The Cable Guy’s redneck minstrel act was a perfect fit for George W. Bush’s America, a place where reason, empathy, and basic decency were derided as elitist qualities by a loudmouth extremist minority that pretended to represent Middle American values. But as 2008 draws to a close, a mainstream comedy that includes a scene where the “hero” refers to an Arab-American as “Pamperhead” without an immediate comeuppance seems to belong to another, hopefully distant era.”
Of course, there will always be stupid, inane, awful movies, no matter who’s in office or what the national mood is. And though I didn’t see WITLESS PROTECTION (I can’t stress that enough), I did see the No. 2 movie on the Onion’s list, the latest disappointment from a once-promising director, M. Night Shyamalan’s THE HAPPENING. Quoth the Onion…
“Shyamalan once looked like a brilliantly innovative stylist, but these days he’s starting to look like an incompetent craftsman with only one tool, which he keeps twisting to increasingly inappropriate tasks.”
Exactly. I saw few movies in the theaters this year (a child cuts way down on moviegoing), but one of them happened to be THE HAPPENING. Oh, how I wish that hadn’t been the case.
