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Guest Blogger: BVC’s Worst Films of 2006

Published by Natasha January 4th, 2007 in Film, Guest Blogger.

Bryan VanCampen — Before we roll the ugliness, I have a few things I wanted to say here: some philosophy, some house cleaning, some ranting.

First of all, the list of worst films in the Ithaca Times was two movies too long, and so as I write this, two titles will be eliminated. Just to make things a little more fun, I won’t weigh which titles got the boot. Suffice to say that whether we’re talking 10 movies or 12 movies, every single on of these title should make you run screaming from the theater and/or video store and/or Netflix queue.

You know why, don’t you? It’s because movies are getting worse. I’ve been doing this almost 20 years, and while the movie business has always been cynical, the cynicism behind all these sanded-down family comedies and endless remakes and sequels is awesome, unfathomable.

Confession: For the last few months, I’ve been recoiling from almost every 2007 movie trailer. You know how it goes: if you go to a family cartoon, you see all the trailers for seven more of the same thing. This happened over and over, and my two salient thoughts were: “I don’t wanna be anywhere near that” and “I want a new job.”

Well, I still love movies, so don’t wait for news of my retirement until it happens. But there was a time when bad movies had a secure berth from January through April — the “dog days” of the movie year. But now, it seems like the flea collars have multiplied, and stupid movie are everywhere. Like, for instance…

10. Deja Vu
I only saw this time-travel turkey a little over a month ago, and already it’s mostly seeped out of my brain like “Doctor Who” plot lines and the multiplication tables. But still you have to hand it to Déjà Vu for being one of the most unexciting, labored and ridiculous time-travel yarns ever committed to film.

Set in New Orleans for some cheap rah-rah flag-waving reason, the movie stars Denzel Washington as a cop investigating the explosion of a ferry boat, when Val Kilmer and a band of uber-nerd scientists introduce him to a time traveling invention that will help him go back in time to solve the case. Never mind the fact that when he does so, and the plot should be speeding along, he stops off at someone’s house to clean up. Of course, if he had cleaned up, the movie would have been 20 minutes long.

You can’t even tell if the movie’s plot device makes sense; A-List hack Tony Scott makes the cast pound through all the laughable pseudo-science to make it a little less, well, laughable, and fails. Adam Goldberg, as Kilmer’s nerdy cool right hand dude, seems to be improvising all of his lines. Considering the stupid script, everyone else should have done the same thing.

9. Apocalypto

A movie for people who think it’s fun to force your buddy to eat testicle tapir.

8. For Your Consideration

I take no joy in slamming Christopher Guest’s new entry in his moc-doc comedy series. Then again, I never thought I would grow to despise Woody Allen’s films over the past few years. Let’s just say that Guest is incredibly bright; he has amassed an amazing stock company of comics who can not only ad-lib one-liners but evolve complex character portrayals over the course of the narrative.

Since collaborating with Rob Reiner on This is Spinal Tap, still the funniest moc-doc ever made, Guest and SCTV star Eugene Levy have taken on the subjects of dog shows, folk music and community theater. In For Your Consideration, Guest targets a trio of hapless, talentless actors who hear through the Hollywood grapevine that their performances in the simply awful melodrama Home for Purim might be Oscar bait.

This school of comedy loves crafting obnoxious entertainers strung up by their own lack of perception and ability. The trouble is that as smart as For Your Consideration is, it’s basically a 90-minute industry in-joke that no one outside of Hollywood cares about. It is also far too mean-spirited, as Guest’s comedies tend to go. Again and again, he raises the hopes of his characters, only to rub their noses in the mud when they get too vain, or too dumb for their own good. Hindsight is one thing, but cruelty to your characters is another.

7. Poseidon

Once upon a time, Wolfgang Petersen made Das Boot, and now he makes fill-in-the-blanks garbage like Poseidon. More’s the pity that he can no longer tell the difference. The original Poseidon Adventure may not have been the greatest thriller ever told, but it had vibrant characters, good pacing and authentic surprises. Now we have the shortened, pre-shrunk version, in which, well, everything is shortened: character, motivation, personality and logic. You can tell that Peterson spent more time creating a believable capsized ship than he did populating the deck with believable human behavior. Other than a pathetic attempt to make certain characters aware of the rogue tidal wave that will wipe out the ship (a pathetic wheeze of “24”-style melodrama), it’s just: sink ship, kill survivors and see who’s left.

That leaves us roughly two hours to guess whether Kurt Russell, Josh Lucas, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum, Andre Braugher or Kevin Dillon will live to pout more egregious clichés. Considering what they have to say and make believable, drowning would be preferable.

6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Merely the latest of many, many sequels who squandered a tremendous amount of audience goodwill on a spotty and overproduced series of set pieces with no compelling narrative to care about. Quite frankly, I know lot of fans of the first film who felt so burned by this sequel that they don’t even care about seeing the final chapter later this year.

5. X-Men: The Last Stand

This should have been all set: Bryan Singer made a good X-Men movie, made an even better sequel, and just when we were slavering for the X-Men movie to end all X-Men movies, Singer ran off to make Superman Returns, and Brett Ratner came in to wreck a great series.

The problems were legion: too dark, too violent, too many X-men deaths (if you’re going to kill X-Men, why not start with Halle Berry?), too many new characters with nothing to do. The script wasn’t ready, Ratner has none of Singer’s humanist flair in the midst of comic book heroics, and Kelsey Grammer was never meant to look like a big blue Care bear on steroids. You can practically hear the stars scream, “Once this is over, my contract is up and I’m outta here!”

Not a good way to tell a story, or engender love from the geek faithful. And so here we are with another financially profitable tent-pole movie that hardly anyone will admit to liking.

4. The Pink Panther

The problem I have with all the remakes and sequels is that you’re penalized if you have a memory. Most film school students I speak to wouldn’t dare see a movie made before 1995, and so who is watching all the originals, most of which are out on DVD? Nobody, which leads to more prefab junk like this.

I remember Steve Martin as one of the greatest, most transgressive comics of the 20th century, a fine actor and a great writer. With the exception of this exhumation of the Blake Edwards franchise, everything Martin has written for the movies has turned out to be a classic. And yet, a whole generation knows him as the doofy dad from the Cheaper By the Dozen series. That’s almost as sad as The Pink Panther.

Directed with no sense of timing or comic skill by Shawn Levy, the new model only proves that trying to usurp or top Peter Sellers’s portrayal of Inspector Clouseu is a fool’s game; Roberto Begnigni tried it and failed, and so did several other comedians. Martin brings nothing to the role and nothing to the trite screenplay, written with Len Blum. That makes sense for a movie that doesn’t need to exist.

3. World Trade Center

I’m sure there will be more 9/11 movies in the future, but World Trade Center is exactly the kind of rah-rah sentimentalized baloney I feared would be headed our way. It is nothing but a glorified TV movie stuffed with empty uplift and synthetic bathos. No offense to John McLoughlin, Michael Pena and their families (whose stories were the basis of Andrea Berloff’s network-ready weepie), but Paul Greengrass’s United 93 gets it right, and World Trade Center gets it wrong.

And how could Oliver Stone have made this thing? And with a straight face, yet? This is not the 9/11 movie we needed from the creator of JFK and Natural Born Killers. This feels more like the kind of movie a director makes after a costly fiasco like Alexander to tell the world he’s “bankable” again. Remember what I said about industry cynicism?

To give credit where due, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal give better performances than the film deserves.

2. Lady in the Water

Every once in a while, a filmmaker makes a movie so berserk, so out of touch with perceptible reality that the movie becomes a kind of unique fish out of water, a legendary bad movie up there with Slaves of New York and Battlefield Earth. Say what you want about M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady In The Water, it is the kind of wrong-headed, ridiculous bad movie that doesn’t come along all that often.

So you’ve got this motel cleaner/apartment super who stutters, and he discovers a waif in the swimming pool, and all of the characters must help solve the mystery of her existence, and there’s a film critic who gets swallowed whole, and Shyamalan himself plays a writer whose work will one day bring about world peace.

Not with scripts like Lady In The Water, I suspect.

1. Cars

Cars is the first big let-down from Pixar Animation, and I can only hope this automotive lemon gets discontinued. I got lots of grief from my family for panning this one; apparently, all my cousins and nieces and nephews loved it and watch it on a loop.
Well, I don’t write for the cousins and such, I write for myself. Plus, guess what? Most kids that young will happily hunker down for an extended test pattern, meaning that they’re not discerning viewers yet.

But after the combined joys of the Toy Story movies, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, this rusty remake of Doc Hollywood just won’t cut it. I hear the cars are incredibly realistic, and that the film is like porn for car buffs. I am not a car buff, but I do expect more from Pixar after all their hard work. Maybe kids will like it, but I was bored and not a little creeped-out by the whole notion: if the cars are alive, who built them? Why do they ride around an America sans people? And why do all the plot points loom on the horizon like mile markers?

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