Buffista Movies 3: Panned and Scanned
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
The bad news: It's being written by the guy who wrote Troy.
That was actually a fan-freaking-tastic script. I cried. And that is difficult to do with a screenplay. The movie wasn't as good as the script.
I enjoyed Van Helsing a lot. I distinctly remember laughing the entire way through. But that might have been because of the looks on ita's face, or the way Burrell would try and rationalize things. Or my mom's fairly continuous snickering. Of course, Hugh and Kate had nothing on the burning flames of chemistry that Judi Dench and Vin Diesel were playing with in the trailer beforehand, so that might've distracted from the enjoyable experience for some. It's tough to follow such an act.
Like, Highlander; Endgame was Stigmata Bad.
God, that movie was freaking terrible. I still, to this day, can not live down talking my aunt into going to see it with me. I thought, I like the TV show, and Adrian Paul is pretty, how bad can it be? The answer was, of course, unimaginably bad-- so incredibly, embarrassingly bad. And Adrian wasn't even pretty. He had horrible jowls. Simply awful.
Like, Highlander; Endgame was Stigmata Bad.
Bah. For true badness, you've got to give it up to Highlander 2. Or the original Rollerball, for that matter.
On the dual-movies theme, don't forget about Bug's Life and Antz.
You want to talk badbadbad movie?
I think I've mentioned here my utter loathing of Magnolia. How it's become my comparator bad movie. ("It was bad, but not Magnolia bad.")
I have a new ultimate bad movie. It ekes past Magnolia for worst movie ever ever ever. I'd rather watch Magnolia again than this movie, and that's really saying something.
It was playing at my gym yesterday. It was so very watch-from-the-hall bad. Like, I was embarrassed to be in there while it was playing.
Scooby Doo 2.
I am not lying. Not even Seth Green added ANY redemptive quality to the movie.
I have a new ultimate bad movie. It ekes past Magnolia for worst movie ever ever ever. I'd rather watch Magnolia again than this movie, and that's really saying something.
Still World and Olympic champion: Bolero. Or pretty much any Bo Derek movie involving dialogue. Tarzan, the Ape Man is a particularly punishing example, and as a bonus, has a three hour Richard Harris death scene.
Bodyguard.
To watch it is to mock. Actually, it's highly MST3-able, which adds to its value somewhat.
Actually, Ken Russell made this ludicrous biopic of Tchaikosky with Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson back in the 70's called "The Music Lovers", which made me almost throw up, so I'll go with that.
Continuing on the dual-movie theme, there are two movies coming out this fall that deal with a woman encountering a young man/boy who is a reincarnation of her dead lover: "P.S." with Laura Linney and "Birth" with Nicole Kidman. It's such an 'out-there' concept, you gotta wonder if it started with one person's idea and got split into two movies sometime down the road.
That was actually a fan-freaking-tastic script.
Really? Now, I speak as a bit of a Homerian purist, but... really? I thought its elaborate attempts at political discourse were weak, and it totally hamstrung itself by writing the gods out of the picture. There isn't a single point in showing a temple, if the god and his acolytes don't revenge themselves bodaciously on the people who destroy that temple. Also? Shitty gender politics (and plain shitty characterization) with Briseis.
I think the script thought itself an historic-psychological treatise, and the implementation was Beefcake Central, but even without the silly/portentous implementation, the script was an extremely dim echo of its source material.
Highlander 2 is the worst movie I've ever seen in a theater. It sets a standard to which other bad movies can only aspire.
There's also
Chasing Liberty
and
First Daughter,
the latter having specifically moved its release date to avoid being included on lists like this.
There are also the two Alexander the Great biopics in the pipeline, though it looks like Stone's going to beat Luhrmann to the punch.