Look, up in the sky! It’s a snake! It’s a plane! It’s—well, not the
worst movie of this year, even though it seemed to have been carefully
sculpted to win that crown. Either way, Snakes on a Plane was the flick
to talk about in 2006. Really, did the world need Superman when it had
a motherfucker like Sam Jackson?

The answer, of course, is that there was plenty of room, if not
love, for both of them on the world’s silver screens. (And, just maybe,
they’ll nestle into one or 100 Top 10 lists this month.) The funny
thing is that although fanboys might have freighted message boards with
their cynicism about how the return of the Man of Steel was shaping up,
Hollywood threw the best comic-moviemakers it had at the production.
And it was good.

But the suits handed Snakes over to the people. Tweak the dialogue?
Sure. Reshoot scenes? Why not? Even the rating was changed, all to
incorporate the so-terrible-they’re-great ideas the Internet-savvy
believed were crucial for Snakes on a Plane to live up to its
so-terrible-it’s-great name.

And though few actually bothered to see it, it was good.

Now consider what Tinseltown thinks we want to see. (“We” meaning
the Great Unwashed, not the Academy.) Out of the 181 films I’ve seen
this year—a fraction of the releases—picking out the best of the bunch
was a snap. But narrowing down the worst? My God. When a movie goes
bad, it’s usually very, very bad. Rant-to-your-companion bad. Bad to
the nth degree. I was allowed to officially castigate only three (see
page 26), and the decision tortured me. I had well over two dozen of
’em on my just-atrocious list—and, unlike my early days as a Washington
City Paper critic, I’m not often sent to the throwaway movies anymore.
Who knows how frequently my senses were spared.

The winnowing ultimately came down to two things: 1) how many
different ways a particular movie sucked and 2) which of those
transgressions offended me the most. By my quick count, there are 10
aspects of a film that Joe “Has Standards” Moviegoer could recognize as
having gone seriously wrong—or sadly, from the studios’ perspective,
$$$. Er, I mean, just right.

Awful dialogue is a personal favorite, from The Grudge 2’s
earnest/frightened/pathetic “I don’t know what to believe anymore!” to
Ultraviolet’s quite seriously played “Are you mental?!?”

You, Me and Dupree falls—and falls hard—under many categories:
Clichéd storyline. Cheap comedy. Blatantly stereotypical characters.
(To Owen Wilson: Fer chrissakes, just say no. The fact that your Dupree
does a 180 in the last chapter isn’t depth, it’s making the movie
worse.) Embarrassing acting was all over the place, but let’s award
first place in that category to those who should know better: Here’s to
Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx’s sleepwalk through Miami Vice.

A sexy, wet-haired (for some reason) vampiress. (I’m sorry, “vampire
warrior.”) Werewolves. Very cool gray-blue environs. These—I’m talking
to you, Underworld: Evolution—shouldn’t add up to the most boring
action movie ever made.

Finally, the last four typical no-nos—remakes, sequels/prequels,
scary movies that are just bloody, and scary movies that aren’t
scary—are efficiently covered by two contenders: The Hills Have Eyes is
pure gore and no fun, while The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
is pure gore and no fright. (If I were to bet, I’d guess that most of
the year’s other “horror” flicks weren’t classics, either.)

But 2006 doesn’t win any blue ribbons for its haplessness. As it was
in the past, so will it be in the future. The era of the
audience-assembled movies, though, may indeed be over, just as abruptly
as it began, if folks don’t go out and actually see them. You’ll have
no one but yourselves to blame when Little Man 2 comes to a theater
near you.

Sometimes, though, stupid can be sublime. Jackass Number Two may
surprise you with how funny watching grown men getting repeatedly
punched in the face can be. As for Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny,
all I have to say is: “cock push-ups.” It’s too silly not to get a
giggle.

Here are some others that scored. Some are original; some looked
like quickto-DVDers. If you can, go see what you missed the first time
around.

The Top 10 Brilliantly Stupid Movies of 2006…

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Directed by Larry Charles

Jackass Number Two
Directed by Jeff Tremaine

Snakes on a Plane
Directed by David R. Ellis

Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny
Directed by Liam Lynch

Crank
Directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor

Employee of the Month
Directed by Greg Coolidge

Strangers With Candy
Directed by Paul Dinello

Madea’s Family Reunion
Directed by Tyler Perry

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Directed by Adam McKay

The Wicker Man
Directed by Neil LaBute

…and Three of the Worst

THE LAKE HOUSE – Unlike Sandra Bullock
and Keanu Reeves’ lovelorn characters, I do not live in a ridiculous
glass house. So I’m hurlin’ stones: You can’t save time in a bottle,
and you can’t fall in love via a tear in the space-time continuum.
Even one conveniently – I mean stupidly — shaped as a mailbox.
Reportedly, after reading the script, Keanu even abandon his
trademark “whoa” in favor of “oh please.”

ANOTHER GAY MOVIE –  Give thanks this
season if you haven’t seen Richard Hatch’s Li’l Survivor.   He bared
it all for Another Gay Movie, a disgusting, unfunny, and downright
contemptible 92 minutes of abusing soap,  cucumbers, and laxatives,
and generally insulting gay people’s intelligence. Unless you like
listening to caricatures talk about “penis drippings, ill-timed
queefs, and 31 flavors of genital cheese.”

THE GRUDGE 2 – Amber Tamblyn, an
incomprehensible story line, murder by hairing – merely three of
the many reasons to have avoided this sequel of 2004’s The Grudge.
Er, or the remake of 2003’s original Japanese version, Ju-on: The
Grudge 2.  Either way, it all comes down to two globe-trotting
ghosties boring people to death.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

And that’s why I don’t drive anymore.

To put it plainly, most of Off the
Black is simply terrible. Its summary: Gruff, lonely man getting up
in years befriends a naive teenage boy, life lessons are learned, and
the ending is sad yet hopeful. Think you’ve seen it before? You have,
in versions ad nauseam.

Off the Black even shares a cast member with
one of them. Nick Nolte, whose character, Ray Cook, is based on the
actor’s mug shot, also portrayed an unlikely sage to a youngster in
this year’s Peaceful Warrior. Here Nolte plays a 57-year-old junkyard
worker and a high-school-baseball umpire. Ray drinks all the time, is
barely intelligible, and doesn’t really know anybody but is often
recognized, usually with venom, as the local ump. When he calls a
ball on pitcher Dave (Trevor Morgan), a decision that cost his team a
championship, Dave and a few teammates TP and otherwise vandalize
Ray’s yard. Dave gets caught, Ray makes him take responsibility and
clean it up – and the mentor/father figure relationship begins.

Writer-director James Ponsoldt litters his film with weird lines
(“You look like a worm set up shop in your colon”) and scenes of
cliched preciousness (camera zooms out in steps as Ray sits alone in
a stadium, Teacher and Student take pulls on a bottle as they discuss
Life). Naturally, Dave has family issues, with a depressed dad
(Timothy Hutton) and a little sister who’s annoying but whom he seems
to like (Sonia Feigelson, who “acts” by working her big brown
eyes).

Ponsoldt’s twist is having Ray ask Dave to accompany him to
his 40th high-school reunion and pose as his son. It’s slightly
ridiculous – wait till you see how Dad reacts to his teenage boy
dressing to the nines to go out with a much older, unfamiliar man –
but from the reunion on, Off the Black ups its game. While
interacting with others, these characters finally start to feel
human, and their bond no longer seems forced. Morgan believably
depicts the awkwardness of being on the cusp of adulthood and how
irritating mouth-breathing kids can be. (Talent, or merely good
timing?) And though moviegoers may forever think of Nolte as equally
pathetic as Ray because of that infamous DUI pic, the reality is one
can’t just stumble onto a set and evoke soul-crushing solitude and
hopelessness, which the vet gradually then suddenly pulls out of his
hat. Ray confesses to Dave, “No, I’m not happy, but I wear it
well.” Nolte does, too, but it’s because the chops are there.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Don’t forget the milk.

 
Regardless of your feelings about the
fantasy genre, there’s one thing everyone can agree on: Elves should
not be 5′6”. But in Eragon, key elf Arya (Sienna Guillory) stands
tall next to her fellow characters; she even has human ears. Whoops!

This sloppiness is indicative of director Stefen Fangmeier and
scripter Peter Buchman’s bland butcher-job on Christopher Paolini’s
popular novel of the same name. The book, which the now-23-year-old
Paolini began writing at 15, is full of magic and lore, yet it hardly
gets the Harry Potter treatment. Instead, its 544 pages are crushed
into a 104-minute film, with characters dropped and plots
manipulated.

And at the center of it all is a  talking dragon,
Saphira, voiced by Rachel Weisz. (Perhaps another universal opinion:
Fierce, fire-breathing dragons should not drop one-liners, especially
Buchman’s.) When she shuts up and races  across the sky, Saphira is
the biggest wow factor in the film, but she doesn’t have a lot of
competition: Her rider, Eragon (a Tiger Beat-ready Edward Speleers),
is the boy of disinterest here, a 17-year-old farmhand who’s hunting
when an ovular blue thing appears on the ground – through a portal,
I suppose, since it’s smoking. Eragon gapes at it then brings it to
his shack, where he gapes at it some more. Soon it hatches into a
cute widdle feathered dragon, and blah blah, Eragon discovers with
the help of Brom, a grizzled former dragon rider (Jeremy Irons), that
he’s been chosen to resurrect this…mode of transportation, which
became extinct when Brom’s own flying beast was intentionally killed.

There’s also an occupation involved, as well as the aforementioned
guess-who’s-she’s-destined-for elf who had been carrying the egg, and
a black-magic dude (Robert Carlyle) who’s trying to get Saphira back
to her rightful owner, the evil King Galbatorix (John Malkovich,
using his haughty purr to make his few minutes’ of screen time seem
Oscar-worthy compared to the rest of the cast).

The movie is as
beautiful – it was filmed mostly in the green mountains of Hungary
– as the story is predictable, and it also gets points for Saphira’s
CG and an intense battle scene. But this skeletal rendering of
Paolini’s vivid book is ultimately the equivalent of Fantasy for
Dummies. The filmmakers should have taken advice from the script: As
Brom first says to Eragon, “Mind your corn.”

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

            

DISCLAIMER: The nonbronze person in this photo is not me. (But it kinda looks like me,
doesn’t it? I mean, back in high school.)

Believe it or not, I belong to a 100 percent genuine critics’ group. (No, I didn’t have to pay them.) And like seemingly everyone else on the planet, we recently put our collective hands to our collective chins and thunk up which movies we believed were 2006’s best.

So follow the link and you’ll find the official results of the Washington, D.C., Area Film Critics Association’s musings. Few surprises here, and I agree with many of them. (Except, well, I still haven’t actually seen United 93. First I refused out of prinicple — really, I do have a few of those — and now that the movie’s receiving so many accolades, it’s more of a stomach issue. But the DVD sits on my coffee table, waiting for me to stop being such a wimp.)

Anyway, here ya go:

http://www.digitalproducer.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=88302

Please, Jack, let’s never see this longing
expression — nor speak of this — again

Right at the gate, The Holiday has two
things working against it: It’s seasonally themed. And it’s a
romantic comedy. You can’t stitch together a more dangerous
combination, even with writer-director Nancy Meyers (see: Something’s
Gotta Give) in charge – or perhaps that should be “especially
with”  (don’t see: What Women Want). Meyers allegedly puts forth
the realities of romance, and she often does. But, dammit, she just
can’t resist that sprinkling of fairy dust, and The Holiday gets a
generous dose.

The focus is on two hardworking women who, trying to
recover from bad relationships, agree to swap homes for solo
vacations. Amanda (Cameron Diaz) is a movie-trailer editor who sleeps
with her BlackBerry instead of her straying boyfriend (Edward Burns).
Iris (Kate Winslet) is a newspaper reporter who’s getting mixed
messages from an ex (Rufus Sewell) and is devastated when she finds
out he’s getting married. The very next day, Iris is off to Amanda’s
giant L.A. home while Amanda heads to Iris’ cozy English cottage for
intendedly men-free adventures. Right.

Superstars have often elevated
Meyers’ scripts, their charisma and comedic skill seducing you into
loving their characters despite some oh-please lines such as “I
finally know what I want…and what I want is you.” Jude Law gets
to deliver that one in The Holiday, whose big names can’t help the
waaay contrived story because most of them shouldn’t be there in the
first place: Winslet, for instance, should never giddily bed-dance
and play air guitar to Jet. Law is better as a cad than someone who
admits to weeping during touching commercials. And Jack Black may
want to stretch, but as an “incredibly decent man” who ultimately
sees himself as a loser? Let’s hope we never see *that* again. The
only one who belongs here is Diaz, who, despite performing one goofy
dance (it must be in her contract), finally gets to integrate her
fizziness into a character who’s a full-grown woman.

Meyers does
serve up some nice scenes, the best of which involve Iris’ friendship
with the revered elderly scriptwriter next door (Eli Wallach). And
there are vulnerable, true-to-life moments that you won’t see in
typical romantic comedies. But as one gag suggests – Amanda hears
the Trailer Guy narrating movie-of-her-life commercials in her head –
The Holiday is little more than your usual predictable Hollywood
throwaway.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

A scalpel-wielding Robin Hood is the
slasher genre’s latest bwah-ha-ha-er in Turistas, a rip-off of Eli
Roth’s 2005 Hostel and an incredible bore.  Director John Stockwell
and debut  scripter Michael Arlen Ross spend on awful lot of time on
Turistas’ generic setup: A group of pretty white kids meet in a
remote area of Brazil after their lead-footed bus driver nearly kills
them (oh, if only). Instead of waiting 10 hours for the next bus to
arrive, they wander over to a nearby isolated beach, complete with
bar, and get naked there. (“Do you guys mind if I go topless?”
asks a blonde who’s forgotten half of her bikini. After the boob
scene, the rest of her swimwear  magically appears.)

Does anyone –
especially a horror fan — ever really enjoy watching characters
you’re barely familiar with frolic in Crayola-blue oceans by day and
party down by night when you’re only there to see ‘em get sliced?
They drink, they make out, they dance; the next morning, the tourists
wake up to discover they’d been drugged and robbed. A native they’ve
befriended, Kiko (Agles Steib), offers to help – by taking them on
an arduous journey to Uncle Stabby’s house.

Turistas is the worst
kind of horror movie: Nothing’s outrageously wrong with it, but
there’s very little that’s right, either. Among the blank cast
members — who include Josh Duhamel and The O.C.’s limited-time
lesbian, Olivia Wilde –  Melissa George is the only one who doesn’t
text it in, making her Australian world-traveled, Portuguese-speaking
Pru likable and sympathetic. The plot itself is a little more
unbelievable than your typical bloodbath; for instance, these victims
are hopelessly dumb and culturally ignorant, yet all turn out to be
expert cave swimmers. The fact that they even end up opting to
negotiate their way through underwater hollows is another thing
altogether, but as it turns out, these are the best scenes: Stockwell
previously helmed Into the Blue and Blue Crush, and he’s an ace at
evoking both the gorgeousness and danger of the deep.

But back to
that scalpel. The killer, who’s introduced too early and already
might as well have “organ harvester” on his forehead, doesn’t
make his second appearance for a looong while. Even then, the
squirmiest sequence is one been-there operation, a suspense-free
gutting that the Discovery Channel could put to shame.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

The next time viewers of Black Gold
duck into a Starbucks, they might just skip that biscotti because
they’ll feel too full of guilt. Marc Francis and Nick Francis’ debut
film follows Tadesse Meskela, the manager of the Oromia Coffee
Farmers Co-operative Union in Ethiopia, where the cup of joe was
born.

By all logic, Meskela should be a man of leisure:
Considering the seemingly unstoppable growth of coffee chains in this
country and around the world, you’d think the 74,000 farmers his
union represents would be rich. In fact, however, the growers on
average receive about a quarter per kilo of beans – a weight that
equals over two hundred dollars when calculated according to what the
Westerners pays for  their daily fix. Meskela’s tireless mission,
therefore, is to turn around this 30-year low, the result of the 1989
collapse of the International Coffee Agreement.

Black Gold is a
variation on the theme explored in last year’s Darwin’s Nightmare,
which horrifically revealed the plight of African countries that are
resource-rich but cash-poor. In comparison, though, the Francises’
documentary feels thin. Meskela is shown calling attention to his
cause internationally, at coffee conventions and even at a meeting of
the World Trade Organization, where the powers that be continue to
ignore Africa’s plea to be granted fair trade instead of first-world
aid. There are discussions about the lack of quality education for
Ethiopian children as well as goofier scenes such as a barista
competition to pad things out, but mostly the subtitles repeat the
same mantra: Farmers are not being paid a just – or even living –
wage for their efforts. And unlike the fishermen in Darwin’s
Nightmare, who depend on scraps for their dinner, Black Gold’s
growers are shown having a more profitable option by switching their
crops from one addictive substance to another – namely chat, a
narcotic leaf that many of their downtrodden countrymen chew like
bubblegum. That’s a trade that goes beyond unfair to just plain sad.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com