90 least favorite films of the first decade of the 21st century

Oldboy

A follow-up to my earlier list of favorites, this alphabetical rundown represents the nadir of my viewing experience over the last ten years. Just as there’s a difference between ‘favorites’ and ‘best,’ what I consider atrocious you may hold dear. Granted, Yi Yi has mostly admirers; forty-five minutes into the thing, however, and I’m ready to hang myself.

    I loathed them all. I found none ‘so bad it’s good.’ Outside of investment potential, some had no visible reason for being; others sent me into a coma. There are scads of dull thrillers, idiotic action movies, incoherent indies, unfunny comedies, tedious Woody Allen misfires and shit-for-brains Troma flicks I’ve yet to catch up with, so don’t be alarmed by their absence here. I compiled it from my personal Netflix ratings (each picture barely earning one sad little star), where I occasionally left comments for friends. For example, on Dude, Where’s My Car? I noted, “No matter how bad you think this might be, it’s worse.” Ain’t that the truth…


10,000 B.C. (2008)
Across the Universe (2007)
All the Love You Cannes (2002)
The Amateurs (2005)

Barbershop (2002)
Basic Instinct 2 (2006)
Bedazzled (2000)
Blue Crush (2002)
The Brown Bunny (2004)
The Butterfly Effect (2004)

The Celestine Prophecy (2006)
Chicago (2002)
Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)
Cote d’Azur (2005)

D.E.B.S. (2004)
Dance of the Dead (2008)
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
The Da Vinci Code (2006)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)
Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000)

Fantastic Four (2005)
Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie, 2001)
Femme Fatale (2002)
Frequency (2000)

G.I. Joe: the Rise of the Cobra (2009)
Gladiator (2000)
The Good German (2006)
Good Luck Chuck (2007)
Gosford Park (2001)
Gun Shy (2000)

Hollywood Dreams (2007)
How Much Do You Love Me? (2007)

I’m Not There (2007)
In Bruges (2008)
Inside (2007)
Irene in Time (2009)
The Italian Job (2003)

Jumper (2008)
The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)
Kikujiro No Natsu (Kikujiro, 2000)

Leatherheads (2007)
Les Destinees (2000)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
Lost in Translation (2003)

Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus (2009)
Mission to Mars (2000)
Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (2007)
My Best Friend’s Girl (2008)

Ocean’s 11 (2001)
Oldboy (2003)
Open Water 2: Adrift (2006)
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006)
The Others (2001)

Panic Room (2002)
Paranoid (2000)
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Pearl Harbor (2001)
Pieces of April (2003)
Pride and Prejudice (2005)

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Running Scared (2006)

Scary Movie 2 (2001)
Serenity (2005)
Sin City (2005)
Small Time Crooks (2000)
Smiley Face (2007)
Species III (2004)
Speed Racer (2008)
Stardust (2007)

Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her (2000)
Three Can Play at That Game (2007)
Towelhead (2007)
Trick ‘r Treat (2008)
Tropic Thunder (2008)

Unbreakable (2000)
Unfaithful (2002)
Unrest (2006)
Untraceable (2008)
Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005)

Valkyrie (2008)
Vertical Limit (2000)

The Weeping Meadow (2004)
Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
Who’s Your Daddy? (2005)
Winter Sleepers (2000)
World's Greatest Dad (2009)
Wrong Turn (2003)

Yi Yi (2000)

The Mel Brooks Collection on Blu-ray

Nine Mel Brooks films in one Blu-ray set: The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, The History of the World Part I, To Be Or Not To Be, Spaceballs, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights

From Fox Home Entertainment | Buy it from Amazon

Review by Dennis Cozzalio

As the godfather of what might be generously described as a dominant strain of comedy that remains popular into the 21st-century, it would seem that Mel Brooks has a lot to answer for. His particular brand of movie parody, forged in the white-hot success of the 1974 one-two punch of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, would set the bar for the Zucker Brothers (The Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane, Hot Shots et al), Ken Shapiro (The Groove Tube) and every other schmuck who picked up a camera to film a kitchen-sink movie parody, up to and including writer-directors Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, who carpet-bombed the genre with a streak of ghastly comedies like the Scary Movie series, Spy Hard, Date Movie, Disaster Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans.

    It’s clear enough to anyone who can quote Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein backward and forward that there is a huge gap between the energy, spirit and, in the case of Saddles, delirium and even anger that Brooks brought to those movies and the soul-crushing emptiness of the …Movie movies. But within his own films Brooks was often wildly inconsistent — in a great comedy like Saddles, the highs were so high that the brief time the viewer spends in the valleys is a fair trade-off; the more balanced, well-paced, reassuringly genial satire of Young Frankenstein probably accounts for its being held up by more fans as the pinnacle of Brooks’ work as a writer-director. (It was also, for those less welcoming of his broad comic persona as an actor, the only one of his hit movies outside of his debut with The Producers into which he did not insert himself.) The rest of his work has much more of a grab-bag feel to it — for every grin, there might be as many as two or three groans.

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Review Copyright © 2009 by Dennis Cozzalio

Molly dear, don’t you shed a tear

The waves came crashing down on the rocks, on a beach that bore no resemblance to the one in the travel brochure. I was handling myself all right, but the old man was a different story. He was short of breath, and those dark circles under his eyes were beginning to creep me out.

    “Are you going to make it?” I raised my voice so I wouldn’t have to repeat the question.

    “I’ve got to,” he yelled back. “No use in me slipping away now.” He turned around and eyed Molly. She stared back, an unblinking Medusa, her Lord & Taylor scarf fluttering in the breeze.

    What a pair, I thought. Better be nice, though: I’d just been crowned as his successor to the ‘coveted position’ of Number One film critic on the Village Voice. Mr. Sarris had held that chair for years but was about to embark onto greener pastures. Molly Haskell, his wife, followed him about like Yoko. I couldn’t figure them out, nor why we’d landed in Greece.

    “Isn’t this where Angelopoulos shot Ulysses’ Gaze?” I asked, waving a hand over the scrubby shoreline. Would anyone else have noticed? Or cared?

    “Touché!” he yelled back. “But don’t let it go to your head. All the great directors are gone. I don’t envy your position.” Molly gave an icy smile.

    Surely I could prove myself, I thought. My words must be worth something. But did I have enough ideas to bring to the table? Or were my opinions as empty and wrongheaded as some had already suggested? Sarris didn’t care: in the trunk of the car were his new set of golf clubs. He could use the sun.

    “When I was starting out,” he said, “all the great American filmmakers were slowing down, and all the post-War Europeans were starting up. It was easy to write, there were tons of things to write about. Even a dachshund could handle the job.

    “But now,” he continued as he sat on a rock, “you’ve really got to reach. That’s why so many critics are writing about cinephilia. Once the well runs dry, you’re left standing around staring at one another. Do you really want to be a film critic who writes about film criticism or the social climate? That crap would kill me.”

    The prospect of the post was beginning to sour. How much adulation could I extend to… what? Most everything was derivative of the stuff that came out forty or fifty years ago. I looked over at her, perhaps seeking an answer, but Molly couldn’t give a rat’s ass.

    “But I wanted to be a movie critic!” I yelled, my voice breaking in faux emotion. “I want to be taken seriously! No one on the internet likes me!” I tried to muster up a crocodile tear.

    “What are you,” he snapped back, “a fucking six-year-old? Jesus, dude, grow a pair and get on with it.”

    Finally, Molly piped up. “You know sweetie,” she said, “I used to eat bull testicles in Spain.” She pointed a bony finger out toward the ocean, as a dolphin danced atop the waves. At which point the alarm went off and I shuffled into the kitchen for morning coffee.

20th Century Foxes: Anita Pallenberg

The song is Keith Richards’s “All About You” from the Rolling Stones album, Emotional Rescue. According to Wikipedia, “The song is a slow bittersweet ballad that has been interpreted as a final comment on the Anita Pallenberg romance that began in 1967 and ended in 1979 when Richards met his future wife model Patti Hansen.” The clips of Anita are from Performance.

Dominique Zardi 1930—2009

A familiar face of French cinema, notably for his numerous appearances in films by Claude Chabrol, actor, environmentalist and, apparently, boxing authority Dominique Zardi passed away on December 14 from cancer at the age of 79. Although he and Henri Attal were clearly over the top as the boisterous gay couple in Chabrol’s Les Biches (1968), the performance is a showcase for Mr. Zardi’s comedic talents. I doubt many Stateside publications will remember him, but there are several online obituaries from Europe available for translation through Google.

Nathan’s famous!

Low budget auteur (his first movie cost four hundred bucks, and it was shot on film), and long time friend of your humble narrator, Nathan Schiff (above foreground; click to enlarge) was honored last year by the Cinefamily, screening his legendary super-8 wonders to a responsive crowd. The vids below are from the Q&A held afterward:

My reviews of Nathan’s early films

Last year’s Abracadaver!

Book review: “Hammer Glamour”

Hammer Glamour:
Classic Images from the Archive of Hammer Films
By Marcus Hearn. 160 pages, illustrated. Hardcover, 11.6 x 9.7 x 0.9 inches. Published by Titan Books. $29.95.

(Click here to see this review on the main Flickhead site accompanied with different photos!)

It first struck me when I was about eight or nine years old: cleavage. It happened at a mid-1960s Saturday matinee double feature, Curse of Frankenstein (1957) plus Horror of Dracula (1958) — the poster screamed “Frankenstein spills it! Dracula drinks it!” — Technicolor productions from Britain’s Hammer Films. I went expecting monsters, and got a heaping eyeful of heaving bosoms. Hammer spared no expense when it came to pushing up the sizeable assets of its actresses, and on that afternoon the eye zeroed in on Hazel Court and Valerie Gaunt, two fleshy icons of one’s hot buttered youth.

    This is Boomer nostalgia, and Marcus Hearn’s Hammer Glamour is a glowing tribute to that bygone era. Profusely illustrated, the hefty new volume celebrates fifty of the studios’ famous (Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch), not-as-famous (Barbara Shelley, Victoria Vetri), cult favorites (Martine Beswicke, Caroline Munro), and nearly everyone in between. “The legacy [of Hammer glamour] is hundreds of photographs,” the author explains. “They evoke a distant and naïve era when sex really was safe, and the time to be glamorous was always.”

    Indeed, the book’s remarkable assortment of images is matched by the presentation. Printed and varnished on heavy stock, the black-and-white and color reproduction is beyond reproach, a superb job credited to C&C Offset in China. That’s my years in printing and publishing taking notice; I still get jazzed over such stuff. The production quality underlines the publisher’s commitment to, and faith in, Hearn’s work.

    Which is… what? Film history? Titillating cheesecake? An overview of fashion and couture? Well, yes on all counts. The author gives rundowns of movie plots and production anecdotes, tactfully avoiding detailed criticisms of individual films. (Hammer produced a lot of dross.) Through movie stills and a generous supply of posed publicity portraits (which are dazzling), he stays focused on the era, its styles and the type of women Hammer put on the screen. Many of them were cast from the same mold: robust, alluring, statuesque, too exotic to be the girl next door. Unless the girl next door happened to be a Penthouse Pet.

    

Above left: The world famous shot of Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC. Left: Martine Beswicke in the less successful follow-up, Prehistoric Women (1967). Below: Hazel Court in Curse of Frankenstein. Although Hammer’s budgets were generally modest, they gave the impression of opulence and breadth. Click images to enlarge.

    Virtually unheard of in America before Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer became synonymous with horror by the ‘60s, and established lucrative distribution deals with Warners, Columbia, Universal-International and 20th Century Fox in the States. It was Fox who orchestrated one of the great publicity gambits of the decade, selling Hammer’s One Million Years BC (1966) on a picture of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini. Her poster would be tacked onto garage walls and boys’ bedrooms from coast to coast, and the movie earned a fortune.

    I was there, my mother joining me to see if it measured up to the Hal Roach original, where beefy Victor Mature battled giant lizards. “He’s no Victor,” she sighed of Hammer’s head caveman, John Richardson. On that we agreed: Richardson lacked Victor’s flabby muscles and greasy hair. But on that day the world went to see Raquel — it’s the only time Ray Harryhausen’s special effects were upstaged by an actor — her lithe, voluptuous physique, carefree demeanor and expertly dyed blonde tresses concealing the fact that she already had two children and was on her second marriage.

    Hammer Glamour stirs these excursions down Memory Lane, correcting common fallacies en route, and considers yesterday’s screen goddess as everyday people. Raquel and Ursula Andress aside, most aren’t living the Hollywood dream; the author finds them as ordinary citizens, beyond fame and fortune. In Hammer’s Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968) and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), Veronica Carlson struck me as one of the most beautiful women in the world. (Her photo on the book’s back cover confirms it.) But in the ‘70s she dropped out of sight. Hearn discovers her happily married in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and douses the fire of my adolescent longing with this sobering vision of an apron and feather duster: “My life now is fabulous,” he quotes her, “but just occasionally when I’m cleaning the house I look back on my Hammer films and wish that I had carried on.” You and me both, honey.

    

Above left: Diana Dors menaced in Hammer’s The Last Page (aka Man Bait, 1952). Left: Susan Denberg, alleged victim of “that Polanski crowd.” Click images to enlarge.

    Of the fun and enlightening tidbits Hearn serves up, I never knew Olinka Berova, ‘She’ of the rather terrible Vengeance of She (1968), was once married to Warners head honcho John Calley. Nor did I know that the one and only Carita was paid a measly five grand for starring as The Viking Queen (1967). Groomed to inherit the Ursula/Raquel throne, the Finnish beauty made a blip on the radar for what the author regards as “one of the daftest films Hammer ever made.” (She was second-billed to Don Murray, who pocketed $75k.) It’s one of the few Hammers I haven’t seen, and the author piques my curiosity:

    “The result of [director Don] Chaffey’s labors was compromised by a script that clumsily crossed Romeo and Juliet with the legend of Boadicea. Uneven in its casting and production values, The Viking Queen is both endearingly old fashioned and surprisingly sadistic. The film veers unpredictably from high adventure to Hammer horror, especially in the scene where [Carita’s character] is stripped topless, bound and flogged by sadistic Romans. The brutality and insinuations of sexual violence, not to mention the ‘wet t-shirt’ clinch between Carita and Don Murray, are wholly at odds with the first part of the film’s Robin Hood spirit.”

    There are the obligatory rags-to-riches-to-rags stories, such as Bond girl Eunice Gayson getting busted for shoplifting fifteen years after her turn in Hammer’s Revenge of Frankenstein (1958). There’s the sketchy life of concentration camp survivor and serial bride Eva Bartok: a decade before appearing in the company’s Spaceways (1953) she married a Nazi, presumably to avoid execution, only to find the union a “series of brutal rapes worse than death.” Working with limited space, Hearn furnishes what info he can on Susan Denberg, Playboy’s Miss August, 1966, and star of Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), whose fractured career and fragile mental state (some blamed it on “that Polanski crowd”) suggest a modern day Frances Farmer ripe for proper biography.

    By the late ‘70s, “the reign of Hammer glamour as the company’s most valuable marketing tool was over,” Hearn writes, “a victim of political correctness and demystifying over exposure.” In a zeitgeist chockablock with sex and skin, in everything from Last Tango in Paris (1972) to scads of raunchy teen comedies, Hammer’s dabbling with naked lesbian vampires seemed zany and outmoded — though Ingrid Pitt looks smashing in Vampire Lovers (1970) and Countess Dracula (1971). Just as they supplanted Universal as the reigning nightmare factory in the ‘50s, Hammer stepped aside for a vanguard categorically void of glamour in the ‘80s, exemplified by Friday the 13th and its ilk. Hammer Glamour illustrates that loss and reminds us that we’ll never see those days again.

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Burns like a red coal carpet, Mad bull lost its way

The Rolling Stones’ song “Gimme Shelter” from the 1969 album Let It Bleed, featured a duet between Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton, who recorded this version in 1970. Billy Preston on keyboard, David T. Walker on lead guitar. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get my Ya-Yas out.

Gene Palma revisited

In a review of the film Hero at Large (Flickhead: 8.27.08), I mentioned the appearance of “street drummer Gene Palma — he of the slick, black-dyed hair and heavily-blushed cheeks.” (You remember: “Now going back thirty years to Chick Webb!” in Taxi Driver.) It triggered a tiny flurry of reminiscences, and prompted photographer Bobby Fisher to send this portrait of Gene he took back in 1986. Endless thanks, Bobby! (If anyone knows what happened to Gene, drop me a line.)

For more samples of Mr. Fisher’s work, go to his website or check out his gallery at Bernstein&Andriulli.

Just what the truth is, I can’t say anymore

I rarely give a ‘links’ post, but, hey, what the hell…

Dude looks like a lady: Susan Boyle, the Margaret Rutherford of the American Idol set, has smashed all records with her new CD, I Dreamed A Dream. I’m no music critic, I just knows what I likes. And this ain’t it.

Deny, deny deny: In the sporting news this week, Tiger Woods dished a wad of boo-hoo-hooey over how sorry he is for porking some babe on the side and how important family is, bla bla bla. Of course he’s blabbering like a bitch: he got caught. If Woods were truly remorseful, the cat would’ve been out of the bag long before that weird OJ-esque car crash, and before “the alleged” concubine spilled the beans.

Afghanistan banana stand: “But one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men. He himself then relapsed into laughter.” Back in the paisley day, I had a feeling that LSD was the key to World Peace. My hazy instincts were correct: check out Soldiers on Acid @ Environmental Graffiti and dig the vid.

I’m all right Jack, keep your hands off my stack: As we cozy up to a Yule Tide season via Walmart, we can pray that “they” don’t up the price of oil to where we’d be shelling out, as it were, fifteen or twenty bucks a gallon. Then we’d get to watch capitalism crumble by President’s Day. While the clock’s a’tickin’ (and you’re trying to stretch your unemployment check to cover the holiday goose) take a gander at Mr. Wolcott’s Turkey Day post.