Famous Flops: After Earth

 
This is the final installment of my 2013 series Famous Flops, in which I have been watching one known turkey per month and writing about it.

The trick when assessing the quality of an M. Night Shyamalan movie is not to hate on it just because it's M. Night Shyamalan. Unfortunately, the man has reached a point in his career where it's almost impossible to go into one of his movies with an open mind. You tend to jump on any little thing that strikes you as ridiculous, when you'd give the benefit of the doubt to many other films.

So I need to be honest and say that After Earth is a bit boring and bland, more than it is outright wrongheaded. In fact, Mr. Shyamalan can be said to be treading water, creatively, as far as I'm concerned. Despite some laugh-out-loud moments in its first half, I actually felt that the critically reviled The Last Airbender had some value in it. After Earth may have about the same amount of value. Which is to say, not a lot, but some.

Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room: Jaden Smith. (I don't know why he's the elephant in the room. Forget I said that.) He's not really a good actor. The temptation is to call him a chip off the old block, but he's really not. He's okay. I was most convinced by him in The Pursuit of Happyness, when he was just a little kid, then not at all in The Day the Earth Stood Still. I haven't seen The Karate Kid, or any other movies he's made. He doesn't bring it here. He tries, and it's a really sweet kind of trying, but he just doesn't bring it. And the movie relies on his acting chops quite a bit. 

You see, he's sent off to find a rescue beacon that's in the other half of the ship his father and he crashed in, some 100 kilometers off on a planet called Earth, where humans used to live. They've long since vacated, as the planet (beautiful looking though it still is) has become toxic to human life. In fact, Smith Jr. needs special breathing capsules to help him breathe, and there's a question whether he'll make it the full 100 kilometers on the few remaining breathing capsules he has, let alone get back to the other half of the ship's wreckage, where his father (Smith Sr.) is in really bad shape with two broken legs.

In every Shyamalan movie you're looking for the high concept hook that attracted him to the project, and here it's more of a backdrop: Humans aren't safe in the other places they live, either. There they are being picked off by ferocious aliens who can't see them, but can track where they are by smelling their fear. The only way to beat them is to cultivate an absolute mastery over your fear, which is what Smith Sr. has done -- at this point you can walk right up next to them and slit their throats. This makes Smith Sr. an expert in the act of what's called "ghosting," and his son a trainee.

I do like that concept, but it's really not used in an interesting enough way. In fact, much of the movie is spent on set pieces where Smith Jr. has to face a certain obstacle between himself and the rescue beacon on Earth -- few if any of which involve the whole "mastery of fear" theme. I couldn't help but think of Shyamalan's The Happening during some of these scenes, because that movie involved the deadly threat embodied in ... trees. The earth is fighting back in a similar way here, but at least most of the threats are a little less inert, and ridiculous, than they were in that film.

That's the problem with where we find Shyamalan in his career right now. He seems to have gotten over the speed bump of really ridiculous fare, which I would argue started with The Village and carried on through Lady in the Water and The Happening. The first half of The Last Airbender is pretty ridiculous, but then it gets a bit better, and I would argue that this is where we find him with After Earth: no longer ridiculous, just boring. Which might be worse.

One aspect of his craft that's definitely still suffering is his direction of actors, which could be part of the explanation for Jaden Smith's less-than-stellar performance. Shyamalan and Will Smith have made the curious decision to excise any of the cheekiness and jovial spirit of a typical Will Smith character, leaving him totally humorless and almost robotic. While I wouldn't necessarily want a reprise of Smith saying "Welcome to Earth" from Independence Day -- though it would be thematically appropriate in this film -- I do think that they have managed to eradicate one of the main reasons people want to see Will Smith in a movie. A sci fi summer release wants the movie star Will Smith, not the actor Will Smith.

The film looks decent and is made competently enough. It's just sluggish and unremarkable.

Which brings us to the rather unremarkable ending of a rather unremarkable series. That's okay. Maybe this series about flops was destined to be something of a flop itself.

Up next: Twenty fourteen will bring us a new series that's appropriate to where I now live. That's the only tease I'll give you for now, with more to follow in January.

Famous Turkeys: The Lone Ranger

 
This is the latest in a series I usually call Famous Flops, which has gotten a little Thanksgiving tweak this month. In this series I watch one movie per month that I know to be a critical or commercial failure, then discuss in gory detail. 

What better day than Thanksgiving to write about a movie that's supposedly the greatest insult to Native Americans since the Trail of Tears?

As it always is, the timing is a bit complicated, as it's not yet Thursday in the U.S. and it will never be Thanksgiving in Australia. (Though I am making turkey, mashed potatoes and green beans tonight for dinner -- shh, don't tell my wife, it's a surprise.) However, Thanksgiving is in the air, even if it's in the virtual air. Ah, if I were back in the U.S., I'd be plotting which movie to take in during my early release from work today. Maybe Oldboy.

But back to the issue at hand.

The Lone Ranger was of course the flop of 2013, and would seem like an even bigger catastrophe for Disney if John Carter hadn't flopped for them on a similar scale last year. (The cumulative disaster of the two is, of course, worse; it just means that The Lone Ranger isn't a singular phenomenon for them.) The difference is that I saw plenty of redeeming value in the fairly messy Carter. I had to dig much deeper to ferret out goodness in Ranger.

This is not to say, however, that the movie is terrible. More than anything I just founded it tedious and elongated and more violent than it had any right to be.

Let's start with that violence. It being Disney, there is of course almost a total absence of blood. That's not to say there isn't a ridiculously high body count, which you might expect in movie that chooses to depict ... an epic slaughter of indians. (Let's call them "indians," because this is one of the original contexts in which the phrase "cowboys and indians" was popularized. And since we're lower-casing "cowboys," let's do the same to "indians." Upper-case it and I think you are actually getting a tad more insensitive, like this is a title that legitimately belongs to Native Americans.)

The reason The Lone Ranger is kind of a disaster is that someone thought it was a good idea for this movie to include an epic slaughter of indians. I should clarify my terms a little here, I suppose. I'm not talking about a situation where a bunch of white men coldly kill a bunch of captive indians in the attempt to wipe them off the face of the earth. That would definitely be worse. But there is a skirmish between the cavalry and the indians that leaves many dead on both sides. What's worse than a bunch of dead bodies in an allegedly family-friendly movie is a bunch of dead bodies from a community of historically oppressed people. Not great.

There are lots of bodies falling here and there, as well as a lot of people you assume are dead based on falling off trains and the like, but the specific acts of violence are the ones that are more suspect. What about the scene where Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) cuts out a man's heart and eats it? Certainly, most of this is off-screen, but the fact that it exists at all is a serious lapse in judgment on someone's part.

Now let's get to the part that offended most people: Johnny Depp as Tonto.

I want to start out on something other than his actual portrayal, which of course involves a white man impersonating a Native American. The movie uses as its framing device -- a very questionable framing device at that -- a big fair in San Francisco in 1933, in which a young boy wearing a Lone Ranger mask is wandering through a series of dioramas with taxidermy animals in their natural habitat. He comes to one which shows us "the savage" in his natural habitat, and it's a very old indian that one would assume was a statue. Except it's not a statue -- it's Tonto, who I guess is supposed to be an early incarnation of one of those street performers who douses himself in silver paint and sits still for hours on end.

Let's ponder the problems with this for a moment:

1) Knowing that Tonto lived into his old age not only destroys any suspense about this movie, it destroys the suspense about any future Lone Ranger sequels they might make. Most of this movie plays like they're setting up for a sequel -- like, for example, the Lone Ranger only naming his horse Silver in the final scene -- but the framing device pushes things in the opposite direction. It's just another sign of poor decision-making, and I wonder if the framing device was added after the fact, when production delays and threats of potentially canceling the movie made them get realistic about its future as a franchise.

2) What the hell fair is employing Tonto as a man who sits still for 12 hours a day as a living relic of his culture? And if we like Tonto at all, which the movie clearly wants us to, aren't we a bit sad that this is what he's doing in his old age? And isn't this kind of the single most oppressive treatment of Native Americans in the entire film? Of "indians"?

I must admit, I was not hugely distracted by Depp's actual performance, even though it does involve dropping most inessential words in a sentence, as is the traditional portrayal of "indians" on screen. (I said I would use that word, and gave my reasons, yet am still finding it objectionable enough that I need to supply quotation marks when I write it.) It helps that Tonto is always the smartest person on screen, constantly involved in clever plans and acrobatic feats. His dynamic with Armie Hammer's The Lone Ranger is pretty much that of Penny and Inspector Gadget or Gromit and Wallace -- he's the second-in-command who's the real brains of the operation, shackled (sometimes literally) to a stuffed shirt who would probably quickly expire if left to his own devices.

So I won't really accuse Disney of grand insensitivity in casting Depp to play this role. It's certainly in the tradition of other Depp roles; he is, in fact, the most obvious choice among today's working movie stars. It would be great if there were a prominent Native American actor who had the star power to bring in the type of dollars this movie needed in order to be a success, but that's just not realistic. Once you decide to make a Lone Ranger movie and know that Tonto is one of the most important two characters, you've got to cast some white actor to play the role, and Depp is as good as any. Perhaps an ambiguously ethnic actor -- a Dwayne Johnson, though probably not him specifically -- would have attracted slightly less controversy. But I think it's kind of splitting hairs.

The question about The Lone Ranger really is: Is it good? Is it entertaining?

It's not good, but it is sporadically entertaining. Some of the set pieces really crackle. An otherwise illogical climactic scene involving trains on parallel tracks, which keep getting separated from each other until there are eight to ten individual train units, has some very fun choreography, with Tonto performing some of those acrobatic feats on a ladder extending between the trains. During these moments, The Lone Ranger finds the attitude that it should have for its entire running time: It's light and fluffy and, yes, fun.

It's just too bad someone thought that running time should be 149 minutes, and that 100 of those minutes should be weighed down by death, slaughter and other ponderous bummers.

Okay, up next: the last month of Famous Flops. In the end, I haven't found this series quite as fulfilling as I'd hoped, and moving to Australia (where I don't have Netflix disc-by-mail) has made getting my hands on flop candidates even more challenging that it was in the United States (where I couldn't even get the movie that I hoped to start the series back in February, Ishtar.) So perhaps the series was a little doomed from the start -- an outcome I may have invited by calling 2013 "an unlucky year for famous flops." Number 13, you've done it again.

I'll kill two birds with one stone and make my December movie one I was going to watch for my 2013 list anyway: the summer's second biggest disaster, M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth. Then we'll start 2014 with a new series I'll tell you about later on. It should be an interesting one.

Famous Flops: Motherhood

 
Welcome to the latest in my Famous Flops series, in which I watch one film each month that was a financial loser, a critical loser, or just plain a loser, and then write about the experience.

Note: I know I promised Cutthroat Island this month, but I couldn't find it here in Oz. Oh well. Geena Davis and Renny Harlin are spared my wrath.

The term "flop" is first and foremost a financial term, but I have not really been using it as such in this series. In some cases the films really have tanked, financially, but in others -- such as The Room -- they are continuing to make money in theaters as we speak. Which can hardly make them a financial disappointment.

My October movie is one that's only famous -- to the extent that it actually is famous -- for how little money it made.

If you haven't heard of the Uma Thurman vehicle Motherhood, that's probably because you missed the little tidbit of news about what happened when it was released theatrically in England. In March of 2010, Motherhood was released in exactly one London theater, the Apollo Piccadilly Circus, where only a single nine-pound ticket was purchased for its opening night performance. Its gross for the weekend was only 88 pounds, the result of only 11 tickets purchased.

That, my friends, is a dud.

And an unprecedented catastrophe of poor marketing.

Well, Motherhood is bad. That's been no guarantee in this series, but it's true in this case.

It strikes you with its oddness from the start. Looking at the movie's poster, you know this is a comedy. But the movie starts with the camera panning over a dark room full of clutter with no sound on the soundtrack -- hardly the way you'd expected to be greeted into a silly romp. Eventually -- I mean after a full minute or two of this -- a song that's somewhere between cheesy and mournful kicks in, and Uma Thurman's hero mother starts to kick in her day before anyone in the house awakens. It's a bad choice.

What follows is sort of a character study, sort of a story about Thurman's character, her two kids, and her sort-of distant husband (Anthony Edwards). The only real plot that I'm aware of is that it's about to be her daughter's birthday, and she has to get together some stuff for the party. Oh, she's also got a pregnant friend (Minnie Driver) with whom she regularly checks in. The scant running time is devoted not so much to a plot, but to things that happen to Thurman over the course of a day or two (it may just be one day, I can't recall for sure). As a little bit of a spine, she's trying to write a piece on what motherhood means to her, to win some kind of contest. She's a mommy blogger, you see.

Let's stop right there. This was the second point where I could be sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Motherhood was shoddily made. The camera focuses in on the ad that notifies Thurman of the contest, and you can easily read the deadline: such and such a date, "12 PM Midnight!" Midnight is of course 12 AM, not 12 PM. Whatever dummy wrote this ad in the world of the movie might make a mistake like that, but the only reason the movie should make a mistake like that is if it makes a point out of the fact that the dummy who wrote the ad made a mistake. Without that, we are left to conclude that it was just an incompetent person in the movie's production office who wrote that poor ad copy.

After the poor opening, the movie just can't ever figure out the right tone. It wants to be light and funny sometimes, succeeding at the former but not the latter, but other times it wants to be raunchy and inappropriate. For example, in one particularly awful scene involving the oh-so-New York problem of not wanting to lose your parking space, Thurman lights up a cigarette in front of her young child, after failing to properly secure the child in the back seat of her car. You'd think a movie pitched to mothers, that wants us to like Thurman, wouldn't have her character commit either of these sins -- the latter one in particular is basically unconscionable. Later in that same scene, a driver she's gridlocking by adamantly blocking traffic in order to keep her parking spot calls her the C-word. Really? In this "light and fluffy" movie?

Then there are just the scenes that seem absurd. Like, the scene where an attractive young man helps her carry a ridiculous number of groceries and other parcels up to her apartment, and she offers him a drink as a sign of thanks. It's a temptation for her to cheat on her husband, and the two end up dancing to some music. In another accidental error like the AM/PM snafu, the person in charge of choreographing their dance moves totally drops the ball here. There's not meant to be anything funny about how they dance -- if so, the movie should have played it up more explicitly. Instead, they both convulse their bodies awkwardly in the same way, as though the choreographer said "This is how both men and women dance - follow me!" It's even funnier if you imagine that there's a third person off camera convulsing his or her body in the same way.

The director, Katherine Deickmann, made another movie that I thought was pretty odd called A Good Baby, which I saw and reviewed about ten years ago. But that baby was a lot better than this one.

Okay, that's enough about Motherhood. You aren't going to see it -- especially not now.

In November, I've got something I know I'll be able to find, because it came out only a couple months ago and has just made its video debut. And boy is The Lone Ranger a flop in every sense of the word. Let's see if I am offended by Johnny Depp's impression of a native American, or am in the small community of critics who find Gore Verbinski's film worthwhile.

Famous Flops: Bamboozled

 
This is the latest in my monthly series Famous Flops, where I watch one movie per month that was considered a financial or critical failure and see if it deserved to be so shunned.

When Spike Lee turns off viewers, it can be for one of two reasons: 1) The subject matter is too in-their-face, and they just don't want to pick up what Lee is putting down; 2) The movie is simply poorly made.

Lee does have a few in the second category (She Hate Me, Red Hook Summer), but the ones people remember are the ones that just pushed their buttons in the wrong way.

I knew Bamboozled would be an example of Lee alienating his potential audience through excessively strident commentary, but I wanted to see if it was also a hack job.

Before I tell you what I thought, though, I should let you know why Bamboozled stopped some people from even seeing it in the first place.

Lee's 2000 film is about an Ivy League-educated black television writer who inadvertently revives the minstrel show, a highly racist variety program in which black actors wore blackface and acted the fool for an hour while perpetuating the most pernicious racial stereotypes imaginable.

But see, he was trying to prove a point, and it just went too far.

Damon Wayans portrays Pierre Delacroix, who is tired of the latent racism he must deal with on a daily basis from execs at his network. When they demand that he create a network hit that will appeal to black audiences, he sets out to create the most offensive show he can imagine, envisioning that this gross error in judgment will lead to his immediate firing (and therefore allow him to work at another network without breaching his contract by quitting).

Of course, as must happen in any good satire, the show is unexpectedly greenlit and becomes a huge hit, even turning blackface into a nationwide fad.

And yes, Bamboozled IS a good satire. In fact, I ended up thinking it was sort of great until the last 15 minutes or so, when it downgraded itself to merely very good.

But you can see why the movie turned off critics and audiences alike. It's a fair question to ask whether putting so many of these offensive stereotypes on display, even to discredit them in no uncertain turns, does more damage and gives them more power than if they were permanently marooned in obscurity. I mean, the minstrel show takes place in a watermelon patch, for God's sake.

I come down on the same side it would appear Lee came down on: It's better to confront this ugly history head on, to educate as a way to never repeat, than to pretend none of this ever happened. If you watched Bamboozled and came down on a different side, I guess couldn't blame you.

The one thing I don't want you to do is write it off as a misfire that shouldn't be seen. In order to make this film, Lee had to struggle with many of these same questions himself. And you know it was a struggle. This is a man who stretches to find signs of racism even when most people would agree it's not there. To contribute to the introduction of images of racial hatred that a new generation can't unsee ... it must have damn near killed the man.

Good thing he has so much interesting to say, and handles it so deftly. You can see just how much the elements of Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show horrify those involved, and the film is practically brimming with viewer surrogates. If you're not Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson, the prospective stars of the show, giving each other sideways glances during the pitch meeting, or if you're not Jada Pinkett-Smith, Delacroix's assistant, biting her tongue so as not to jump out of her seat, then you're certainly a room full of white television writers, exclaiming in disbelief when notified that the show will be set in a watermelon patch.

What's so deft about Lee's commentary -- before it goes a bit overboard -- is how it shows us how tricky satire can be, both in reference to the Mantan show and to the very film he's making right now. There's a fine line between criticizing something and celebrating it, just as there's a fine line between getting paid by the man, and getting played by him. Lee's movie clearly suggests that some Hollywood actors -- Will Smith actually gets named -- aren't much better than the jive-talking "porch monkeys" seen on the Mantan show, given that their primary value to a movie exec is to be sassy and bring in black audiences. (I would not use the term "porch monkey" myself, except that the Mantan show's outrageous name for its musical accompaniment is The Alabama Porch Monkeys.) Lee points the finger at certain black superstars for being complicit in their own dehumanization, even (and perhaps especially) if they're earning millions of dollars in the process.

So I can see why Bamboozled pisses of big-name black actors, and I can see why it pisses off anyone who is predisposed to hating Lee, but I can't see why it pisses off anyone who likes to struggle with issues of modern racial identity the way Lee struggles with them here. If you want a movie that'll make you think, Bamboozled will do just that.

Before I wrap up, I did want to address the issue of whether Bamboozled was poorly made, from a technical standpoint. At first I thought it might be, or at the very least, that I had to adjust my picture settings on my TV. See, the movie was shot mostly on Mini DV digital video to keep the production costs down. This gives it a grainy look, much rougher than what you'd expect from a seasoned filmmaker. And initially it was displeasing to me.

When I realized that the film's look was a function of the medium in which it was shot -- and that this medium was likely a necessity of having subject matter that couldn't get much financial backing -- I shrugged off the surface aesthetic unpleasantness of it. In fact, Lee makes some interesting stylistic choices with his film stock, using digital video for all the "real" scenes and film for the actual footage of Mantan's show. That choice worked for me.

The whole movie worked for me, really.

In October I'm going to go with a fairly obvious choice, if I can get my hands on it here in Australia: Cutthroat Island, the movie that single-handedly bankrupted Carolco Pictures and effectively ended the careers of Renny Harlin and Geena Davis (though both have continued to work in less prominent capacities).

If I can't get my hands on it, well, it'll be something else.

Famous Flops: The Room

 
This is the latest in my monthly series Famous Flops, in which I watch one absolutely terrible movie and tell you what I think of it.

By all rights, my first post after arriving to Australia (almost a full week ago) should be some kind of "welcome to Australia, Vance!" post. However, I have deadlines to keep, and only a precious few days remaining in August in order to serve up my monthly installment of Famous Flops.

It seems like forever ago that I saw The Room, since so much has happened in the interim. In fact, I still had a few days remaining at my job when I took to the theater on the night of Saturday, July 27th (technically cheating since the screening should have fallen within the month of August) to watch a movie so famously bad, they now show it at midnights on Saturdays in cities around the country, including North Hollywood, CA. I feel like I haven't worked in forever, so this tells you how long ago it was -- it was forever ago plus a few days.

This movie is terrible, of course.

But first a little history, personal history, about it.

I was living in Los Angeles when Tommy Wiseau's craptastically wonderful film was first released back in 2003. I remember thinking of it as some kind of Los Angeles institution akin to that ageless (i.e. very old now) pink Corvette-driving "beauty" Angelyne. One look at the billboard and you could tell that it was not a reputable production. Yet that billboard stayed up there on Highland, I think it was, for years, meaning that it did indeed have some kind of dollars or marketing muscle or something behind it. My fascination increased.

Sometime last year I learned that it was playing at the Laemmle in North Hollywood at midnight on the last Saturday of every month. I tried to get a crew to go on Thanksgiving weekend when a friend was in town, but you'd be surprised about how people ultimately react to a midnight movie when their backs are against the wall. They passed.

About three days before the last Saturday night in July of this year -- in other words, the last Saturday I'd be eligible to see The Room in Los Angeles before leaving for Australia -- the scarcity of my remaining opportunity struck me. I knew I needed to move now if I wanted to make The Room -- the full-on live experience of watching The Room, not just a DVD viewing -- happen. I emailed a couple friends and one bit. We set it up for that Saturday.

There's a great story that goes with this viewing, but I'll save it until after I give you my impressions.

First I should probably set the scene. There's an idea that The Room is a cultural heir apparent to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and seeing the live screening did nothing to disabuse me of that notion. For starters, it was packed. Not sold out, but populous enough for a midnight screening to earn the description "packed." The next thing I noticed was that people were bringing props, a la Rocky Horror. Plastic spoons were one particular prop. A football was another, though to the great consternation of many audience members, this football was lost/misplaced early on, never to be recovered. Lastly, the audience was buzzing with electricity. When the movie inexplicably started about five minutes early, disappointed audience members still filing in loudly exclaimed "It's not midnight yet!" To no avail, of course.

Okay, the movie.

Yeah, it's awful. Here are some overall comments/impressions:

1) There are about four sex scenes within the first half-hour. However, these are not lurid sex scenes designed to titillate. They are "romantic" sex scenes, involving cheesy music, rose petals, and both participants with expressions on their faces like you might see in an ad for an erection pill. What's most comical about these scenes is that they are ALL romantic, even though the same woman appears in all four, but has two different partners. The movie means for us to believe that she has an equally romantic relationship -- in other words, a relationship that the movie itself supports her having -- with both men.

2) Tommy Wiseau. He is probably the worst actor who has ever lived. He looks a bit like Gabriel Byrne, but there's no comparison between their abilities as thespians. Wiseau's unplaceable European accent probably contributes to his poor line readings, but only so much. You're not just picking on him because he has a funny accent. You're picking on him because he is a truly terrible performer.

3) The football. About five different times in this movie, characters engage in carefree sessions of football tossing. This is regardless of what's going on in the plot (plot? what plot?) and seemingly without reason. None of these characters seem athletically inclined, generally (although there's also an extensive jogging scene), nor would they seem interested in football, in particular.

4) The plot. What plot? As far as I can tell it's about a guy (Wiseau) who is losing his wife (Juliette Danielle) to his best friend (Greg Sestero). However, it is frequently very indirectly about this. There's also a part where their teenage neighbor gets involved in some kind of drug deal gone bad, but it's handled so non-specifically (we never learn what kind of drugs, or how he got involved) that it becomes just another one of the film's laughable elements.

5) The technique. Just awful. Establishing shots of San Francisco -- and there are many, usually involving the Golden Gate Bridge -- linger on for 10-15 seconds longer than they should. The dialogue is Z grade. Characters appear mysteriously and become important without being introduced or contextualized. Characters also sometimes look at the camera or make inexplicable gestures/glances.

6) I could go on.

7) But what I really want to say is that the participation of the audience, while active and in many ways quite fun, sometimes served as a distraction for me. Knowing how terrible everything about this movie was, I sometimes regretted having real howlers in the dialogue drowned out by their rejoinders. I don't suppose there's anything I could have done about that except for see the movie first at home, and then come to the theater. However, I think seeing this stuff for the first time on a big screen is key to your enjoyment of it, so my complaint about losing some of the priceless craptasticity is only a minor one.

Okay, so, the story.

When The Room ended and we got up to leave, I patted myself down and realized I did not have my keys. As it was nearly 1:45 a.m. and I had to get home, panic set in almost immediately. Sorry, I should tweak that last statement a little bit. As it was nearly 1:45 a.m. and I had to get home, and my wife was already in Australia, panic set in almost immediately.

I first examined the area around where I was sitting, since the most likely explanation was that I'd lost my keys between the seats. It's happened before. But they were not there. I then thought that perhaps I had left them atop the urinal in the men's room, since I had indeed relieved myself before the movie started. They weren't there either.

Panic really started to set in when I couldn't find anyone who worked at the theater still there. I assumed there must be someone in "the back room," an area behind the concession stand where it seemed most likely they'd be. But leaning over the concession stand and repeatedly saying "Hello? Hello? Excuse me?" yielded no results. This was starting to get truly frightening.

Actually forging back behind the concession stand finally prompted a woman in the lobby to identify herself as a member of the staff. Pretty dick move on her part not to say anything before then with a very obviously agitated customer desperately trying to identify her, so I guess it was a good move on my part to breach the employee area. I asked if any keys had been turned in to the lost and found. She said no, but I was welcome to look. Meanwhile, my friend was doing a much more thorough search of the theater.

Suddenly I knew where they were, and where they almost certainly would no longer be:

On the roof of my car.

My car, which was parked on a side street off a main thoroughfare, on a Saturday night in North Hollywood.

I started running at full sprint, sure that they would be gone, sure that my car would be gone, sure that I would be out the amount of money I hoped to make on my car when I sold it in a few weeks, sure that I would have lost all the personal items in the car as well. I felt a cold sweat break out on my forehead and ran faster.

It took only about 20 seconds to reach the car, where I immediately saw a shimmering object on its roof, right where I expected it to be.

I scooped up those keys, breathed a massive sigh of relief, and somehow ran back to the theater even faster than I'd run to get to my car. It took another 30 seconds for my friend to emerge from the screening room (and I was now locked out so I couldn't get to him), but when he did, there I was, dangling the thought-to-be-lost item in glorious victory.

When I told him where they, in fact, were, he laughed in disbelief and ecstatic joy.

Here's what happened: I arrived a few minutes earlier than he did, and while waiting for him, I stood outside my car and smartphoned for a few minutes. When I do this, I usually just toss my keys on top of my car, then grab them before I go. In this case, I expected him to call me when he arrived and I'd go meet him at the theater. Instead, he was walking toward me and talking to me on the phone, so I naturally started to walk toward him when I saw him turn the corner and come into my view. No thought was given as to whether the car was locked or I even had my keys.

So my keys sat on top of my car for nearly two hours, from 11:45 to 1:45, in what used to be a kind of seedy neighborhood but has now improved slightly, and my car was not stolen.

I'll just have to thank my lucky stars for that one.

Okay, on to September. As I'm still getting my bearings and I don't know what my new methods of acquiring movies will be (we can still watch Netflix streaming using a special plug-in, but I don't know yet know how I'll get DVDs and BluRays), I'm going to leave my next month's choice open-ended. Let's face it -- you weren't going to watch it beforehand anyway. No reason more than one of us has to subject ourselves to this crap.

Famous Flops: The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure

 
This is the latest in my monthly series Famous Flops, in which I watch one movie per month that is noted for how terrible or how unsuccessful it was, then write about it here.

Okay. Whew.

Having reached an undignified low last month when I actually sorta liked The Hottie and the Nottie, I grabbed hold of The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure for dear life, hoping beyond hope that I would not like it.

Indeed, I didn't like it. Whew.

However, I do have to say one thing about it: If The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure were just a dumb television show, it would hardly warrant a mention outside the children's TV circuit. By having the gall to release itself theatrically -- and thereby accruing the lowest U.S. box office opening weekend for a movie opening on more than 2,000 screens, just $448,000 and change -- The Oogieloves reached for a place in movie infamy history.

Yes, this movie is bad, but it's probably not sufficiently ridiculous to be far worse than some other entertainment aimed at very young children. It's the fact that it thinks so much more of itself that makes it such a misfire. You can really tell that the creators of The Oogieloves thought they were launching a phenomenon, and they simply weren't.

One of the pieces of hubris of which they are guilty is that they thought they were going to create an interactive movie experience that would become addictive to children. This nominal "adventure," carried out by three Barney-like creatures named Goobie, Zoozie and Toofie, is punctuated by a series of songs and dances that are supposed to bring children in the audience to their feet. At the start of the movie, the Oogieloves explain that any time the butterflies fly across the screen (and there's a message they may not be able to read that says "It's time to get out of your seats!"), they should stand up to sing and dance with the Oogieloves. When a handful of turtles cross the screen ("It's okay to sit down now"), the song and dance portion is over for now.

I guess you can't blame them for trying, yet we do anyway. It takes a certain amount of ego to say that you're going to love what we're offering you so much, you'll want to get up out of your seats and dance. Things like that tend to spring up organically -- say, The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- so when someone tries to make them happen artificially, that person seems a bit too proud of him/herself. However, you'd be right to ask how they're supposed to create this interactive experience, if not by weaving it into the fabric of the movie. Guess it's kind of a catch-22.

Anyway, kids didn't go for it. If they had, their parents would have told other parents, and the movie would have made more than $206 per screen.

The deck was stacked against this movie with parents from the start. After all, with their felt costumes and their dopey eyes, the characters do resemble Barney more than they resemble anything else in the children's landscape. Barney is an oddity -- he's a smashing success, despite the fact that almost any adult you talk to will say they hate him. That kind of thing doesn't come along every day, and one look at the Oogieloves made most parents say "Uh uh. Not again."

So far I've been talking mostly about things I could have gleaned without even watching the movie. So, how about some actual stuff from the plot?

It's goofy as hell from the start, but "goofy" is too amiable a word, not nearly insulting enough. It appears that the Oogieloves are throwing a birthday party for their friend, Schluufy, who is a very sleepy pillow. In fact, Schluufy spends almost the entire movie sleeping, which doesn't do much to make us worried whether his pals can reclaim five lost golden balloons that they mean to bring to his party. The Oogies leave Oogie headquarters (or whatever it is) to go find the balloons. Staying back home is their friend, a vacuum cleaner named J. Edgar. (Hoover, get it?) J. Edgar watches what's going on because the window in their HQ, called Windy Window, can magically show him what the Oogies are doing at any given time. Windy Window is a human face looking not unlike the Wizard of Oz, except she's a woman with a Southern accent.

Still with me?

So the Oogies go out and meet a variety of human characters played by the likes of Chazz Palminteri, Cloris Leachman, Cary Elwes, Toni Braxton, Jaime Pressly and Christopher Lloyd. Each character they meet (Pressly and Lloyd are in the same scene) must help them get back one of the balloons, which have followed a particularly unusual diaspora for having all presumably been released from the same person's hands. (Or the same vacuum cleaner's hands -- I believe it was J. Edgar who lost them.) Each time they must engage in a song and dance, before ultimately doing what they need to do to collect the balloon. There are also dance routines that recur, like the Oogies' special Oogielove chant whenever they have a success, and the little song they sing to the belt-less Toofie every time he drops his pants, which is a lot.

Still with me?

The human actors are perhaps the only thing to even remotely recommend this movie, and only a couple of them. It would be fair to say that each actor pours his or her all into the various roles, so that's one thing. Braxton gets some laughs as a loopy songstress, Palminteri is sort of sublime as a man in a diner serving milkshakes with animatronic cows, and Pressly and Lloyd do their best as Mexican dancers. The most annoying human character is Elwes as a cowboy named Bobbly Wobbly, whose thing is that he wobbles when he walks. While many of the others seem like they might be winking at the camera, Elwes is just mugging, and it grates in no time.

There were a few times when I was watching when I wondered if there weren't something subversive going on here, if this weren't the biggest parody ever pulled off with a completely straight face. Ultimately, though, I decided that really terrible movies have a way of seeming like they were intentional, simply because the decisions are so bad that you have to wonder how someone with money approved them. So I dropped the theory that The Oogieloves might be a massive joke, and just settled on the most obvious interpretation of its quality.  

This is about all anyone needs to write about this movie, so I will stop now.

I'm cheating in August. Oh, it's a big flop alright, enough of a flop to have become sort of a success: It's Tommy Wiseau's The Room, which has become sort of the heir apparent to the aforementioned Rocky Horror Picture Show. The cheating part? I've already seen it. I just watched it at a midnight show last night, meaning a couple days before the beginning of August. But they, I'm moving to Australia in just over three weeks, so you'll forgive me if I have to engage in a little bit of cheating.

Famous Flops: The Hottie & the Nottie

 
This is the latest in my monthly series called Famous Flops, in which I watch one movie per month I know to be famously terrible, financially unsuccessful, or otherwise a flop.

Fall in line, Vance. Fall in line.

I can't.

FALL IN LINE, VANCE!

I'm sorry, I just can't. I have to admit it:

I sort of liked The Hottie & the Nottie.

Ugh. I just died a little bit.

After three straight months of movies that I was supposed to hate that I didn't hate -- I didn't love them, to be sure, but neither did I hate them -- I thought for sure I'd hit the goldmine with the awful, terrible, miserable, awful (did I already say "awful"?) Paris Hilton vehicle that is so bad, it's the butt of modern jokes about what it means to be a bad movie.

And I liked it the most out of the four.

One of my core beliefs about film criticism is that you tell people what you actually think of a movie, even if it embarrasses you more than any sentiment you've ever spoken aloud before.

Good thing I'm only typing this rather than speaking it aloud:

I sort of liked The Hottie & the Nottie.

Here's what I expected to discover from the movie with the 7 Metascore and the 5% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes: That it was such an inexcusably vain exercise for Hilton that any ordinary narrative reality was thrown out the window in the service of a misguided lionization of "hotties" and a cruel and brutish dismissal of "notties."

Here's what I actually discovered:

1) Hilton will never win an Oscar, but she is capable of believable moments and more subtlety than anyone would ever dream of giving her credit for.

2) The film's heart is most certainly in the right place, even if it ends up being one of those standard "'ugly' girl is actually pretty when she finally cleans herself up" movies.

3) Joel Moore is an infinitely likable protagonist with deft comic timing. Since you likely don't know who Joel Moore is, he's this guy:

Of course, just admitting that you sort of like a universally reviled movie isn't the end of it. Not by a long shot. The next step is that you must discover why you liked it -- or perhaps more importantly, why other people hated it so much.

And here's what I've decided: Hating on Paris Hilton is the easiest thing in the world. It's a critical softball that almost anyone can hit out of the park.

Because the essential problem with The Hottie & the Nottie, especially for a Hilton hater, is that it kind of worships at the altar of Paris. Not to the overall detriment of the story, if you can ignore it, but enough so that it's easy to latch on to it if you decide you want to.

For starters, a line of dialogue refers to Hilton's Cristabel Abbott as "the hottest woman in Los Angeles." That's a particularly absurd claim given that Los Angeles is home to Hollywood, which is chock to the brim with women whose physical beauty is their primary asset. Cristabel is not even one of those women -- she doesn't even make her living on her appearance. (In fact, I can't remember what her job is at all and I just saw the movie last night.)

Then there's the fact that the camera delights in running up and down Hilton's body on a couple occasions. You know Hilton gets off on stuff like that.

But here's the thing: Many movies have had characters whose entire function is to be "the hot chick." (In fact, there was a whole movie called The Hot Chick.) The problem we have with it here is that Paris sees herself as capable of filling this role, and she is the creative entity most responsible for the existence of the movie in the first place. If she were just an actor hired to play this role, we wouldn't fault her. But as a sign of her lack of humility, it enrages us.

The thing is, Paris Hilton is sort of hot, in certain objective ways. She has a thin body. She has very good cheek bones. She has blonde hair, which plays a surprisingly significant role in making someone appear hot. There's so much backlash against her that we think she's not attractive, and we can certainly bag on ways in which she isn't so attractive (especially her personality), but it's not like she's an ugly girl trying to pass herself off as a pretty girl. She is pretty -- she's just not the "hottest woman in Los Angeles."

I must have some kind of soft spot for this person because I also didn't subscribe to the popular sentiment that she was one of the primary elements that ruined Repo! The Genetic Opera. Part of that is because I don't think Repo! was ruined. In fact, I own it -- and even though it was given to me as a gag gift, the person giving it to me gave it to me because they knew I actually liked it. Hilton's role is not that big in that movie, and it's certainly nothing to laugh at. Paris Hilton has the basic competence necessary to be an actor. There, I said it.

Because I'm sure you don't care if I spoil it, The Hottie & the Nottie ends up being a fairly traditional romantic comedy with a fairly traditional dose of gross-out humor (though not as much as the reviews would lead you to believe), in which Moore's character eventually falls for "the nottie," played pretty charmingly by Christine Lakin. If you want to look at it as a sign of Hilton's lack of vanity, she doesn't need to make herself the romantic lead in her own movie. She's essentially kind of a Macguffin that helps the male romantic lead find the female romantic lead. If she were truly as delusional as we all think, she'd figure out a way to have it both ways -- and that's what would make a movie worthy of our concentrated hatred, because it would likely ignore things like tried-and-true story structure and the traditional sense of which characters audiences find sympathetic. Instead, Hilton is intelligent enough to know what role she must play in this movie -- even if on some level it is a shallow homage to her physical beauty.

If you are looking for big problems with The Hottie & the Nottie, they are the same as with movies like She's All That, where an ugly duckling is transformed into a swan through what should be some fairly easy physical adjustments. I haven't seen She's All That, but I understand that making the female lead beautiful is literally as simple as taking her glasses off. It's a bit more complicated in TH & TN, as Lakin's character has somehow let an awful dental problem linger into her mid-20s, and has a massive mole on her chin. Why she hasn't taken care of these problems any earlier -- especially when she has a beauty-obsessed swan as her best friend (Hilton actually literally looks like a swan) -- is merely one of those plot mechanics that just needs to be that way for the story. It's stupid, but it's no more stupid than She's All That or other movies of their ilk.

The Hottie & the Nottie also distinguishes itself, slightly, by trying to put its finger on a real social phenomenon -- one that actually contains a bit of self-deprecation on Hilton's part if viewed the right way. The actual phenomenon of the title has to do with the idea that in order to have a chance with a pretty girl, a suitor has to ingratiate himself to her unattractive best friend. There's probably some truth to this, it's just that this movie exaggerates it (greatly) for comic effect. The elephant in the room, though, is why the pretty girl has an ugly best friend in the first place, which perhaps the film should have tackled more overtly if it wanted to qualify as true self-deprecation. The idea has always been that a pretty girl who's friends with an ugly girl does it so that she can look comparatively more beautiful. That suggests that the hottie (in this case Hilton) has real insecurities, and in some ways probably has low self-esteem. A reasonably solid core on which to build a gross-out romantic comedy.

And yes, some of the gross-out parts are, indeed, gross. The nottie also has terrible issues with her toenails, and at one point, one flies off and lands in the mouth of the guy who's being paid to be her date. Yes, that kind of thing is puerile and gross -- but no more so than a hundred other comedies that we don't lambast like we lambast The Hottie & the Nottie. (As a person who has bad toenail issues myself, I also tend to think of this kind of thing as less of an exaggeration and more of a reality.)

The 7 Metascore contains universally negative reviews, but the slight difference between this scale and Rotten Tomatoes is that a 5% freshness rating means that some people actually did rate the movie as fresh. Three people, to be exact. Here's what they said in their capsule reviews:

"At the risk of going against the obvious 'it's-cool-to-hate-Hilton' popular majority, it should be stated up front that The Hottie & the Nottie isn't half-bad." - Dustin Putnam, dustinputnam.com

"I wouldn't say it's particularly good, but certain measured elements of the genre create something surprisingly passable." - Eric Kohn, New York Press

"It's hard to fault the filmmakers, because given the premise, it could have been much MUCH worse." - Edward Douglas, Comingsoon.net

That's all I'm saying.

Though it should be noted that the first critic who gave it a fresh rating is Dustin Putnam, and the director of this film is Tom Putnam. Hmm. So maybe it's only two fresh ratings after all.

Still, what's clear from these comments is that the people knew they were supposed to hate it. They didn't because they were more courageous than other people who saw the same movie, who maybe also didn't hate it, but knew that a review full of vitriol was expected of them. There's no easier punching bag than Paris Hilton, and no negative review would be held up to less scrutiny than this one. They weren't going to be confronted on the street by anyone who said "I can't believe you said that about The Hottie & the Nottie." So, they said it, and they said it with glee.

Me, I'm honest, so I say again:

I sort of liked The Hottie & the Nottie.

Okay, I think I've found a can't miss movie for July. It's a movie I desperately wanted to see in time to rank it for my 2012 list, but the damn thing took forever to get to video. It's The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, and it's streaming on Netflix if you want to watch it with me.

Famous Flops: Xanadu

 
Welcome to the latest edition of Famous Flops, in which I watch one movie per month that was considered a massive failure either critically or commercially.

Sites like Rotten Tomatoes are interesting because their metric to examine the quality of movies is open-ended. By that I mean, the freshness rating of an old movie is never closed. A critic -- one who has met the site's eligibility requirements -- can declare a movie rotten or fresh whenever they want, even if the movie came out 50 years ago. Filmspotting host Josh Larsen created a stir recently when he sullied the previously unblemished record of 12 Angry Men by submitting the one negative review of it. We'll leave the discussion of whether this makes Larsen admirably brave or utterly foolish for another time.

What we can discuss now is whether this is a bit of a cheat. I think it is. On some level, it seems only fair that the published critical consensus about a film is what critics thought about it at the time it was released. Now, there are certainly occasions where a film has grown in esteem over the years, so if you were to judge only the initial reaction critics had (wasn't it Roger Ebert who didn't like Alien?), you would not be getting the full picture. However, in a case like the one above, the opposite may be true. Larsen seems to be judging 12 Angry Men by 2013 standards (in fact, I think he saw it and made his fateful judgment in 2012). Does Larsen really believe that he would have judged this (apparently not indisputably) great film so negatively in 1957?

Enter (finally) Xanadu, the Olivia Newton John bomb from 1980. The film that was meant to confirm and build upon the star's Grease popularity, but instead likely short-circuited her acting career.

However, I'm looking at it through 2013 eyes, and as a result, I'm a lot more forgiving. (Which I guess makes the Ebert/Alien example more germane in this situation.)

I know, watching Xanadu today, that it's a failure on many levels. But I'm also a person who has grown up in an era of movie fans who fully appreciate camp, and how can I not see Xanadu as glorious camp? If I'm judging a movie on the standard of how disagreeable it was to watch, I have to say that I liked Xanadu.

The story concerns a young artist named Sonny (Michael Beck) who has a fairly unique job, as movie jobs go -- he paints larger versions of album covers so that they can be displayed promotionally. In a fit of frustration over one particular painting, Sonny tears it into pieces and scatters those pieces into the wind. The pieces float until they find a mural outside an old disco club? roller rink? who knows. (Wikipedia describes it as an "art deco auditorium.") The mural contains a half-dozen beautiful women in all their late 1970s disco/sci-fi/album cover glory, and the shreds of painting bring them to life. One in particular, named Kira (Olivia Newton-John), is bequeathed a pair of roller skates, and "bumps into" Sonny along a Santa Monica bike path. When the artist sees his muse appear on an album cover he's supposed to paint later that day -- even though she wasn't a paid actress on the shoot -- he starts to wonder what the meaning of it all is. The long and the short of it is, she's there to assist in the meeting between Sonny and Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly), a former orchestra leader who lost his own muse years before. The two are destined to open the "art deco auditorium" as a new club called Xanadu. Oh, and did we mention that Kira is a literal Olympian muse, from Mount Olympus?

If you are a bit lost/confused, don't worry about it. The movie is incredibly simple to follow, and actually requires a handful of song-and-dance numbers to make it to feature length.

It's probably obvious that this is the stuff of a great cult hit, which is how I suspect we would describe Xanadu nowadays. It's certainly oddball enough, most notably with the appearance of Hollywood legend Gene Kelly. At the tail end of his career, Kelly is a bit fragile here -- but he's also a lot lighter on his feet than you would expect, and has a ton of contagious gusto for the material. His first dance number starts out modestly, as though keenly aware of his limitations, before picking up steam and demonstrating that Kelly has still "got it." It may just be that Kelly's million dollar smile added at least a half point of a star rating for me on its own.

Newton-John is pretty sweet here, too. She has a couple fabbo musical numbers, in additional to ethereally roller skating in and out of Sonny's world. It's plenty charming. Beck as Sonny is pretty bland, but two out of three ain't bad.

Of course, this must have all seemed like a train wreck in 1980. When none of the aesthetic stylings of a movie are the source of nostalgia or the epitome of kitsch, your only choice is to face them on their own terms, and that must have been tricky for audiences at the time. It was especially tricky for critics -- that we know for sure.

But watching it 33 years later, I can't help but be charmed by one of the climactic numbers, which involves an army of clubgoers on roller skates (led by Kelly) clapping in sync and chanting the movie's name.

So, I guess I'm glad I saw it now instead of then.

Okay, on to next month. After hating each of the first three movies I've seen in this series less than I thought I would (and actually liking at least one), I've stacked the deck for epic hatred in June. I'm watching -- yes, I'm really going to do it -- the Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie. It's supposed to be just awful, and I'm really, really hoping it is.

Famous Flops: Atlas Shrugged: Part I

This is the second in a monthly series in which I subject myself to famously bad movies, and see if they're as famously bad as I think they'll be. 

In the wake of Roger Ebert's death, I've heard a lot of people discussing how personal the job of film critic was to him. They've talked about how Ebert made himself a part of his reviews, how he fearlessly championed movies because they were in his wheelhouse, while pillorying movies that he was never likely to appreciate in the first place.

It may seem strange to start a discussion of the flop Atlas Shrugged: Part I with a fond remembrance of Roger Ebert, but hang with me for a minute.

Although I cherished the man, I do take a slightly different approach to film criticism than he did. I take film criticism personally in the sense that I argue passionately for the merits and against the weaknesses of the films I discuss, but I do also believe that I need to remove my "self" from the proceedings as much as I can. One example of that: When I was reviewing movies for All Movie Guide, I often sought out movies where I was not part of the intended demographic, such as movies aimed at African-Americans. I thought these movies deserved to be given fair and earnest reviews, reviews that were not inevitably crippled by the fact that I was not African-American. I don't know what Ebert's approach was to reviewing such movies, but according to the philosophy of his approach, he would have been justified in reviewing these movies negatively simply because they were not aimed at him. (And let's be honest, movies aimed at black audiences don't necessarily attract the top-money talent in the industry.)

That brings us, finally, to Paul Johansson's 2011 film Atlas Shrugged: Part I. It's the first in a series that's supposed to eventually have three parts, the final installment of which will complete the adaptation of Ayn Rand's famous novel. Part 2 came out last year, and was dismissed with just as many critical guffaws as was Part 1.

The thing is, part of what most critics seemed to hate about this movie has something to do with taking the Ebert approach to how it offended their personal sensibilities. I'm not saying I liked Atlas Shrugged: Part I, but neither was I ready to laugh it out of the building. 

Perhaps it's time to give some explanation why Ebert and others would not have liked this movie.

If you're not familiar with Ayn Rand, she was basically a conservative ideologue. She believed in the exceptionalism of the individual, which sounds good in the abstract. But what the idea boils down to is that greatness is derived from self-actualized human beings striving for their own rational self-interest, who will logically, as part of this pursuit, create the great inventions and ideas of our age. She believed that a society founded on the good of the community tended to be the enemy of these great specimens of humanity. Simply put, she was a hardcore capitalist who despised socialism. However, she disguised much of this through a philosophy called Objectivism, which enabled her to put more of an intellectual spin on her essential elitism.

Now, movies that have strongly conservative agendas tend to do very poorly with critics. The reasons for this are fairly simple: 1) Most critics come from the world of journalism, and most journalists tend to be liberal; 2) Most filmmakers also tend to be liberal, which means that movies made by conservatives tend to be weaker aesthetically. There's a third reason: Since movies with strongly conservative agendas are very rare, they tend to leave a person feeling "weirded out" in a way they can't entirely pinpoint. That "I just walked into the wrong lecture" feeling.

All of this is to say that Atlas Shrugged: Part I is not as bad of a film as it was made out to be. Though it did definitely leave me feeling "weirded out" from time to time.

The story, such as I'm able to explain it, involves several captains of industry as its protagonists -- the first tip-off that it's not your usual story. In most stories, the hero would be the little guy, but the heroes here are the big guys. The villains are the ones who want to regulate them. But this may not even be weirdest part.

The weirdest part is that the primary indicator of the health or illness of the U.S. economy in the not-too-distant future (2016 to be exact) is the rail industry. That's right, the economy seems to live or die on which trains are doing well and which aren't. One of the heroes of Atlas Shrugged is Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), a bigwig at the heretofore massively profitable Taggart Transcontinental. Another hero of Atlas Shrugged is Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler), the CEO of Rearden Steel, which is manufacturing a new steel amalgam that will allow the fastest transcontinental travel ever. Everyone else in the movie -- and I mean everyone -- is fixated on the success or failure of their partnership.

The villains are those who support unionized workers, try to stifle companies that want to become monopolies, and generally want to end the fun that the rich people enjoy so much. One of the key developments in the plot is the passage of a bill that disallows any person from owning more than one company. Yes, the movie is asking you to root for the big guy against the little guy.

But this is what Rand's book is about. It's not set in 2016, but otherwise, the book sounds very similar. It presents her political perspective, which we may think is kooky, but which was responsible for a best-selling novel.

If Johansson presented Rand's ideas ineptly, then we'd be right to rake him over the coals. But to be honest, much of this movie is decently executed. Sure, it has that kind of weird feeling of promoting fringe ideas, and the corresponding weird feeling of no one famous appearing in any of the key roles -- smaller parts essayed by the likes of Jon Polito and Michael Lerner is about as close to the A list as this movie gets. (Schilling would later appear in a movie opposite Zac Efron.) Part of this, of course, is because the movie is low budget. But it doesn't look low budget, so that's a feather in Johansson's cap as well.

The worst thing about the movie is probably its lack of action. There's a lot -- a lot -- of discussion about business strategies, about schemes to increase profitability and drive one's competitors out of business. After awhile you start to think "Have they really just been talking about trains for the past hour?" The answer is yes, yes they have.

So this is not my kind of movie. The protagonists are fundamentally difficult to root for, even if they are indeed exceptional by Rand's standards. There's not a lot of action. And the politics are something with which I essentially disagree.

But is this a halfway decent adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, as far as I can tell? Yes, it is, it's halfway decent.

Perhaps I was predisposed not to hate Atlas Shrugged because I really loved the 1949 adaptation of her other most famous novel, The Fountainhead. King Vidor's film is about an exceptional architect, played by Gary Cooper, whose main struggle is with an architectural community that wants to change him or reel him in. I didn't know anything about Rand and her politics when I saw it, and this is what I wrote in my review:

"Rand's talky philosophies, which dominate the film for better or worse, invite endless contemplation about what it means to be a trendsetter and to protect the purity of one's artistic endeavors, especially in a world eager to quash those who challenge the status quo."

In other words, divorced from a liberal's bias against Rand, I found these ideas fascinating, even powerful.

I do think it's fair to meet a movie like Atlas Shrugged: Part I on its own terms -- just as I did when I saw 2016: Obama's America and decided that it was a reasonably competent expression of a case against Obama. I think the theories in that documentary are crackpot theories, but the evidence is presented in a way that makes me understand why the people who hold those opinions hold them. So, thumbs down, but not the most ridiculous movie I've ever seen.

Because of some of the ways it's slow and a bit too dense for its own good, Atlas Shrugged: Part I is definitely also a thumbs down for me. But it's not a laughable thumbs down.

And yeah, sure, all these oblique references to an unseen character named John Galt are a little ponderous, especially since there's no resolution to them. But loose threads are expected in a film that's supposed to be the first of three.

I'm even kind of curious to see how the next two parts turn out.

Okay, looking ahead to May ... the Olivia Newton John bomb Xanadu. At least it'll be plenty cheeky.

Famous Flops: The Adventures of Pluto Nash

Hello, and welcome to the real first post in my new series Famous Flops, after I flopped the ball last month by picking a movie (Ishtar) that I couldn't get my hands on without buying it.

Note to self: When you're going to watch a movie that's not very good, make sure you write about it as soon as possible. I watched The Adventures of Pluto Nash over a week ago now, and details are already starting to escape me. And details -- especially outrageous ones -- will be part and parcel to this series, if I want it to be the kind of hoot that will justify me watching these terrible movies.

For starters, I think I will begin each post by telling you what kind of flop this is. In almost all cases, the movie will have been a financial failure, so that's not what I mean here. I mean that there are two very distinct ways a movie can be bad:

1) Outrageously misguided. The movie makes a bunch of howlingly bad choices and is filled with laugh-out-loud moments. ("Howlingly bad" and "laugh-out-loud" are essentially two ways of saying the same thing.)

2) Lame. The movie is not egregious in any single, definable way -- it's just lame.

Needless to say, it's a lot more fun to watch and write about a movie that is outrageously misguided. Alas, that's not the case with The Adventures of Pluto Nash. It's just lame.

That's especially disappointing because I figured it would be outrageously misguided. Eddie Murphy in a goofy space suit, which was a central part of most ad campaigns for the film, seemed like just the start. I expected him to be interacting throughout with a bunch of very poorly rendered CGI aliens and other silly props and creatures. Alas, this was not to be.

The movie is about an ex-convinct named Pluto Nash, who has gained quite a reputation on the criminal circuit as a successful smuggler. Upon getting out of jail, he saves an old friend (Jay Mohr), who owns a dive bar on the moon (the whole thing takes place on the moon in 2080), but can't repay his debts to the mob. Nash agrees to pay his friend's debt seconds before the mobsters are going to pour battery acid down the man's throat, effectively ending his nascent singing career -- and any number of other potential pursuits, such as, you know, living. Flash forward eight years, and Nash has turned the dive bar into the most successful club on the moon -- which puts him right in the crosshairs of Rex Crater, a mobster who wants to buy/take the property for himself. Nash is having none of that. He's also just given a job to the daughter of his old prison buddy who has just arrived from Earth, played by Rosario Dawson.

All of this is presented rather blandly and without any consideration of Murphy's skills as a zany comic. This may be one of the straightest of his roles on film. Rarely is he called on to do any sort of impression or use his rubber face to any purpose. In fact, most Murphy characters that are some variation on Pluto Nash are notable for being so completely above the fray. Not only is Nash not above the fray, he seems to be genuinely concerned by the events of the plot in a way that plays unnaturally given Murphy's talents.

Rex Crater has a number of goons at his disposal (one played by Joe Pantoliano) who make several failed attempts to whack the club owner, leading to Nash and Dawson's character going on the run and getting involved with a number of would-be whacky adventures. These adventures are presented so lifelessly that I barely even remember what any of them were.

The one character I really liked was Nash's robot body guard, played by Randy Quaid. Usually the thing you'd hate most about a movie like this is the sidekick character(s), but the android Bruno is the real exception. He's an obsolete model, which makes him lovably dim-witted in certain ways -- and this is something Quaid can do very well. Perhaps the thing I liked most about the character is that to give him a robotic voice, his dialogue is auto-tuned. Maybe I'm still just a sucker for auto tune, a decade after it seemed like a novelty, but the overall effect was to make this character seem very sweet and charming.

Murphy and Dawson are fine. Really. Remember, this movie is not outrageously misguided, it's just lame.

Oh, Nash does eventually don a spacesuit for exactly one scene.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash didn't offend me, which may be the most disappointing thing about it.

Having gotten out of the gate with a bit of a thud, I'm definitely angling for something outrageously misguided for April. I can't imagine having any other reaction to Atlas Shrugged Part I, the 2011 adaptation of Ayn Rand's famous novel. This movie was supposedly a creative disaster, though neither its critical lambasting nor its poor box office (less than $5 million) prevented Part II from coming out last fall and Part III from being scheduled for next year.

Flop fail

Remember last month when I told you about a new series on my blog called Famous Flops, which would find me watching one epic flop per month that I hadn't previously seen? And that I announced Ishtar as my first movie for February?

Yeah, that's not happening.

When I announced Ishtar as the first movie in the series, I did so without having a clear path for seeing it. I assumed it would be available on Netflix, though I don't know why I would assume such a thing -- the Netflix inventory is notoriously full of holes, some of them a lot bigger than this one. In the comments section of that post, Don Handsome pointed out that Netflix did not in fact carry Ishtar.

But I didn't have to scramble for an alternate viewing method for long, because the helpful website www.canistream.it revealed to me that I could in fact watch Ishtar on Crackle. I had never used Crackle and was a bit skeptical of its validity as a resource, but I soon learned that the only price to pay for this free service is having to sit through commercials. Plan back on.

Then I checked Can I Stream It? again and found that either its apparent availability had been an optical illusion, or just like that it had slipped out of availability again. The website did inform me that the movie was available for purchase from Amazon for $14.70, but that exceeds my budget for something like this.

So the apparently epic awfulness of Ishtar will remain a mystery to me for an undetermined amount longer, and instead I'll be launching the series in March with The Adventures of Pluto Nash. A movie that is indeed among Netflix's offerings.

Will you join me? If not, I can hardly blame you. It'll be an adventure indeed, I'm sure.

An unlucky year for famous flops

When I started my last two recurring monthly features on The Audient, it was to answer a specific need. I felt I wasn't making enough room in my viewing schedule for films that were released before 1980, despite having more of an interest in them than your average person. So I launched Decades and then Getting Acquainted, both of which were designed to give me a structured reason to watch these films.

In unlucky year '13, I have a different need I'm trying to address now: I'm trying to see more bad movies.

Why would someone set such a goal, you might ask?

Well, I've always thought that watching movies should be a balance between watching great examples of cinema and watching schlock. Not an even balance, mind you -- but for at least every five movies that show you the best way to do things, you should have one to show you what not to do. My high school film teacher, who might otherwise strike someone as a snob, always touted the benefits of seeing schlock. (That was the actual word he used, and I'm appropriating it here.)

When I was reviewing movies for All Movie, I was fed a steady diet of not-very-good to downright bad movies. But that gig ended in late 2011, and since then, the balance has tipped -- unsurprisingly -- in favor of movies I actually want to see.

I know this because I keep a spreadsheet of all the movies I've ever seen, and because it's a spreadsheet, it's possible to apply formulas to the data I'm keeping. One such formula tells me the percentage of movies I've seen that I've liked. I keep a running tally of thumbs ups and thumbs downs, and add to that number each time I see something new.

For quite some time, the percentage of movies I'd seen that I liked was hovering around 64%. I don't know if that seems good or bad to you, but most people might think it's a shame to spend over a third of your time watching movies you don't care for. Me, I was comfortable with it.

In recent years, though, that number has been creeping upward. Now it's over 67%. And whether it's rational or not, I have been rooting for it to go back down. Every time I see a bad movie and the percentage creeps downward by a couple hundredths of a percent (more than it creeps upward when I see a good movie, since I've seen more good movies), I silently cheer the result. Not so much as to falsify the results, but enough that it makes me feel like I'm keeping a certain equilibrium.

You might logically say "Vance, even 67% is nowhere near the one out of six bad movies ratio you advocated earlier. You'd have to get up around 84% before you'd be at that level."

True, but that's assuming I was starting from scratch. I can't change my past viewings, I can only control what I'm seeing now. And these days, it's probably more like one in ten bad movies.

Plus, there are degrees of badness as well. The truly instructional bad films are the truly terrible ones, and they are also usually the most fun. Most bad movies I see these days are only a marginal thumbs down, what one might describe as worthwhile failures. And while worthwhile failures always contain plenty of instructional moments, they aren't the cautionary tales that I may be looking for.

So, this is a very long way of saying that my new series is called Famous Flops, and starting in February, I'll be concentrating on the worst of the worst, one per month, and then writing about them here.

That's right, I am going to identify movies that are famous for being terrible that I have not yet had the (dis)pleasure of watching. I'll laugh, I'll cry, I'll wince, and maybe sometimes I'll actually like them better than their reputation, which will be an interesting result in its own right. (Hey, if I haven't told you already, I describe Gigli -- which would have been a perfect candidate for this series, had I not already seen it -- as "not that bad.")

My goal will be to watch this movie at any point during the month that I can fit it in, and then write about it close to the end of the month so you have a chance to watch it too. Okay, okay, you may not want to play along. But if you do, it's just one movie, and you may share my fascination with gawking at cinematic car wrecks.

And if you do, here's my first title: Ishtar. In February, I'll be watching the Elaine May film known primarily for being a flop, even though it starred Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty. Seems like a perfect place to start.

I'll see you back here around the end of February to discuss.