Worst Movie Ever

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Last week I asked folks about the worst movie of 2013. Which made me curious what folks think is the worst movie of all time.

I think my vote would go to Schindler’s List. Slick, oleaginous, self-satisfied Spielberg tripe about the Holocaust. Bleah.

Let me know what you’d pick in the comments.
 

Shindler-Girl-Red-Dress

152 thoughts on “Worst Movie Ever”

  1. You may want to get into another line of work if you think Schindler’s List is the worst movie of all time.

    I think you are just trying very hard to be contrarian.

    Grow up.

  2. Sigh. I’ll never understand why people take it as a personal attack, or as a sign of mendacity, that someone doesn’t like the same things they do. Talk about a need to grow up.

    But you know…rather than whining and bitching at me, why not play the game and whine and bitch about the movie you dislike the most? If you think Schindler’s List is great, what do you think is the worst movie ever?

  3. Sigh. I’ll never understand why people like Noah whine and bitch when someone merely points out that they are just trolling for comments by claiming something as ridiculous as Schindler’s List is the worst movie of all time.

    Rather than wasting your time insulting me, why don’t you write a post on what movie you really think is the worst movie ever?

    Again, grow up.

  4. I hate Schindler’s List too, but there’s always the conundrum of whether a “bad” movie is more aesthetically failed or more evil. “Evil” seems to be points for Birth of a Nation, which is recognized for being one of the greatest formal breakthroughs in film history. I sort of feel like the worst movie ever should star Steve Gutenberg, and/or Kirk Cameron.

  5. I agree with you Albert (with respect to the Gutenberg/Cameron comment). But, naming a movie with Gutenberg or Cameron wouldn’t get Noah as much attention as naming Schindler’s List.

  6. Kurt, I really hate the movie. I’m not trolling. I didn’t think anyone would even really bother to talk about Schindler’s List. I thought people would just enjoy talking about what they though the worst movie was.

    I didn’t insult you. I tried to engage. But I guess that didn’t work.

    Bert, I thought about Birth of a Nation. I haven’t actually ever seen that, I don’t think.

  7. The worst movie I have ever seen, by a wide margin, is I Know Who Killed Me. The movie is an exercise in sadism — a torture-porn film (albeit one with relatively little gore) starring a former child star already known, at the time, for her issues with substance abuse. This would be bad enough, but it is also incredibly pretentious, surrounding its sadism with a stylized visual vocabulary stolen form Lynch and Argento. Unlike the works of those directors, however, there’s nothing more going on — it’s as though the director sought to make the movie Blue Velvet’s worst critics accused it of being — and fell short, but then also layered displaced pedophilia onto it. The only way to enjoy this movie is to be, like the villain, convinced that poor Lindsay Lohan deserves to have these horrible things done to her for being sexual and for having recently been underage. I should also mention the jarring sex scene in the middle of the film that is, inexplicably, played for laughs.

    Yuck.

  8. Kurt, you are now trolling. You’ve made your point multiple times. At this point you’re derailing the thread. If you want to talk about what movie you think is the worst ever, go ahead. If you keep being a troll, I’m going to block you. Fair warning.

  11. With me, it’s probably a toss-up between The Exorcist and Breaking the Waves. I’ll probably say the former, as I think William Friedkin, William Peter Blatty, and so forth should have been prosecuted for child abuse.

    However, the adjective “worst” doesn’t seem quite applicable, as both films are fairly accomplished in many respects. “Loathsome” or “despicable” would be more apropos.

  12. Really? I liked both the Exorcist and Breaking the Waves. I can definitely see why Breaking the Waves could be seen as despicable (and even agree to some extent). The Exorcist not quite so much…though I didn’t know that they mistreated the performer.

    Breaking the Waves is the only movie that ever made me literally throw up, I think…though not because of content. The hand-held camera gave me motion sickness.

  13. “Now, Voyager” (about a spinster who finds love by basically stalking and manipulating some guy) is generally lauded as an amazing film and one of Bette Davis’s best. It may very well be one of her bests, but I found the movie strange and creepy.

  15. I don’t know the behind-the-scenes stories with The Exorcist. However, I can’t see how one could possibly stage some of those scenes with a 12-year-old in the way they did without it being child abuse. That scene with her masturbating with a crucifix particularly comes to mind.

  16. My vote would either go for every Adam Sandler movie made in the last 5-10 years or the movie “The Room”

    If you havnt seen The Room, you really should.

  18. It’s been a long time since I saw The Exorcist, but if I recall correctly the impression that Regan is masturbating with a crucifix is created by cutting from a long shot of Linda Blair lifting the crucifix up followed by a closeup of a hand that we take to be Blair’s bring it downward violently, followed by a shot in profile. Blair, according to quick Google search, did not fully grasp what she was miming in the scene. I’m also not sure how much of that scene was her double — I know it was her double who slaps Ellen Burstyn in the same sequence.

    To be honest, the first time I saw it many years ago, it was unclear to me if she was masturbating or mutilating herself — of course it’s supposed to be both (the line “Jesus Christ! Fuck me!” should have been a giveaway, I suppose, but both are also non-literal expletives.) Blair, at any rate, does not seem to feel that she was abused.

    I have seen The Room, but it’s so amateurish that I almost feel that it shouldn’t count.

  21. then im gonna go with whichever transformers was the one where the only good guy to die in the whole movie was the robot that talked in a hilariously stereotypical black guy voice.

  22. I just looked it up, it was the first one.

    And the black robots name was “Jazz”

    what an atrocious movie…

  24. I dont really know who that is but after a quick google search I discovered that he gave a positive review to “jack and jill” so I wouldnt be surprised if he gave good reviews to other shit movies.

  25. I used to run with a crowd that liked stuff like Monster-A-Go-Go and Manos, the Hands of Fate and The Beast of Yucca Flats and Plan Nine from Outer Space, so I saw quite a few movies that might be candidates for “Worst Movie Ever.” Many of these have a certain charm, though, and I have some affection for movies like “Frankenstein Island” and “Robot Monster.”

    In the 1990s, a friend of mine, knowing that I like bad movies, challenged me with a new movie that one of his friends “in the industry” had told him was making the rounds as a spectacularly terrible movie. “Bring it on,” I said.

    The movie was Being Human, with Robin Williams. Man, is it bad. My high tolerance for bad cinema has never been so soundly challenged. I took three days to watch it as I couldn’t handle more than 30 minutes at a time. It is so boring. I wanted to eat my own eyeballs to make it stop.

    So “Being Human” is my candidate.

  26. Ian, Armond White’s a very famous (maybe the most famous?) film critic, known for his contrarian views. He loved one of the Transformers films; I can’t remember which (and haven’t seen any of them myself…)

    I like Plan Nine From Outer Space. I don’t think technical competence is necessarily a point for or against a film, myself. Lo-fi or slick is an aesthetic choice which can work well or poorly.

    Havne’t seen Being Human, but Robin Williams’ cinema career has mostly been one massive blight.

  28. The worst movie of all time has to be smart enough to know what it is doing and aesthetically cogent enough to present a clear perspective. Ideally it would be critically acclaimed or artistically credible, because that would mean that it actually plays a significant part in people’s lives (one way or another). I don’t think that bad movies can compete with movies that are well-made in an insidious or ugly way.

    I haven’t seen Triumph of the Will or Schindler’s List, but I think that those are the types of films that make good candidates. Goofy, unthinkingly offensive and derivative shit like Police Academy is too harmless to be the worst movie of all time.

    In this spirit, I was thinking I would pick Dogma, Kevin Smith’s self-satisfied Bible fan-fiction, but I don’t think that it’s ultimately interesting or smart enough to make it to the number one spot.

    Instead, because I’ve got Woody Allen on the brain, I’ll pick Midnight in Paris. It’s condescending and sentimental to the point far beyond the point of disgust. It features a cast of thoroughly unlikeable characters, an annoying bumbling protagonist, and a love interest that is a one-dimensional cipher for male desire. It also has a cast of historical caricatures that are deployed like middle-aged liberal arts English major fanservice. It even manages Allen’s trademark shiver-inducing older-man/younger-woman romantic interest. It all comes off as a wealthy, over-educated, and entitled masturbation fantasy. It’s the sort of movie that makes young people into political and aesthetic radicals of all stripes by virtue of its very existence in the existing order.

    My favorite movie is probably There Will Be Blood. Just in case I’ve hurt any feelings and you seek revenge.

  29. Kurt, if you’re still with us in spirit, I hope it’s calming to learn that Noah is by no means alone in his distaste for Schindler’s List. In this discussion people such as Art Spiegelman, with whom Noah does not exactly march in lockstep, express pungent disdain for the film. Also, in the book Eyes Wide Open by Frederic Raphael, Stanley Kubrick is quoted thusly: “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t.”

    I don’t offer this out of a desire to dogpile on the film, but to point out that a critical disdain for SL isn’t something Noah manufactured out of nanny-nanny-boo-boo contrarianism. I’m the only person I know who thinks that scene near the end where Schindler breaks down about the lives he could have saved if he’d pawned more lifestyle accutrements is a powerful challenge to a love for creature comforts; even the people I know who love the movie hoot at that scene.

  31. Robert Stanley Martin,

    I heard an interview with Friedkin in which he claimed he is friendly with Blair and lunches with her. According to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Ellen Burstyn claims Freidkin deliberately had her jerked around too fiercely in some wirework harness they used to do a scene where she gets poltergeisted around the room, and she suffered injuries from which she’s never recovered.

    Owen A,

    I like how you define your criteria. I do think, though, that character likability is one of the most pernicious things tinseltown has introduced into the public bloodstream.

    My favorite bad film is The Mask of Fu Manchu, starring noted Asian-American actor Boris Karloff in the title role, and famed Asian-American actress Myrna Loy as his bondage freak daughter. The movie’s all about the sly, brutal wickedness of The Heathen Chinee, the beastial thuggishness of The Negroid, and of course the total fucking awesomeness of The White Man. What makes the movie great, though, is the way its ineptitude undermines its loathsome racist thesis. There’s a priceless scene near the end where the scrawny protagonist “beats up” two of the buffest African-American bodybuilders you’ll ever see. The bodybuilders have to pretend to get defeated by someone who clearly couldn’t win, and one of the bodybuilders has this wonderful embarrassed grin, like he’s in on the joke and the filmmakers aren’t.

    A more recent stinker is Double Whammy from director tom DiCillo, which I watched because I loved his films Living in Oblivion and The Real Blonde. This one feels like a clueless attempt to sell out. It’s the worst Tarantino mimeograph ever, in part because it feels like the director is doing all the sex and violence schtick with a weary let’s-get-this-over-with sigh. Furthermore Denis Leary’s put-upon cop is presented as a protagonist but never does anything except suffer insult and rut with his highly unprofessional chiropractor. We gave up on this dud midway through; theres another plot thread about a couple of aspiring screenwriters, and I suspect it ends with them writing the movie we just watched, but I couldn’t go the distance. There’s probably worse movies, but it was a bad, subhuman film from someone who’d made wonderful human films.

  34. Aaron, the characters in Midnight in Paris aren’t unlikeable in an interesting, well-developed, or intentional way. They’re unlikeable because they are supposed to be relatable despite being fucking annoying.

  36. The Mask of Fu Manchu is AWESOME! Just so over-the-top crazy that I have to love it. It’s highly offensive but it’s so overboard that it can’t be taken seriously. And Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy are so devoted to their roles!

    (Loy later expressed regret at playing this and other evil exotic women in films like The Squall and Thirteen Women.)

    My biggest criteria for judging whether a film is bad or not is boredom. Was I bored? For how long? Did I stop the film?

    The Mask of Fu Manchu is never boring. Stupid, yes. Boring, no.

  40. Oh man, I’m so glad someone mentioned Robin Williams, and Dogma. To bring it back to live-action cartoons, while we’re at it, Noah and I, with some friends, had an atrocious experience seeing Spawn. Spawn BAD.

    As for overrated AND offensive, how about Gone With The Wind?

  42. Yeah Gone With the Wind tried pretty hard to make me feel bad for an entitled Southern white woman during the civil war. It didn’t work, so I guess it’s a failure both in terms of its mission and its execution.

  44. I can’t follow you into hating Wes Anderson territory, Stabler! You’ll have to go on without me! When you finally reach good taste, tell them *cough cough* tell them to remember me, always!

  45. There’s no such thing as the worst movie of all time.. At best (worst?), you might be able to pick a movie that you personally dislike the most. Oddly, I’m drawing a blank there, myself…I really dislike Mulholland Drive, I guess.

    For once, I find myself agreeing with Bert — there’s a real tension between two judging by ideological offensiveness and technical/formal incompetence, or, in other words, by moral and aesthetic badness. And I’d add that there’s no principled reason to favour one measure over the other.

  46. Mulholland Drive is fabulous. I love creepy stuff (although, RIP, I found Philip Seymour Hoffman’s scripts uneven).

    But sure, Wes Anderson is an exemplar of taste, at least if you have a taste for a nostalgic Cat Stevens montage that may or may not be an advertisement for some mystical app that appeals equally to Baby Boomers and Gen X.

  47. I don’t think you parsed my comment correctly. I was implying you were courageous enough to criticize something I’m irrationally fond of.

  48. Oh! Pardon me. Irrational fondness for dreck is always forgivable (although, whether or not that’s true could be a good topic for this thread).

    Speaking of which, does everyone know the amazing shlock video of Everything Is Terrible?

    I am actually embarrassed that I may not like anything that truly embarrasses me. I like My So-Called Life for example, which is terrible, but it’s sort of pro-queer and so not totally embarrassing.

    Nobody mentioned the new Star Wars movies. Or Whoopi Goldberg. I have no fondness for either.

  50. I don’t really have an all-time least favorite, but I recently saw a bad (both as a movie and in an ethical sense) movie that I found pretty fascinating. Has anyone else watched God Bless America, which is available through Netflix on Demand? The movie was written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, the pseudo-spastic guy from the Police Academy movies, who I guess is a very angry liberal in real life. It’s about a middle-aged loser and a cute teenaged girl who go on a killing spree, condemning through self-righteous speeches and then murdering all of the people who apparently annoy Goldthwait: Fox News hosts, Tea Party people, vapid celebrities, cruel judges of t.v. talent shows, rich teenage girls on reality shows, people who talk in movie theaters, etc. Even though I pretty much hate all the same people as Goldthwait, even I was made extremely uncomfortable by his apparently dead-serious conviction that all of them absolutely deserve to be murdered. With all of the recent shootings, it’s kind of amazing that a movie like that was actually made.

  51. Sin City is the only movie I’ve ever walked out of. I hate that movie really deeply, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough movies to nominate a “worst of all time.” I don’t know – I stopped The Animal short as a kid because I thought it was so bad.

  56. If all of Woody Allen’s movies were as bad as Midnight in Paris he’d be in jail right now.

  58. I should add, before anyone suspects anything– it was a PRO-intelligent design documentary. Ben Stein can make even Richard Dawkins seem like a somewhat non-dickish individual.

  61. Oh Life is Beautiful sucked!! So did Happiness (RIP again), which came out the same year, the year of unfunny ironic titles. Yeah, Jim Carey should not be forgotten.

    For what it’s worth, I meant to impugn Short Circuit Steve Gutenberg, not Police Academy Steve Gutenberg.

  67. I want to second (or third) Jacob on Sin City. I have similar feelings for 300, and was not able to make it through Suckerpunch. Zack Snyder is probably my least favorite director working today.

    I truly hate Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Desperately hate it.

  70. Hmm, I enjoyed 300 because it was pernicious and not boring. I suppose it’s desirable if everyone finds pernicious art boring, though. Birth of a Nation, for example, just puts me out.

    I recently rewatched Schindler’s List and thought it was pretty darn good. It suffers from the same problem as 12 Years a Slave does, namely that its part of a problematic current of desired uplift at the end of stories rooted in a reality where most people involved in reality didn’t have happy endings. This trend is most often seen in the use of a reporter (typically white) who struggles to get the story out, which he or she succeeds at, so the audience can feel some closure. I don’t see how being part of this twisted tendency makes a particular film awful, though, and SL is at least as good as 12 Years — I’d say better overall.

    I could probably pick any softcore film starring Shannon Tweed as being the worst film of all time — besides being crudely made, they don’t even deliver on the sex. But that’s too easy. I’ll pick some piece of kitschy pomposity that’s also really fucking boring to sit through. There are two names that come to mind: Tarkovsky and Malick. From the former (who’s an expert at fucking up good SF novels), Stalker features 3 guys sitting in the dirt muttering the worst kind of new age mumbo jumbo for over 3 hours. From the latter, A New World is bunch of spirtiualist horse shit about the noble savage featuring Johnny Depp clone, Colin Ferrill that makes the American Transcendentalism sound a lot like whatever new age self help books Tarkovsky liked to get his ideas from. I made it to the end of Stalker, so maybe give the honors to A New World. But, really, with the exception of both directors’ first films, you could just about substitute any of their works here. I’ve really learned to hate them over time. Give me Snyder or Spielberg or crass materialist commercialism over spiritualist drivel. Fuck spiritualism.

  71. I agree with Charles on 300.

    A: All of Malick’s films aren’t interchangeable in terms of message or content. E.g. The Thin Red Line /= Days of Heaven.

    B: What is “spiritualism”? I assume you’re not talking about the belief in ghosts. If you’re suggesting that either Tarkovsky or Malick have some sort of straightforward belief in a spiritual afterlife that is espoused in every one of their pictures then you are giving some shallow and boring readings to some movies that are a bit more aesthetically complex.

    Classic Charles Reece though. When are you going to write your systematic work?

  72. I’ve walked out of a handful of films in my life — “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Barry Lyndon,” and “Ghost Rider II” immediately spring to mind.

    For “Ghost Rider,” my phone vibrated with a call I needed to take out in the lobby. After the call was over, I just said, “Screw it,” and left.

    “Barry Lyndon” was just boring and way, way too long.

    TCM was just so painfully bad, I couldn’t take watching any more of it.

    But I think the worst big budget dramatic film I’ve ever seen was “The Oscar.” The worst comedy? There have been many (especially by Friedberg and Seltzer), but “Meet the Spartans” might have been the worst.

  73. I loved Stalker, and Tarkovsky in general. Still need to see the mirror.

    You win on contrarianism though. Tarkovsky as worst film ever is a line in the sand.

    12 Years doesn’t actually have an especially uplifting ending, fwiw. Patsey doesn’t escape; most slaves don’t escape. The film is pretty clear that Northup’s freedom is aberrant, and doesn’t solve slavery or make up for it. Schindler’s List doesn’t have anything like that kind of clarity. (IMO)

  74. Really surprised no one has brought up Crash yet (the Academy Award one, not the Cronenberg one). In terms of being actively harmful I struggle to think of one worse except for maybe Birth of a Nation

  76. I wouldn’t even put Midnight in Paris in the bottom 50% of Woody Allen movies. As someone who grew up admiring him and felt honor-bound for years to see everything he did, I can tell you that much of his post-1990 work has reached almost unimaginably low depths, with Celebrity and Curse of the Jade Scorpion leading the pack as his all-time worst. And two of the earliest movies in which he appeared, What’s New Pussycat? and Casino Royale, are among the most excruciatingly boring and unfunny comedies I’ve ever seen, although I don’t think either of them were his fault.

    I actually liked Sin City and was really impressed by the visuals. Were you guys put off by the worship of violence and the over-the-top misogyny or something? It just seemed like a tongue-in-cheek Mickey Spillane pastiche/unofficial sequel to Pulp Fiction to me. I thought 300 was more like right-wing propaganda, though.

  78. I hated Sin City’s visuals, actually. I found them really sloppy and confusing – in the attempt to mimic the comics they lost a lot of clarity. And I hated the way people looked like they were floating in empty space all the time. I could stand to watch about any 10 seconds of Sin City with the sound off, but that’s about it. Don’t get me started on that Miller dialogue.

  79. Ooh Crash. What a terrible movie. And Babel too, that copycat ensemble film made a few years later. I can’t remember if Traffic was very good… ensemble films are the worst.

    Speaking of which– I think everyone must have gotten tired of hating on Love Actually, as no one’s mentioned it yet.

  80. American Beauty is craaaazy terrible. Crash is as well. And while we’re on the subject of Best Picture winners, No Country for Old Men is pretty shitty.

  82. The Happening. It was like M Night told the movie studios, “You think Lady in the Water was a bad movie? Ill show you what a bad movie is.”

  83. “You win on contrarianism though. Tarkovsky as worst film ever is a line in the sand.”

    Yes, but if someone comes out and says, “I hate everything by Ozu”, Charles might have to give up his Contrary Crown. I’m going to guess that Charles also hates almost everything by that atheistic spiritualist Dreyer.

  84. I don’t know about feature films, but easily the most hideously awful music video of all time is michael Jackson’s ‘Liberian Girl’:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3V-7DEAgdc

    It actually renders me incoherent with rage and prone to homicidal violence. The quintessence of narcissistic suck.

  85. As a child, I hated Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I dimly remember Jacob shares this with me?

  87. I like that this is a list of semi-respected films that people find reprehensible, rather than a catalogue of incompetence. The obvious argument to anybody’s choice is that there has to be an aesthetically “worse” movie out there, but the consensus here (aside from mentions of some classic stinkers) is that the choices are films that show some skill, but have certain messages or styles that people really dislike or even hate. I think that’s probably more valuable than agreeing with most complainers by saying that Adam Sandler sucks.

    For me, my go-to choice for worst movie is A Beautiful Mind, which made me angry in its glib treatment of mental illness. There’s a fascinating story there in its main character as somebody who was able to overcome schizophrenia in real life, but the movie presents it as him basically deciding that his hallucinations aren’t real, after which all his problems are solved. As somebody with family members who deal with mental illness, I found this dangerously misinformed, something that adds to the stigma of mental illness as something that’s “all in your head” that can be overcome with simple willpower rather than actual medical treatment.

    As for other people’s picks, I haven’t watched Schindler’s List in years, so I should see it again to see how much Noah’s hate has rubbed off on me. I remember thinking certain aspects of it were pretty good, like the nastiness of the concentration camps and Ralph Fiennes’ character, but I might hate it on rewatch, although probably not with the intensity that Noah does. Rushmore is one of my all-time favorite films, so I obviously disagree with that one. 300 isn’t especially good, but I like its visual style (same goes for Sin City and The Spirit, the latter of which kind of won me over with its total insanity). In fact, I’m generally positive about Zack Snyder, since while his movies are invariably pretty stupid, he directs the hell out of them. Even Sucker Punch, while a total failure at whatever it was trying to do, is pretty fascinating in its bizarre, misguided ambition.

    So yeah, to each his own. Unless you like A Beautiful Mind, in which case you’re wrong.

  88. Suat, Owen & Noah,

    I haven’t caught the Ozu bug, but I don’t hate him, either. He did train my favorite Japanese director, Imamura. Really different styles and views between the two it seems.

    And I like Dreyer well enough, particularly Ordet (duh). I would say of his most famous film, Passion, that it contains a really great close up that he overuses until it just kind of gets dull by the end. It has the same effect on me as a Ruby-Spears cartoon that keeps using same cells to save on money. Yeah, I’m a soulless heathen. Anyway, I don’t think Dreyer expresses what I’d call spiritualism (Passion might be debatable, I guess).

    Spiritualism that I hate to see in my movies: the notion that rocks, reeds, mud, cows, fields, and even the suffering of others exist to give some hidden, transcendent meaning to our material existence. A 3 minute scene of floating reeds in water has you watching floating reeds in water for 3 minutes. However, it’s supposed to have you fill in the metaphysical ellipsis with lots of gooey emotions about how meaningful our existence is. But the reeds still won’t give a shit. This is why Tarkovsky fucks up good SF novels, he has to ultimately make Solaris about us, the waste left from the intergalactic travellers about us. (He’s the anti-Imamura.)

    I think Malick expresses the same sort of existential anthropomorphism, particularly in Tree of Life (which expresses pretty much the same worldview people made fun of Insane Clown Posse for expressing in the song “Miracles”), but all his nonsense about “grace” goes back at least to the Thin Red Line (which makes for two films that begin with noble savages swimming in the ocean). It’s not true of the amazing Badlands, but I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to find soulful sustenance out of all that struggle in Days of Heaven. Everything is suffused with grace, or “miracles” — metaphysical ellipsis, fill it in with your own version of “humanity.”

    And Schindler’s List has at the end a complete breakdown by the protagonist for condemning to die all those others by his wasting so much wealth on junk. I found this scene effective (so I’m not a complete heathen), and it certainly underlines all those who didn’t get out. It also has the viewer identifying with the sin, rather than against it, like 12 Years does. (Not that the latter is wrong to do, it’s just emotionally easier.)

  89. It’s not clear to me that the viewer is given an easy out in 12 Years. You want Northup to escape, but no one else gets to. I don’t think that’s actually an easy place to be.

    Wheras with Schindler, you identify with Schindler and he’s all guilty, and you’d be guilty too, and you’re all good people, and he saved so many, how could you hate him? His breakdown is a way to underline his sainthood, not problematize it. Whereas Northup is never a saint in the first place.

  92. Shortly after Schindler’s List came out, I saw a documentary about Schindler that included an interview with a guy who had been saved by him during the war and worked for him afterwards. This guy described Schindler as an obnoxious egomaniac who was constantly bragging about what a great humanitarian he was, but he added that this arrogance was also what prompted him to save so many people. That seems like an at least potentially interesting point for a movie to explore, although I don’t remember if Schindler’s List actually did explore it.

  93. Schindler’s List didn’t explore that. Schindler’s a lovable rogue; his main humanizing flaw is that he sleeps with lots of women.

    Also he’s Liam Neeson. Though I don’t think Spielberg realized what a repulsive flaw that is.

  95. I really like Showgirls. The only bad Veorhoven film is Basic Instinct. If I listed films I’m fond of Noah would ridicule me.

    I stop watching films I don’t like so I don’t remember them much. I don’t hate any film, only find plenty boring. Going out of your way to avoid films you know will be bad is a good thing.

    Superman Returns was very very very bad. It had talent working on it.

  96. I kind of liked Showgirls! I like Verhoeven in general. Even have some fondness for Basic Instinct, honestly.

    I think Showgirls is often cited as the worst movie ever, though. Wikipedia has a list of others.

  98. Most people remember the two stupid sex scenes in Showgirls. Especially the one in the pool and dismissed the actress as bad. She isn’t. Verhoeven likes walking the serious and ridiculos line. Often crossing it. He is aware of what he is doing. He likes taking the piss out of his audience, the actors and the film and I love him for it.

  101. Read them Noah.

    I’ve been lurking since you were a blog.

    Sometimes I pop my head out to comment but not often.

  102. I also loathe Schindler’s List. To be honest, there’s no worst film, there are so many truly awful films … Hollywood’s worst films are a vile sphere whose abominable center is everywhere and vile circumference is infinite …

    More to the point, who is the worst audience? Because most of the stinkers mentioned above are hits.

  105. So, noone else hates Forrest Gump? Guess I need to step in, there…

    It’s not so much the movie itself (although it is witless and leaden), but the way all America just fell for it, like everybody was just waiting for an idiot man-child to reassure everyone with simplistic wisdom and reduce historical upheavals to channel-surfing set-pieces.

    (Or so I felt at the time. I haven’t rewatched it since it came out…)

  106. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. It tries so hard to mean something when really it’s just further evidence of von Trier’s increasingly obvious fear of women. It’s one of those films where you tolerate the discomfort and ugliness (which includes all manner of bodily fluid play, torture and genital mutilation: enjoy!) because you think the filmmaker must be leading up to some kind of meaningful point. But a little over 100 minutes later, you realize you’ve just sat through something no less disgusting nor more meaningful than Bad Grampa.

  107. Perhaps it’s just the company I keep, but generally women seem more repulsed by Showgirls than men. I found it especially depressing that Gina Gershon had such a thankless role.

    Also, since Verhoeven’s name isn’t on Showgirls – he used the name Jan Jansen instead – what does that say?

    Conversely, I think the first RoboCop film was brilliant. It’s one of the few I’ve liked enough to purchase on DVD. I also liked Spetters.

  109. As a joke, a friend gave me a copy of Showgirls: The Book shortly after we went to see the movie in the theatre. It features photos from and inspired by the movie, along with text by Paul Verhoeven indicating that he seriously believed the movie to be a deep and important work of art.

  110. Charles — a while back I saw online some of Malick’s script for Tree of Life (can’t find the link now, but it was via critic Jim Emerson’s blog). The choice excerpt:

    ***

    Reptiles emerge from the amphibians, and dinosaurs in turn from the reptiles. Among the dinosaurs we discover the first signs of maternal love, as the creatures learn to care for each other.

    Is not love, too, a work of the creation? What should we have been without it? How had things been then?

    Silent as a shadow, consciousness has slipped into the world.

    ***

    It delights me that Malick’s scripts are like this; it’s exactly how I imagined them. Scene 26: the void. Suddenly life erupts! But still there is tension between Man’s spiritual side and his nature as a beast…or the film’s final scenes: Heaven is holding hands with Brad Pitt on the beach. [In margins: Note to self — more gnosis!!!]

    (NB: I made up those last two)

  111. I like Joe Ezterhaus’ defense of Showgirls, that it contained so much transcribed dialogue and actual situations that audiences found it too phony and ridiculous. Sounds plausible, but I’m a fan of the film.

    Noah, Schindler is a real asshole throughout the film, hardly lovable, unless you’re drawn to douchebags. The film repeatedly shows his Jewish assistants having to keep mum while Schindler willfully gives into self-delusion.

    Maybe Spielberg should’ve approached the man with the same cynicism as Verhoeven approached the culture of Vegas showgirls …

  113. Regardless of any reservations I might have about the intellectual fate of Reecean thought, I gotta agree. It doesn’t really matter if the quote is real or not, it’s obnoxious either way.

  114. Ahem:

    “Music is a lot like love, it’s all a feeling
    And it fills the room, from the floor to the ceiling
    I see miracles all around me
    Stop and look around, it’s all astounding
    Water, fire, air and dirt
    Fucking magnets, how do they work?
    And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
    Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed
    Solar eclipse, and vicious weather
    Fifteen thousand Juggalos together
    And I love my mom for giving me this
    Time on this planet, taking nothing for granted
    I seen a caterpillar turn into a butterfly
    Miracles ain’t nothing to lie
    Shaggy’s little boys look just like Shaggy
    And my little boy looks just like daddy”

  116. I think Showgirls falls into so bad it’s good category. Pretty much every line in it is hilariously awful. The truly worst movie shouldn’t enjoyably bad IMO, it should the kind of movie you would never recommend to anyone.

    What about Patch Adams?

  117. Chris K, you are not alone. I never “got” Forrest Gump. I confess it took me a while to figure out that there was no message I couldn’t detect. It was simply a sucky film.

  118. Lost in Translation? The scene where the two off them scoff at the singer at the bar made me want to kill.

    The film just came across as a racist, self-entitled narcissistic piece of shit. I lost a little hope in humanity after watching it.
    But I can still forgive Bill Murray. He can get away with anything. Even that one.

  119. Lost in Translation? The scene where the two off them scoff at the singer at the bar made me want to kill.

    The film just came across as a racist, self-entitled narcissistic piece of shit. I lost a little hope in humanity after watching it.
    But I can still forgive Bill Murray. He can get away with anything. Even that one.

    Which leads me onto “Her”…

  120. I kind of hate Bill Murray in film. He always seems to ooze bloated self-regard.

    We’ve got votes via social media for Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Scoundrel.

  121. One film that sticks in my mind many years after seeing it is Powder…I can’t remember all the details of what it was about, but remember it was creepy and I wanted to walk out of it. Another movie that people seem to love but I can’t stand is the Tarantino WW2 movie Inglorious Basterds.

  122. hi
    I really really hated Miranda July’s ‘You and me and Everyone we know’.

    Horribly pretentious, with some ghastly epater-les-bourgeois scenes and a denouement that tried for ‘redemptive’ but was just vacuous faux-resolution.

    This film was a toxic combination of smugness, incoherence, pretension, mawkishness and self-deceit.

    thanks.

  123. On Facebook I originally nominated any film with Adam Sandler, but on reflection those suck so much and he is so bereft of any qualities worthy of discussion that they don’t really even qualify as movies….and so I vote for AI, which was one of the worst experiences I have ever had in a theatre of desperately wishing a movie would just fucking end already—-but it didn’t, it just kept on going, and going, and going, on and on and on….

  124. Hear hear on Miranda July. The concept of a poop being pooped back and forth between two anuses is an amazing idea, but it wasn’t enough to save that movie.

  125. My contrarian pick would be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I actively spent the movie rooting against Ferris, hoping he would get punished. A smug, oily, vicious character, one who’s supposed to be a lovable trickster but was entirely despicable. Matthew Broderick’s constant mugging in that movie didn’t help.

    Worst blockbuster pick: the 1990s remake of Godzilla. Inept on every level, as it steals from every other blockbuster imaginable but doesn’t do it right.

    Worst indy film by someone who should know better: Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. That the material was dated was beside the point. The film is one long series of tedious, repulsive performances, led by an overmatched Uma Thurman putting the audience to sleep.

  127. I had a college professor who hated (and taught) Ferris Bueller. He went on this whole rant about how Bueller is a privileged WASP, and he only gets to take his day off because he uses daddy’s expensive computer to hack the school attendance records.

    He also said the people who made the film were people who worked hard and stayed in school, but the message of the film is slack off and cut school and you’ll get ahead in life, which he saw as a calculated lie by the movie makers.

    I’m not sure I buy all of that but the rant was entertaining!

  128. I don’t often agree with Armond White but he was right about Precious.

    Deeply offensive, racist, poorly written and ineptly shot.

    Favourite moment, 400 pound heroine who can barely walk steals a bucket of fried chicken and runs away. Young athletic shop assistant runs after her and somehow (we cut away without seeing the chase) is too slow to catch her.

  129. Pallas, you weren’t a student of mine, were you? I go on an almost identical rant whenever BUELLER comes up in class–it’s like saying “Niagara Falls” to Moe Howard.

    In 1986, immediately after a friend of mine and I saw the film in the theater, I launched into a 10-minute screed about how BUELLER (and Bueller the character) embodied everything loathsome about Reagan’s ’80s. My diatribe ended, though, when my friend pulled his car over, said “I liked the film and I’m sick of listening to you,” and kicked me out of his car. I had to walk the rest of the way home.

  130. Not to start a fight or anything, but I think folks who’re saying Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is somehow bad for high schoolers to see because it promotes rule-breaking and so forth need to lighten the heck up. To me, that argument holds as much water as saying that allowing high school kids to see Dirty Rotten Scoundrels or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels will encourage them to take up a life of crime (since both those films ‘glamorize’ a life of crime and make it look fun). All three films have numerous moments of over-the-top farce that place them all firmly in the land of make believe.

    ‘Ferris’ will always be one of my favorite films, regardless of the naked class bias, because it’s just so darned funny and absurd! I place it in much the same class as Better Off Dead: fun, funny, and farcical.

  131. At least for me, it’s that Bueller is a privileged, smarmy, repulsive ass. He’s like a younger version of the guys in Hostel, basically. Hostel is great because guys like him get gruesomely murdered. Bueller is ugly dreck because we’re supposed to root for him to rule the world (as he already does.)

  133. I’m also pro-Ferris. The main joke of the movie is that this kid lives a life of totally undeserved luxury due to luck and charm, but he’s harmless enough that I can’t see hating him. Also, Jennifer Gray’s scenes at least acknowledge how irritating someone like that would be in real life (kind of like the Frank Grimes episode of The Simpsons). The Office’s Michael Scott has some vague similarities to Ferris, and I like him, too.

  134. (Although I just skimmed the movie’s Wikipedia page, and it looks like you guys aren’t the first to link it to Reaganism. Dan Quayle has called it his favorite.)

  135. No Craig, you weren’t the teacher. Guess that’s independent support of your view though.

  136. The thing about Ferris is that Matthew Broderick, at least to me, was a poor fit for the sort of charmer that Ferris is supposed to be. Instead, he comes off as merely smarmy. The fact that his self-indulgent hedonism nearly wrecks his best friend’s life makes him far from harmless in my view, even if it was all to teach him a lesson.

    I agree with Craig that the classism and privilege of the movie are pretty awful, but purely from an aesthetic standpoint, I wanted to see this asshole punished instead of celebrated. I also didn’t think it was funny, but then I find most John Hughes pure comedies tend to be more mean-spirited than funny.

  137. Since we are talking about failed comedies how come no one has mentioned Freddy got Fingered? I know some people consider it misunderstood work of art but there can’t be that many of them. Not even here.

  139. Noah, you might actually like Freddy Got Fingered, depending on your tolerance for Tom Green. It’s kind of Johnny Ryan-esque in its gross-out humor, with characters and situations that are totally nuts, bearing no resemblance to reality or actual human behavior. Some people have theorized that it’s all an elaborate prank on the studios who gave him millions of dollars to make a comedy, not to mention the audience, and hell, why not humanity itself? It’s so desperate to offend (or just be weird) that I can’t really hate it, and there are parts that are pretty funny, but much of it is just inexplicable, and I kind of respect that he managed to bring such a strange, singular vision to life. There’s also what have to be some father issues mixed in, with Rip Torn playing Green’s verbally abusive father as somebody who is as crazy as he is, in a performance that is so over the top that you wonder if he prepared for it by just smacking himself in the face repeatedly. So, yeah, it’s probably a failure as a movie, but it’s really like nothing else, and so I can’t hate it or call it the worst.

  140. Noah, may I ask why do you hate Shawshank Redemption? I wasn’t crazy about it myself but what are your problems with it?

  141. It was a while ago…Morgan Freeman doing his magical African-American thing is always pretty repulsive. I thought the choice to have the hero not actually have committed the crime was cowardly and awful. A glib, feel good movie about the US prison system has many of the same problems as a glib, feel good movie about the Holocaust, I guess.

  142. Yes, Shawshank is so smug and reactionary. I loved it as an 18 year old, but looking back, I can’t really approve of the kind of film that rhetorically encourages us to wreak vengeance on rapists by beating them into idiocy, etc. Also, that scene where he walks up to the head guard and says “Do you trust your wife?” is so naff! Utterly lacking in the required level of realism.

  143. p.s. Schindler’s List is ok in my book: acknowledges that only a fraction of people were saved and shows ‘atrocities’ in an intelligent way to a mainstream audience.

  144. Has anyone mentioned Frank Miller’s The Spirit?

    Also:

    The first Wayne’s World. Two hours of jokes falling flat, like one of those old newsreels of early attempts at flying machines collapsing before take-off.

    I sat down to watch Oliver Stone’s Platoon thinking it’d be a good generic war-is-hell movie. It wasn’t.

  145. oh yeah- ‘Beautiful People’. A film about Balkan war. Went to see it coz my friend was an extra in the opening (rather good) scene. Downhill from there- the script is a ghastly confection of melodrama, incredible (literally) plot turns and some really nauseating ‘resolutions’.

  146. I concur, Rob. I always appreciated that the movie showed tha Schindler displayed true heroism by saving lives at great risk to himself, but also committed reprehensible, exploitative acts. I think that’s a very real picture of human beings and their various potentials. I also appreciated that it showed the dilemma of the do-gooder confronted by insurmountable evil — nothing I do will ever be enough, but I must do what I can.

  147. By the way, the worst movie I saw recently — or saw the first twenty minutes of — was Identity Thief. It made me identify so much with the male protagonist/victim that nothing that happened to him was funny in the least. Then it failed to make me like McCarthy enough to hang around for her redemptive arc. It was nice that the cops were shown as thinking human beings constrained by the law — not just mindless flesh-puppets of a bureaucracy, which is all they would have needed to be to serve the plot.

  148. Joe, I saw Platoon with a veteran of that conflict. He said “It was as if every bad thing that ever happened to a unit, and every bad thing any unit ever did, all happened in this one platoon.”

  149. Thank you Noah. I don’t really hate the movie but I can’t bring myself to like it for the reasons mentioned (to be fair, magical black guy was likely unintentinal since the character is white in the book) and the warden character. That guy was such a joke even despite efforts of the actor who I think did a decent job given what he had to work with. If he was just a fanatic who couldn’t see prisoners as people that could work but instead they made him full-blown cartoon villain.

    Another thing that bugs me was that they never revealed Red’s crime. I know it was meant to be ambitious but given that we know Andy was innocent it strikes just strikes me as another cheap attempt to make us symphatize with him.

  150. I didn’t think I had anything for this thread and then I remembered Crash. Very glad to see it so represented here; stomp it into the dirt.

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