In advance of the upcoming shuttering of The Screengrab- just four more days, folks!- the DVD departments of Disney, Paramount, and Fox have graciously decided not to put out any recent releases this week in protest. Thanks for the support, guys!

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Phil Nugent's Top Ten Worst Movies Ever (Part One)

1. FIELD OF DREAMS (1989)
2. JFK (1991)



Some would argue that Natural Born Killers is the ultimate Oliver Stone audiovisual freakout, but this celebration of the noble questing rectitude of a deranged slime ball named Jim Garrison will always have a special place in the spittoon of anyone who, like me, once lived in New Orleans and shared a city with that particular waste of space. There was a time when Stone himself actually seemed to think that Garrison's "theory" about the assassination of Kennedy had something to it, but that misguided period in his life was over by the time the movie opened, and Stone shifted to arguing that while, of course, everything Garrison ever said or did was manure, the important thing was to create a "counter-myth" to balance the "official myth" of the Warren Commission report. Marginally more sophisticated observers have tried to defend the movie on the grounds that, in its hyper thyroid dementia, it "captures" the mindset of many unfortunates who were mentally discombobulated by the turmoil and tragedy of the '60s. Maybe it does; the "Flesh Fair" sequence in Spielberg's A1 perfectly captures my mindset when I'm caught in traffic with a migraine, but I'm not sure that makes it any better. Anyway, we don't really go for rampaging homophobia here at the Screengrab, and however you want to dress this piggy up in fancy bows, it'll still be a street crazy rant about how the queers killed Kennedy. Add to its crimes the fact that it extended Kevin Costner's fifteen minutes.

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The first thing to know about 88 Minutes is that it actually runs 108 minutes. Clearly this is not a movie to be trusted. Yesterday Defamer noted that the Al Pacino vehicle ranked third on Metacritic’s list of the all-time worst reviewed movies, although it apparently has received a positive notice or two in the meantime as it has dropped to #29 as of this writing, just behind the 2002 Dana Carvey “comedy” Master of Disguise. 88 Minutes has a critic’s score of 12 out of 100, a rating of “extreme dislike or disgust” in Metacritic parlance. At Rotten Tomatoes, it is currently weighing in at 12%, and the critical consensus is listed as “A shockingly inept psychological thriller.”

It’s hard to believe a movie with the IMDb plot keywords “Exploding Car,” “Female Nudity,” “Seaplane,” “Lesbian,” “Tied to Chair” and “Obscene Finger Gesture” could be all that bad.

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Every year, on the eve of the Oscar ceremony, I like to re-watch with a former Best Picture winner. Normally, I’ll pick a favorite of mine (as I did last year with The French Connection) but this year I decided on a change of pace, selecting a movie that I haven’t seen and have barely thought about in at least fifteen years. And while there’s no denying that Chariots of Fire made an impact on popular culture, its status as an Oscar-anointed “classic” is much less certain.

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Monday was Guy Fawkes Day. What the hell is Guy Fawkes Day, you may be asking if you are not British, or the product of an inferior educational system? The Fifth of November is what it is, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot by one Mr. Fawkes to blow up Parliament. Americans, comic book fans, and people who were hung over in their Survey of European History classes may remember it best from V for Vendetta, where the eponymous terrorist V decides Guy Fawkes Day is the perfect time to throw his own fireworks display at the Houses of Parliament, touching off a popular revolt against the tyrannical government of a future England (not entirely without similarity to modern America). Hollywood films have always had a bit of a, shall we say, delicate constitution about films that portray violent revolution, which, despite the circumstances of our own founding, seems to smack a bit of pink. Other countries haven’t been so squeamish; here’s some good films to watch when you’re ready to stick it to the Man.

BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN [THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN] (1925)

A classic in every sense of the word, Sergei Eisenstein’s phenomenal silent movie about an uprising of sailors against the czarist regime virtually invented the modern art of montage, gave us the endlessly influential “Odessa Steps” sequence, and stood as a towering achievement of Soviet cinema, even outlasting its censors and detractors in Russia itself. But one of the most astonishing things about it is that it was made less than eight years after the Russian Revolution, arguably the most important upheaval of the 20th century. The notion that such gorgeous and powerful art could be put the service of the purest propaganda would haunt writers and critics for decades – and would be put to the test again when Leni Riefenstahl began work on her Triumph of the Will.

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