The Screengrab : in the company of men

The Screengrab's Top Ten Worst...Movies...Ever!!!! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs' Worst Movies Ever (Part Two...plus 5 honorable mention bad movie haikus!)

6. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997)

Long ago I was happy and carefree, way back when Roberto Benigni was the sorta-annoying Italian guy from those Jim Jarmusch movies. He made funny jokes, I made funny jokes, everything was good, see? But now that happiness is gone forever. The day that I saw Life Is Beautiful, my love - strike that, let’s say “tolerance” - of Benigni became a tearful nightmare. You could call it the day the clown cried. See, the premise of the movie is that Benigni is trying to convince his child that the Nazi concentration camp they are in is all a big, jokey game. Actually, that's only the second half of the movie. The first half is about Benigni trying to woo his lady through a bunch of wacky pratfalls. The second half is Benigni making light of the Holocaust through wacky pratfalls. It's the craziest genocide of a people ever! You'll laugh, cry, puke in horror, and never be able to watch Down By Law again!

7. HAPPINESS (1998)

This was the least repellent clip from this film that I could find. Todd Solondz thinks that he’s the most misanthropic man in movies, but his misanthropy is as meaningless as Natural Born Killers' satire because it has no center. It's one thing to be a misanthrope because you are deeply disappointed in humanity (as with, say, Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Michel Houellebecq), but it's a completely different thing to strive towards misanthropy just because...what? Because deep down, we're all just using each other, right? We're all just biding time until we can rape children, right? We're all just waiting for the numbness of age and indifference to envelope us, right? We're all just wanting to get our own rocks off and to hell with everyone else, right? Beneath contempt.

8. IN THE COMPANY OF MEN (1997)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone’s just waiting for the right moment to stab you in the back. A nation of creeps. Fuck you, LaBute.

9. HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING (1991)

"$34 million? They must have had a limousine every time they went to the john!" Ah, Roger Ebert, you slay me. Most of the movies on my list are repulsive due to their content rather than the complete incompetence of the filmmakers. This one is both! It makes no damn sense, looks like shit, cost the studio a ton of money, and stars Sean Connery! I had seen bad movies before, but this was the first really bad movie that I ever saw where I literally couldn't understand how it had come to be. For that, it'll always have a special place in my heart.

10. THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995)

Dimwitted Irish guys from Long Island who fuck around while women swoon all over them? Sign me up! They're going to talk about life and love and pseudo-profound heavy stuff like that, all with the same bada-bing inflection? Whoa nelly! They'll all learn to believe in love again? Warms the ol' cockles of the heart, it does, faith and begorrah! And boy howdy, that Ed Burns is dreamy, isn't he? Whoever made this movie sure thinks so! (HC)

Bonus 5, in haiku:

American Beauty (1999)

Suburbs: repression,
Sadness, revelation. Then
You're shot by a queer.

Armageddon (1998)

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Shazam! Whizz! Bang! Crash! Ba-donk!
Kablooey! KaBLAM!

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Oh, Robin Williams,
Bearded man with life lessons,
You ruined poetry.

You've Got Mail (1998)

Bloody thoughts! Only
One way to quell: watch The Shop
Around The Corner.

Memento (2000)

Start here. Smart conceit
Hides lacuna at the heart
Of story. Start here.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor, Haikuist: Hayden Childs

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Ride Hard

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Wicker Man (2006, Neil LaBute)

Peter Smith — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

The setup: Horror-movie remakes are a dime a dozen, but one of the most potentially interesting director-project pairings was Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man, which found the always-provocative writer-director taking a stab at the horror genre.

What went wrong?: LaBute often gets taken to task for his misogyny, especially in films like In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things. I’ve always found the accusations a little reductive, but it’s hard to argue against them in regards to The Wicker Man. The story basically boils down to this: there’s a beehive-inspired community where women rule and men serve them silently, and the hero (Nicolas Cage) gets manipulated by the women into becoming a human sacrifice. The community's leader, Sister Summersisle, tells Cage's Edward Malus (pronounced "Male-us" — get it?) that "men have their uses. . . for procreation." Clearly, LaBute is trying to say something about men’s fears of female power, though it’s all so ridiculous that it’s hard to say what that may be.

Not that Malus is an especially sympathetic hero. In the 1973 original, the protagonist is a staunch Christian who faces off against equally zealous pagans. Here, LaBute drops the dichotomy, instead countering the crazy beehive people with one of Cage’s most spectacularly unhinged characters. While he’s initially unsure whether he wants to visit the island, Malus becomes a sexist autocrat upon his arrival, barging into residences and schools and waving his police badge around, proclaiming the women to be "freaks" while being himself a less-than-exemplary representative for "normal" society.

Cage may be the closest thing Hollywood has nowadays to a late-period Brando, inspired when the material is good and equally inexplicable when it fails him. Here he goes so far over the top that the movie becomes a seemingly endless string of "bad laughs," and by the climax we’re practically rooting for the character to get his comeuppance. I somehow doubt that was LaBute’s goal.

The result is a film that feels schizophrenic. It contains plenty of shock tactics and nightmare imagery to appeal to the horror crowd, but ends up coming off as a bizarre — if mostly unintentional — comedy. The original was no great shakes as a horror movie either, but it played its story fairly straight. But by the time Cage starts running around in a bear suit at a human sacrifice ritual, where it’s revealed that virtually every female character in the film was in on the conspiracy (those women — they’ll take you down if they have a chance!), it’s long since become impossible to take The Wicker Man seriously. It’s entertaining to watch, but that doesn’t make it good.

The fallout: The Wicker Man is an abject failure as a horror film, but Cage’s performance has garnered a cult following, judging by all the YouTube videos inspired by the movie. LaBute’s next film, Lakeview Terrace, is scheduled for release next year, and while it appears to be in LaBute’s tradition of films that ask difficult questions, I doubt any of them will be quite so compelling as "How'd it get burned? HOW’D IT GET BURNED???"

— Paul Clark