The Screengrab : vince vaughan

2008 in Review: Scott Von Doviak's Top 10 Unwatchables of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

As your resident movie janitor, I could hardly wrap up the year without a rundown of 2008's greatest crimes against cinema. As always, I see them so you don't have to.

10. STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS

I have little to add to my earlier rant. The sad thing is, there are still a few George Lucas zombies willing to defend this star dreck.

9. STEP UP 2 THE STREETS

A movie that raises many questions, not least of which is: “There was a Step Up 1?” A teenage street dancer (Briana Evigan, the next Demi Moore, if we needed one) is forced to enroll in an upscale school for the performing arts, leaving her old crew to accuse her of NOT KEEPING IT REELZ. This can only be settled with a dance-off! A thoroughly unconvincing dance-off that looks like an outtake from Night of the Living Dead: The Musical.

8. MAX PAYNE

Here we have a ludicrous new film genre (coincidentally featuring Ludacris): the videogame noir. Based on a first-person shooter game that was influenced by Hong Kong action movies and the "bullet time" effects of The Matrix, Max Payne is at least three steps removed from any semblance of originality. It boasts a stylish surface, but there's nothing new beneath it.

7. THE RUINS

Reviewed here at the time of its release. At least, it was in theaters when I started writing the review; I think it had been pulled by the time I posted it. A gripping, intense read becomes a dead teenager movie with laughable CG effects.

6.TYLER PERRY'S THE FAMILY THAT PREYS

Within the first five minutes of The Family That Preys, four different characters utter some variation on the line, "I need a drink." By the end of this latest Tyler Perry opus, I could definitely relate. Family is a mean-spirited endurance test populated by some of the most unpleasant movie characters in recent history. Perry prides himself on leaving out the sex and violence and making movies the whole family can enjoy. It's hard to imagine families enjoying this one, though; they're more likely to be traumatized when they aren't bored out of their minds.

5. FIRST SUNDAY

So bad that I’ve already covered it here as part of the Unwatchable series. Nuff said.

4. FOUR CHRISTMASES

Here's a movie that spends an hour showing how unpleasant family can be and how grotesque small children are before doing a complete U-turn into sickening sentimentality and hypocritical moralizing. Director Seth Gordon, who made last year's terrific documentary The King of Kong, turns out to be just another sitcom hack. Witherspoon is so chirpy and strident, it's not clear that anyone told her this was supposed to be a comedy. To say that Vaughn is phoning it in these days would be an insult to telecommuters everywhere. Four Christmases with this bunch is four too many.

3. PRIDE AND GLORY

There's nothing wrong with a gritty cop drama, so long as it has something to offer besides grit. Pride and Glory provides murky images, shaky camerawork, a muddy soundtrack, blood by the buckets and profanity by the bushel. It's easy to see why director Gavin O'Connor buried his movie under all this sludge; scrape it away and there's nothing but the most generic "bad cop" movie possible underneath.

2. TRAITOR

Don Cheadle is the world's most boring Muslim - but at least he's not evil like all the other ones! There's very little suspense in this dull, talky thriller, but there is a laughable twist ending for the ages.

1. THE LOVE GURU

Everything you’ve heard is true. This isn’t a case of mass hypnosis or the critical brotherhood sticking together – it really is that bad. Mike Myers described this comedy about a self-help guru’s attempts to help a hockey player win a championship as “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas.” Actually, it’s a delivery system for dick jokes, each one dumber than the last.

Vince Vaughn, Working Class Hero

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Vince Vaughn's first big movie role cast him as a guy who wanted to be Dean Martin, after which he made a string of movies in which he sometimes seemed to be trying to turn into Bill Murray. Who knew that all this time, he was actually shooting for Bob Hope? It seems that Vaughn, who has friends in the stand-up business who he's known since his days as a struggling actor, has long been in the habit of organizing stand-up benefit concerts wherever he happened to be filming movies. Then, a couple of years ago, Vaughn suggested that he and his stand-up buddies — Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco — load up a few buses, head out to the South and the Midwest where live comedy is scarce, and play thirty cities in thirty days. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," Vaughn says. The results can be seen in the new concert documentary Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights, which opens this weekend. Bob Hope comes to mind because there's something about the way Vaughan talks about the project that casts it all in a USO-tour, bringing-laughter-to-the-troops sort of frame. Indeed, as Dave Itzkoff notes in The New York Times, "With little fanfare Mr. Vaughn has in recent years made occasional visits to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and organized comedy shows to benefit the Army Emergency Relief Fund." (Vaughn's sister Victoria is an Army Reservist who was on the bus for the month-long tour.) The movie doesn't stray into any war zones, but at one point the comics do encounter displaced Katrina refugees. As for the comedy itself, it may not be cutting-edge satirical, but Vaughn's own taste is blue-collar populist. "I’m not a politician,” he says. “I don’t have the answer to anything, but I do like to make people laugh. Can’t we all be on the same side with the stuff, versus having comedy that’s so acidic and meanspirited and dividing? That’s just not my nature.” Whatever the audience, Vaughn clearly sees such projects as his way of giving something back. "Both of my parents worked for a living, so I know what it's like to have real pressure and real problems."

Doug Liman Weighs His Options

Phil Nugent — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

A lot of big movie directors are adolescent geeks who get a style upgrade and an attitude adjustment after they achieve success — whatever you think of Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino now, believe it or not, before they had money and clout, they were worse — but a profile of Doug Liman in New York magazine is fascinating partly because Liman doesn't seem to have been changed much by his success. (Reporter Steve Fishman, on meeting with Liman at the director's production office: "Liman arrives late, as usual. As usual, he wears a T-shirt and jeans, though today he’s also got on a long fitted coat. 'You look good,' says an assistant. 'What's wrong?'") That success was long in coming. Liman was dependant on his father, Arthur Liman (the New York lawyer best known as the prosecutor in the Iran-Contra scandal), for financial support until he was able to direct his first film, Swingers, when he was thirty-one. Jon Favreau, who wrote and starred in the movie (with Vince Vaughn), had hoped to direct it himself, but was unable to secure funding; Liman got the money, again, from his father. (The deal that Liman cut with Miramax for the finished film made him a rich man, something that led to a temporary estrangement from Favreau.)

Since then, Liman has made one movie that straddled the indie world and Hollywood, and three films — The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and the forthcoming Jumper — that comprise what he calls "my sellout trilogy." You might think that Hollywood would love the bejesus out of this guy, who has shown an ability to freshen up commercial material in a way that has not only produced a string of hits but kicked off a major franchise in the Bourne series. But instead, Universal so hated Liman's behavior on the set of the first Bourne movie — which, in addition to his chaotic filming style, which inspires complaints from some that he seems disengaged rather than in charge, included a true uber-geek episode in which Liman "paid the crew overtime to light a forest so he could play paintball" at night — that they didn't do the customary turnabout that the industry routinely performs with troublesome directors and embrace him warmly when he delivered at the box office. Instead, when Brad Pitt wanted to do Mr. and Mrs. Smith for Universal, Liman claims that Pitt "was told he could pick any director he wanted except me." This had the predictable effect. Liman's actors do tend to end up in his rooting section. Matt Damon credits the director with saving his career with Bourne. And Sarah Polley, who starred in Go, won the New York Film Critics Circle's Best First Film prize for her direction of Away from Her, she asked Liman to be be her escort for the evening — though she couldn't resist telling him that he should do it because "It's the closest you’re ever going to get." Liman doesn't seem so sure. "I kind of lost my indie credibility over Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I know I haven't lost it. I just have to go make an independent movie. I just have to do it. Just for me."