Joe Queenan is one of those gadflys who can be amusing even while he's irritating you. Like Christopher Hitchens he traffics in the risible. He's literate, clever and many times dead on. Here's a pretty funny piece from a recent Guardian.
Joe Queenan braves Paris Hilton, porcophilia and men who eat themselves to death as he goes in search of the worst movie of all time
Friday March 21, 2008
The Guardian
Painful ... The Hottie and the Nottie
The release of the Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie has revived the debate as to which is the worst motion picture ever made. Because the film logged in with some of the worst receipts in history - $250 per screen on opening weekend - there is a temptation to accord it the mythical status of such universally ridiculed motion pictures as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or Plan 9 From Outer Space, to welcome it into the dark, Bizarro World pantheon inhabited by phantasmagoric disasters such as Showgirls, Ishtar, Heaven's Gate, Battlefield Earth, The Postman and, most recently, Gigli and Swept Away.
That is not fair. It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful. Anyone can make a sickening movie; we are already up to Saw IV. Anyone can make an unwatchable movie; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. And anyone can make a comedy that is not funny; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. But to make a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock requires a level of moxie, self-involvement, lack of taste, obliviousness to reality and general contempt for mankind that the average director, producer and movie star can only dream of attaining.
for the rest:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2267064,00.html
Well, we can add CLEOPATRA to the list of terrible films, or at least commercial flops, which helped sink their studios, or at least left them teetering...along with the list I started at Bill Crider's blog, with STAR! and ONE FROM THE HEART as well ISHTAR and HEAVEN'S GATE.
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