A.V. Club Blog

The triumph and tragedy of Anthony Perkins’ career is that he could never stop being Norman Bates. When you’re famous for playing a crazy baseball player (1957’s Fear Strikes Out), a crazy motel proprietor (1960’s Psycho), and a crazy crazy person (1968’s Pretty Poison), romantic leading man roles in light comedies are probably out of the question. The Tiger Beat demographic was never within his reach.

The unexpected triumph of Vince Vaughn, meanwhile, is that he couldn’t even convincingly be Norman Bates for 105 minutes. Vaughn should have sent Gus Van Sant a fruit basket after Psycho’s disastrous first weekend for fucking up the remake so badly that no one would ever associate Vaughn with Norman Bates, let alone try to typecast him as a sexually tormented lunatic.

For Perkins, Bates was a cross to bear, an identity he couldn’t shed, a blessing and a curse. For Vaughn, the role was simply a bump in the road, a part he played and discarded on his way...

By 1985, a three foot tall black man from Minnesota with a wardrobe seemingly borrowed from The Vanity 6 had reached the very pinnacle of pop superstardom. Prince was a critic’s darling and a popular favorite. He’d conquered the world of film a year earlier with Purple Rain and walked away with an Academy Award and a smash-hit soundtrack in the process.

Yes, everything was coming up Milhouse for Prince. All those years of hard work and mastering his craft were finally paying off. In flush times like these, Prince is habitually visited by an angry, persistent inner voice from somewhere deep within the inner recesses of his purple and paisley soul. This agitated voice regularly issues a soul-shuddering cry for professional suicide. “Things…going…too…well…Fans….too…happy…career…proceeding…too…smoothly…must…sabotage…self…with…crazy…off-putting…stunt.”

As usual, this insane inner voice urging self-destruction...

It’s easy to bash the gutlessness and groupthink of record companies and movie studios. But it bears mentioning that Prince recorded Purple Rain and Sign O’ The Times for Warner Brothers while that dreadful-looking album of jazz-fusion instrumentals (N.E.W.S.) stuck it to the man by going the independent route.

The backing of a major international conglomerate may be tantamount to slavery (cause, you know, well, you’d really have to ask Prince about that one), but total control creates as many problems as it solves. Imagine how much better Prince’s late-period work would be if he was still collaborating with the guy in the E.R. scrubs who plays the keyboards. Dr. Fink, where are you? If left to his own devices, Prince probably would have transformed Purple Rain into a three hour-long experimental fantasia about the relationship between a magical biracial tree sprite and a leprechaun hermaphrodite.

Prince’s cinematic...

This morning as I perambulated about during my habitual pre-dawn stroll, I happened upon the Depression-era Cockney bootblack who first appeared in my Scenes From A Mall entry. Though I walked briskly in the opposite direction in hopes of eluding his attention, he recognized me all the same. “Mr. Rabin! It’s ever so delightful to see you this fine and dewy morning! You must be terribly nervous, good sir, about your hundredth My Year Of Flops entry! There’s ever so much pressure on you to make it a good ‘un. Why, the eyes of the entire world are upon you! So what are you going to favor us with today, guv’nor, a cheeky reappraisal of Alex In Wonderland? A fevered defense of The Pickle? My, but Moon Over Parador is just begging to be re-discovered! Oh but there are so many wonderful, wonderful Paul Mazursky films to choose from, each more exquisitely floptastic than the next! Then once this project is over, you can devote yourself fulltime to rehabilitating Mazursky’s...

2005’s Where The Truth Lies was supposed to be Atom Egoyan’s The Elephant Man, The Dead Zone or Basic Instinct, a cinematic breakthrough where a beloved cult weirdo makes nice with the Hollywood mainstream and makes his corporate masters great gobs of cash in the process. Instead it sunk like a stone, dying a quick death at the box-office (that NC-17 sure didn’t help) and coming up empty at Academy Awards time, despite the stunt casting of Kevin Bacon (a man with the least Kosher name this side of silent screen icon Gentile T. McGoy) as a Jerry Lewis doppelganger with the eizen flaven and the nice laaadyyyyy!

The project united strange bedfellows. It was based on a novel by Rupert Holmes, a singer turned playwright and novelist best known for the musical The Mystery Of Irwin Drood and the song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” In the course of my research, I learned some interesting things about Mr. Holmes. I learned, for example, that he loves piña coladas and getting...

A few years back I was forced to watch The Passion Of The Christ to prepare for the final audition of my poorly rated, mildly disreputable basic-cable movie review panel show Movie Club With John Ridley. I’d pointedly avoided seeing The Passion of the Christ during its theatrical run. It wasn’t anything personal: I just dislike Mel Gibson personally.

Since I missed out on seeing the film on the big screen I was reduced to watching it on a twelve-inch screen in my hotel room after catching a six A.M flight from Chicago’s Midway airport to LAX on ATA. Oh, the glamour of television! Somehow, I imagine that when Mel Gibson contemplated the ideal viewer for his ferociously personal, self-financed labor of love he probably didn’t envision a pinko Jew watching the movie against his will on a tiny television screen in a state of bone-deep exhaustion.

But even if I’d seen The Passion Of Christ on an IMAX screen after a dozen Cappuccinos I doubt I’d have...

Here at My Year Of Flops Incorporated we’ve explored a broad spectrum of terminally unsexy sex films that collectively put the “blechhh” into “sex”. From Havoc to Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction to Body Of Evidence I’ve surveyed some of the unsexiest sex films ever made with a visceral combination of revulsion and disgust.

Today I’ll explore the mother of all unsexy sex films: 1994’s Exit To Eden, a once-in-a-lifetime cross between HBO’s Real Sex and Love, America Style. It’s a transgressive erotic drama! No it’s a wacky diamond smuggling comedy with Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd! No, it’s a transgressive erotic drama and it’s wacky diamond smuggling comedy with Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd!

It’s a surreally misguided attempt to make the kinky world of BDSM palatable to a conservative, mainstream audience by dressing up Dan Aykroyd like The Gimp and putting Rosie O’Donnell in revealing domantrix gear....

There’s nothing lonelier than being a Jew on Christmas. When someone says “Merry Christmas” all I hear is “Fuck you, Jew.” When someone says “Happy Holidays” what they really mean is “Fuck you, Jew.” When they say “Happy Chanakoonah” that’s ultimately just another way of saying “Fuck you, Jew.” When someone at work says “Hey, Nathan, can I borrow your Juno screener?” All I hear is “Fuck you, Jew”. Man, I really need to go back on my meds. Fucking seasonal depression.

Ah, but Christmas isn’t really about religion, you say. It’s that most wonderful time of the year when people forget their troubles and join together to worship at the altar of the Great God of Commerce and to a much lesser extent, his little buddy Jesus.

We pay tribute to the Great God of Commerce with maxed-out credit cards. personal checks and plain old cash. But then, in a culture-wide fit of passive-aggression, we turn our backs on the Great God Of Commerce by bombarding...

Throughout the course of this project, I have tried, and failed, to find the perfect balance between ambitious commercial failures begging to be reconsidered and cinematic punching bags politely requesting a long, hard beating. Yet after suffering through Pay It Forward and Howard The Duck, I was suddenly gripped with a masochistic urge to plunge further and further into bad movie hell by subjecting myself to the black hole of ego and arrogance that is An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood Burn. It would be the bad-movie-watching equivalent of slicing open the webbing between my fingers and pouring lemon juice into the cuts. Oh, but you people seem to enjoy watching me suffer. Even more disconcertingly, I’m starting to enjoy the pain.

Alas, the random machinations of fate spared me from that cruel destiny. For the time being, at least. I couldn’t track down Joe Eszterhas’ odious tribute to himself so I was instead forced to revisit a film I genuinely like despite...

It all comes down to the rat-tail. For me, nothing better symbolizes George Lucas’ surreal disconnect from the world we live in, as opposed to the fantastical world inside his brainbone, than the rat-tail Hayden Christensen wears in Attack Of The Clones. Then again, it could be worse. It’s entirely possible that some heroic unknown soul fought a fierce battle to convince the King of The Sci-Fi Dorks that he shouldn’t try to “update” the look of the Star Wars universe for its prequels by having the storm troopers rock acid-washed jeans or Zubaz track suits, but gave up on convincing Lucas not to have the future Darth Vader don a hairstyle generally associated with insecure 11-year-olds in 1983.

Lucas is clearly a man connected to the cultural zeitgeist. Unfortunately, it’s the zeitgeist of 1937. While his peers were immersed in the sex, drugs, and rebellion of the ‘70s. Lucas thought things like “Gee whiz! I’m gonna make the sci-fi serial to top all sci-fi serials!...