The A.V. Club - My Year Of Flops

Film: My Year Of Flops: Finding His Forte Case File #199: The Brothers Solomon/MacGruber

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

When Will Forte commits to a role he really commits. There’s no distance or protective irony. When Forte goes all in, he really goes all in. Will Ferrell commits to a similar degree, but he at least has the safety of a persona to fall back on. Forte doesn’t have that: He disappears inside characters that sometimes blur the line between amusing and excruciatingly irritating, like Congressman Tim Calhoun, a deeply disturbed politician and Weekend Update guest who inadvertently betrays a lifetime of sordid deeds and deep dysfunction every time he opens his mouth. Forte’s lack of ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Miraculous Case File #198: Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

There are bad movies and then there are shitty miracles. In bad movies, something goes awry: The script is convoluted or the third act is a mess or Anthony Hopkins is playing a black man for some reason. In a shitty miracle, everything goes awry. It’s not a matter of one sorry element dragging the rest down; it’s every terrible component amplifying the awfulness of everything else. These shitty miracles represent the perfect storm of bad ideas and miscalculation. Everything must line up perfectly for a shitty miracle to occur. That’s how the world usually works. Within ...

Best Of 2011: My Year Of Flops: Furtively Feminist, Mostly Misunderstood Case File #197: Sucker Punch

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

All writing is, on some level, self-indulgent. By putting pen to paper, literally and otherwise, we’re declaring that our thoughts and sentiments are so bold and important they must be shared with the world. We write and dance and think and direct and storyboard about that which obsesses us. In four months, I will have officially spent half a decade chronicling cinematic failure here. Come January, I will have devoted something like 400,000 words to My Year Of Flops. That’s an awful lot of time and space to devote to something that by definition will be of ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Beyond Redemption Case File #196: The Beaver

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 12:00:00 -0500

Is Mel Gibson beyond redemption? Is anyone? Will we ever be able to watch Gibson onscreen again without thinking of breathless threatening phone calls to ex-girlfriends, drunk driving, or anti-Semitic screeds? It’s a testament to how badly Gibson has crossed the boundaries of what’s considered forgivable that earlier controversies that could easily have destroyed his career—like the furor that arose over the anti-Semitism in The Passion Of The Christ and a 2006 drunk-driving arrest where he called an officer “sugartits” and expressed a strong conviction that Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world—now ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Keeping It Faux-Real Case File #195: Ali G Indahouse

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:00:00 -0500

I recently re-watched the first season of the American incarnation of Da Ali G Show in a rapt state. I am in awe of Sacha Baron Cohen. The depth and scope of his achievement is remarkable. For two incredible seasons in the United States, where he brought the show in 2003 after finding fame in the UK in the late ’90s, Cohen interviewed some of the most savvy people in the world under the pretense of being a weed-smoking, do-rag-sporting idiot named Ali G., all without them calling him out on being anything but what he professed to be. On ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Exposing the Menace of Sugar Ray Case File Case File #194: Fathers’ Day

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

As I wrote in the MYOF book-exclusive Case File for W, there comes a moment in every cinephile’s intellectual and creative development when he or she comes to realize that Oliver Stone is full of shit; similarly, there comes a moment in every comedy fan’s intellectual and creative development when he or she comes to realize that Robin Williams is not funny. For many, this is a jarring, even shocking revelation. The hirsute yuksmith is supposed to be funny. To some of his fans, he’s less a funnyman than comedy incarnate, a madman whose brain simply cannot ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: On the Gilded Wings of Pretension Case File #193: Passion Play

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 12:00:00 -0500

There are few things as tragicomic as the passion project gone awry. It’s one thing to whiff with work-for-hire. It’s quite another to bomb the story you believe you were born to tell. Put yourself in the Italian loafers of Mitch Glazer. Within the comedy world, he’s a Zelig figure with a knack for being in the right place at the right time with the right people. In the mid-’70s, the right place at the right time happened to be the hallowed halls of 30 Rock, where as a young writer for Crawdaddy, Glazer followed a ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Yankee Doodle Dandy Case File #192: 1776

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:00:00 -0500

As indelibly documented in Neal Gabler’s essential 1988 history of early Hollywood, An Empire Of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood, the Eastern European immigrant rag merchants and peddlers who helped create the American film industry were a ferociously patriotic bunch. Why wouldn’t they be? The United States treated them with unimaginable benevolence. Many of them fled Poland and Russia at the musket-point of Cossacks. In the United States, they dominated the most glamorous industry known to man. They ruled over a glitzy realm populated by some of the most beautiful, desired, talented people in the world ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: In The Mood For Lovesickness Case File #191: My Blueberry Nights

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:00:00 -0500

I fell in love with Chungking Express. There are no other words to describe it. I fell for the world writer-director Wong Kar-Wai created in the 1994 film, and I couldn’t wait to return. Chungking Express combined the comforting reassurance of the familiar with the exhilaration of the new. Wong is unmistakably a French New Wave baby, one of Jean Luc-Godard’s far-flung creative progeny. For countless filmmakers, Godard is the fountainhead. Filmmakers take from him what they need: Quentin Tarantino gravitated toward the Godard who obsessed over American genre films and macho tough-guy posturing. Hal Hartley embraced Godard ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Fame, Ain’t It A Bitch Case File #190: I’m Still Here

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:00:00 -0500

The Joaquin Phoenix-starring movie I’m Still Here represents a sticky wicket for My Year of Flops. It’s such an odd, unclassifiable project that it’s hard to even ascertain what the benchmarks for its success or failure might be. It was never going to gross $100 million or sweep the Oscars. It’s not that kind of a film. In fact, it’s hard to figure out what kind of a film it ultimately is. Yet I’m Still Here fits the parameters and vibe of My Year Of Flops in that it was largely, if not exclusively ...

Features: My Year Of Flops: Forever Losing Case File #189: Good Advice

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Geeks of the world, I have good news. We won the culture war! I didn’t realize that until last Friday, when I saw a film that would have blown geeks’ minds had it been released in 1986. Back then, every element of the film would have marked it as a pop-culture event to be breathlessly anticipated. Imagine a genre picture. It’s a vampire movie with a twist: It takes place largely in what appears to be an Old West town. That’s pretty novel, huh? But that Old West torn is actually located in a post-apocalyptic future where ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Sad Sack Case File #188: The Wrong Guy

Wed, 11 May 2011 12:00:00 -0500

Dave Foley once seemed destined for greatness. He was funny. He was smart. He was boyishly handsome. But more than anything, he was likable. We rooted for him. We identified with him. We wanted him to succeed. We wanted him to get the girl and the happy ending. We wanted that for his characters, but we also wanted that for the affable Canadian playing them. The Kids In The Hall was never going to be a Saturday Night Live or Second City-style training ground for future cinematic superstars, but if anyone in the cast had a shot at carrying films ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: The Movie Industry Is Brutalizin’ Me Case File #187: Run, Ronnie, Run

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:00:00 -0500

Somewhere, a 19-year-old is getting ready to watch a television show for the first time. This person is relatively pop-culture savvy. He likes comedy even if he would never consider himself a comedy nerd. Maybe he even reads The A.V. Club. So he’s heard about this show that is supposed to be absolutely fucking amazing, like, one of the best television shows of all time. So this young person pops in the first DVD of the show’s first season and it all looks so cheap. The production values are practically public-access level. That wall looks like it ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Heaven-Bound Heartwarming Case File #186: Project Greenlight Presents Stolen Summer

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Project Greenlight, the filmmaking reality competition sponsored by Miramax and produced by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris Moore, was supposed to be a winning proposition for everyone involved. One lucky filmmaker would receive a million-dollar budget and the promise of a theatrical release from Miramax. Audiences would get an inside look at the gritty details, fierce infighting, and mind games of independent filmmaking. At the end of the day, Miramax would release the product to critical acclaim and boffo box-office. Project Greenlight would be show-business democracy at its finest. It would be the movie America—with the help of ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Clueless Case File #185: The Stupids

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:05:00 -0500

Even famed comedy directors like John Landis—the man behind Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, An American Werewolf In London, Coming To America, and the amazing documentary Slasher—sometimes have to work up a furious flopsweat trying to get studio executives and audiences to understand their comic vision. But what happens when your own leading man, the guy with his name above the title, can’t quite comprehend why what he’s doing is so supposed to be funny? That was the situation Landis faced while directing 1996’s The Stupids, an ill-fated cinematic adaptation of the popular ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Written Entirely In 3D Case File #184: Drive Angry 3D

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:00:00 -0500

I generally like to wait until history has rendered a verdict on a film before writing it up for My Year Of Flops. Every once in a while, however, I encounter a flop so irresistible, so intrinsically fascinating, and so utterly unreal that I swoop in like a vulture eying ripe carrion and write it up while it’s still in theaters. Sometimes I don’t want to wait for a cultural consensus to form; I want in and I want in now. Fuck delaying gratification. Southland Tales was such a film. Speed Racer was another. So was Delgo. And ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: You Know, For Kids! Case File #183: The Hudsucker Proxy

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0600

The Coen brothers fulfill an important role in American society: They fuck with us. They’re tricksters who’ve made it into the upper echelon of American film without ever losing, or even compromising, their simultaneously admirable and maddening eagerness to fuck with audiences, critics, interviewers, and the world as a whole. To borrow Matt Groening’s take on the role The Simpsons played early in its run, the Coen brothers are Bugs Bunny to the world’s perpetually apoplectic Yosemite Sam. This helps explain the frustrated, exasperated response many of their films receive. After the breakthrough success of Fargo ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Sad Goodbye Case File #182: The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:11:00 -0600

In a perfect world, we would all go out on top. I can imagine no death greater than that of Harry Einstein, a journeyman dialect comedian better known as Parkyakarkus, and better known still as the father of Albert Brooks and “Super Dave” Osborne. On November 28, 1958, Einstein performed a killer set at a Friar’s Club Roast of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz before falling into Milton Berle’s lap and dying of a heart attack. In an attempt to detract attention from the guy who had just killed, then died, emcee Art Linkletter asked crooner Tony Martin ...

Video: My Year Of Flops: Oscar-Winner-Laden Pre-Precious Preposterousness Case File #181: Shadowboxer

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:00:00 -0600

When contemplating the wonderful world of flops, it’s wise to habitually return to the fortune-cookie wisdom of Elizabethtown, the film that started it all. As Elizabethtown indelibly reminds us, “No true fiasco ever began as a quest for mere adequacy.” No, true fiascos often begin as a quest for greatness. The fiascos that linger in our minds and ricochet through the ages fly too close to the sun and get burnt to a crisp for their arrogance. As I’ve written before, the same ambition, chutzpah, and admirable willingness to risk looking like a complete jackass in the eyes ...

Film: My Year Of Flops: Martyrdom or Bust Case File #180: Your Cheatin’ Heart

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:25:00 -0600

I approach the imminent end of Nashville Or Bust with both pride and regret. If I have turned even a few souls onto the likes of Bob Wills, Merle Haggard, Tom T. Hall, Gary Stewart, Loretta Lynn, or Kinky Friedman then I will be doing God’s work. But there are a few entries where I missed the mark and failed to do justice to the depth, complexity and richness of an icon’s mythology, music, and life. I will always regret, for example, not doing a better job with my Hank Williams entry. What Elvis was to rock, Williams ...