Uncle Scoopy's world-weary musings about naked celebrities, sports, humor and other important, manly things.
As the good lord intended. Hey, it worked. I bought that model, and it wasn’t easy to get them in my size. (15. My shoes look like Krusty’s.)
Why, this is shocking! I would have used her breasts to sell shoes.
But I guess I’m not practical. It isn’t easy to get boobs and shoes in the same shot.
But they tried:
This list is more of a conversation starter. As a few commenters noted, Hansel and Gretel didn’t have a monstrous budget and is a pretty decent flick.
Their list is missing the very worst ones, as I see it (in near agreement with IMDb and RT).
(1) Cats is rated 2.8 at IMDb (19% at RT) and had a total budget (production plus marketing) of about $200 million. Battlefield Earth and the Rollerball remake have lower scores and/or worse reviews, but I subjectively moved Cats to #1. I don’t think there’s any case to leave it out of the bottom three.
(2) or (3) The remake of Rollerball had a larger budget than Hansel and Gretel (much larger adjusted for inflation), and is rated 3.1 at IMDb, 3% at Rotten Tomatoes. Any critic who gave that a good review should never be allowed to write another review. It has no redeeming elements.
(2) or (3) Battlefield Earth is rated 2.5 at IMDb, 3% at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a toss-up with Rollerball for the #2 spot. If I absolutely have to choose, I think Rollerball is worse, despite slightly better numbers.
(4) Catwoman is rated 2.8 at IMDb, 8% at Rotten Tomatoes. A solid candidate for #4.
(5) Knight of Cups has mediocre scores at IMDb (5.6) and RT (46%), but gets my subjective vote for #5. It is a worse movie than anything on the Linkiest list. I would rather watch The Lone Ranger or Green Lantern any day.
As one commenter noted, no list of this type is complete without Heaven’s Gate. While it’s not a terrible film, it was so expensive, and its box office was so paltry, that it wiped out a major studio.
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Will anyone be able to make a decent film about Green Lantern? I’ve always found him to be one of the stranger creations of DC. On the one hand he wields almost unlimited cosmic power, capable of defeating Superman himself. On the other hand, what if his nemesis is dressed and face-painted entirely in yellow? Then he’s just some guy wandering around with a cheesy ring and a Coleman lantern. This has actually happened in the comics. Batman and Robin once battled the ol’ Lantern while they were painted yellow in a yellow room. Robin bullied Lantern, taunted him, took his ring away, and would have beaten him to death had Batman not intervened.
So GL can either defeat Superman or get his ass kicked by Robin. It all depends on the spectrum.
“In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might
Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.
I crush the plans of each evil fellow
Unless, of course, he’s wearing yellow.”
Afterthoughts about Shatner’s birthday:
You know, the verb “to suck” has taken over the world. When I used to say, a few decades ago, “I suck at Asteroids,” women actually got offended. Now everyone says “suck” on family shows and “Meet the Press.” In fact, most of the impolite slang we used in New York and New Jersey in the 1960s has been adopted and legitimized by mainstream society. The only thing they haven’t adopted from our old slang is the traditional “this” response. Example? The priest says, “Dominus vobiscum.” Then you say, “Dominus THIS, Padre,” and grab your crotch. This works on all occasions and as a response to any comment. (Or, as an alternative, you can grab your crotch and say “I got your Dominus right here, Padre”, but my friends found this variant too verbose.). To relate this to the “suck” verb, one guy would say, “your cigar sucks,” and the other guy would grab his crotch and say, “suck THIS.” There you have plenty of merriment and an instant Algonquin Round Table of witty repartee for all occasions.
The co-opting of “suck” by the mainstream culture leads to a lack of gradations. Is it fair to say that Cher’s singing sucks, when this is the same way you would describe Yoko Ono? Of course not. So I therefore propose four degrees of suckeration. To focus on the musicians for a minute, here’s how it would work if they were members of your family.
Shatner is an excellent illustration of this principle, because you might casually say “Bill Shatner sucks as an actor,” and/or “Bill Shatner sucks as a singer,” but the word “suck” doesn’t really mean the same thing in both sentences, does it? As an actor he’s only a first degree suck. He has even shown brief flashes of genius. As a singer, however, he’s not only guilty of fourth degree suckeration, but he could actually be in the fifth degree, since he pretty much sucks deeper and harder than anybody has ever sucked in the history of music. In fact, if Shatner had lived before the age of recording, and your grandpa told you how bad he was, you would think the old boy was exaggerating. Even if you believed your gramps, you would not be capable of imagining how bad the performing was, because there is nothing else to compare it to. If the recordings of Shatner did not exist, we simply could not conceive of anything that bad. In a sense, ol’ Kirk, as much as Newton and Freud, stretched the very boundaries of human conceptualization.
We owe him so much.
Taken from my review of Game of Pleasure, which has nothing to do with Shatner other than being to film what Bill is to singing.
Go crazy, because “real life is for March.”
I have a real soft spot for this episode of 30 Rock, which I would rank among the top twenty sitcom episodes of all time.
(Where is Chuckles the Clown now that we really need him?)
In addition to Leap Day and Chuckles, some of my other nominees:
I’m sure that I must be forgetting many. “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” isn’t a traditional sitcom. It’s an afternoon kiddie show from Nickelodeon, but I’d probably nominate at least three episodes from that show, which may be my favorite comedy of all time. I’d mention some episodes of Arrested Development and the underrated Go On (which one of you turned me on to), but I can’t immediately separate the episodes in my head.
The Marx Brothers on Feb 18, 1957, in the green room of America After Dark.
From left: Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, Groucho and the obscure Gummo. Gummo was in their vaudeville act, but left to enter the army in 1918 and never returned to the act. (He stammered, and never liked performing to begin with.)
Chico, the oldest, was about 14 years older than Zeppo, the youngest. The first four brothers were born in rapid succession (1887, 1888, 1890, 1892), then there was a nine-year gap before Zeppo came along.
America After Dark was a short-lived format change for the Tonight Show, after Steve Allen had moved on. NBC made it kind of a nighttime version of the Today show. It bombed. Within months, NBC hired Jack Paar and went back to the old Tonight Show format.
There was also a transition period in 1962 when Paar left. NBC hired Carson, but Johnny was under contract to do a game show on ABC, so NBC filled in for Paar with various guest hosts for a few months. In that interregnum, they retained the Tonight banner and format.
Dawn’s death leaves Tina Louise (Ginger) as the only surviving cast member from the Île de Gilligan.
Dawn did no nudity in her career, but there was the scene below in a 1965 episode of Gilligan’s Island, specifically s2e2, which was titled “Gilligan Saw My Ass Cheeks.”
This was probably my favorite episode except for the one where the professor built a speculum out of palm fronds and gave Ginger a complete gynecological check-up. Gilligan accidentally stumbled upon the makeshift examining room, and the professor had to hit him on the head with a coconut so he would forget the traumatic sight.
Things were going well until the application of Gilligan’s First Law, which states that any memory loss caused by a falling coconut will be reversed when the victim is struck by a second coconut. For years after his memory was restored, Gilligan was a haunted man, fearing to gaze upon any sort of opening, because his mind would automatically replace the object with the image of Ginger’s coochie.
Gilligan was in therapy for years after they left the island.
They say he never recovered, but some of the mental illness might have been caused by the many concussions he received from being constantly thrashed by the skipper’s hat.
Not to mention falling coconuts.
The imaging legend that is Brainscan assembled these looks at Sarah Miles in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing
The “man” in the title was played by Burt Reynolds, who is probably remembered as a loquacious man, quick with a quip. Uncharacteristically, he plays it completely straight here as a humorless, laconic cowboy. It seems that this cowboy, Jay Grobart by name, will do anything to reclaim his half-Shoshone children who were cared for by their mother’s tribe while Jay was in prison for murdering the man who raped and killed his wife, the titular Cat Dancing.
As the story begins, Jay has turned into a train robber who needs a suitable amount of money to repay the Shoshone man who has been caring for the two parentless children. As Jay and his gang make their escape from a highly lucrative heist ($100,000 – roughly equivalent to $2 million 2014 dollars. What a train!), they stumble upon a cultured, somewhat prissy housewife named Katherine Crocker (Sarah Miles), who is running away from her wealthy but cruel husband, a dandy who happens to sport a helluva salon tan, since the actor playing him is George Hamilton.
Sarah Miles alone was sufficient to make any film shoot interesting, as much for her antics off-screen as on. You probably know about her extracurricular hanky-panky with Kris Kristofferson while filming a movie called The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea in 1976. They enjoyed their sex scenes in that movie so much that they staged some additional ones for a Playboy pictorial. Kristofferson’s wife, Rita Coolidge, was not impressed by their devotion to the craft, and ended the marriage soon after, a development that Kris professed to regret deeply. Sarah engaged in similar shenanigans on the set of Cat Dancing. During the shoot, her personal assistant and secret lover, David Whiting, was found dead in his hotel room under mysterious circumstances. The resulting investigation and the attendant publicity served to expose the affair between the actress and her assistant, which ultimately broke the back of her marriage to Robert Bolt, a highly respected playwright (A Man for All Seasons) and screenwriter (Lawrence of Arabia).
Movie (and source novel) comments after the jump
About two decades ago, in reviewing various films, I pointed out that all fantasy movies have exactly the same plot. The last two Avengers movies follow the formula almost perfectly.
Here is my official outline of the Universal Plot:
In order to gain all power in the universe, the Full Rizzuto, it is necessary to re-unite all the pieces of the Holy Cow, as written in the sacred Book of Ish in the scriptures of forgotten Kabibble. This is an opportunity that only occurs every 5,000 years, so the Insane Evil Dude has to act fast before the Cosmic Offer expires, and infinite power returns to its regular price. The Insane Evil Dude, who has almost finished assembling the Holy Cow, is usually an old white guy who plans to use the Full Rizzuto to create tax breaks for the rich, safaris, corporate golf outings, Republican fund raisers, and other stuff that evil old white guys like.
The muscle-bound good guys must prevent him from doing this. The good guys have something that helps them, like a magic sword, or a piece of the Holy Cow, or the Sacred Key to Kyser, ancient college of all musical knowledge. The Kyser Key is the only force in the universe more powerful than the Full Rizzuto.
Simply change the proper nouns, and you have your own fantasy adventure.
For example:
In the case of the Avengers saga, the Holy Cow is called the Infinity Gauntlet, the pieces of it are called the infinity stones, and the Full Rizzuto is (as usual) infinite power. The Kyser Key is a time machine.
The Avengers saga has only two real variations from the universal plot, and they seem minor when considered within the big picture:
(1) The Insane Evil Dude is not acting in his own self interest. He’s even more insane than that. (Hint to Thanos: instead of using the Infinity Gauntlet to halve the population of the universe, use it instead to double the size and resources – same exact result without all that pesky murder!)
(2) The Insane Evil Dude actually succeeds in obtaining infinite power, so the good guys must use the Kyser Key to undo his actions rather than to prevent them.
Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas performed arguably the hottest scene ever filmed between A-list actors (which they both were at the time).
I have some thoughts about the movie. Complete spoilers follow:
I think I’m going to surprise you with what I am about to say. I’m the guy who asked why the hell Blake Edwards thought it was a wise idea to remake a Truffaut movie as a Burt Reynolds film (The Man Who Loved Women). You would therefore expect me to hate the entire idea of this lavish Hollywood remake of yet another Truffaut movie (Mississippi Mermaid), but I don’t feel that way. Mississippi Mermaid was not an exceptionally good Truffaut movie. Although the idea had merit, it was filled with inexplicable behavior and illogical plot twists. I think it was a good idea to remake it.
Before you unload on me and my obvious lack of taste, let me set the record straight. I am not telling you that Original Sin is a great movie, and I’m not recommending it. The fact that I don’t object to a remake doesn’t mean I endorse this particular execution of that idea, although I think it is a reasonable screen representation of the kind of plot and atmosphere represented by Cornell Woolrich’s “Waltz into Darkness,” the novel which formed the basis for both Truffaut’s film and this one.
The basic summary: a mail order bride shows up on an island. She’s not at all what the groom expected. He was waiting at the docks for a plain woman, and was confronted with a knock-out. Her story, “I didn’t want you to send for me because I had a pretty face. I sent a picture of my ugly cousin.” He believed it, because he had done something very similar himself. He told her that he was a simple worker when in fact he owned the factory/plantation, because he didn’t want her to come because she had seen a pretty bank account. Believing her, however, was a big mistake. She was a con artist who has conspired with her boyfriend to murder the real mail order bride and clean out the groom.
Frankly, Truffaut’s film had a serious problem with inexplicable character motives. When the con woman cleaned out the rich guy’s bank accounts, there was no motivation for her to do that. She was trading down. What kind of con is that? She had the greatest life imaginable with a rich guy with impeccable manners who looked like a movie star and completely adored her. She would have been far better off telling him the truth and staying with him rather than cleaning out a couple of bank accounts and ending up right back where she was again in a couple of years. The only possible explanation for her actions is that her unseen partner-in-crime had an inexplicably strong hold on her, something that she just couldn’t break. But the Truffaut movie never explained that.
The remake tried and succeeded fairly well in that one aspect. The partners had a bizarre sadistic/masochistic co-dependency relationship that dated back to childhood. That alone could explain how he controlled her, but the screenwriter added a further clarification as well. The con woman WAS going to stay with the rich guy, until he made her write a letter to “her sister” – actually the murdered woman’s sister – which forced her to end the game.
Unfortunately, both versions of the story have a massive logic error. In theory, the con woman and her partner killed the real mail order bride on the ship. They flung her overboard and concocted a scheme to impersonate her. Do you see the big problem with this set-up?
The mail order bride didn’t know she was going to marry a rich man! She thought she was going to the island to marry a mere foreman for love.
So why would anyone decide to bump her off and take her place? To con a poor man? Conning the poor has never been an especially lucrative enterprise.
(Well, to be more precise, conning a single poor person has never been very rewarding. On the other hand, if you choose to do it en masse, as do the TV evangelists, it seems to be pretty fruitful.)
This newer version of the story pretty much follows the Truffaut film for 75 minutes – until the bride is rediscovered by the rich man after her flight, at which point he intends to kill her, but is dissuaded by the story of her life, a tragic tale of woe.
After that point, however, Original Sin becomes a completely different film, filled with staged deaths, cons, counter-cons, unexpected revelations, and about ten completely outrageous, over-the-top plot twists.
Truffaut’s film really focused on obsession, and the plot was kept fairly simple to allow him to focus on the rich man, who loved the con woman even after he knew she was an imposter. The new film is really plot-driven. I don’t think it was handled properly. When a film is based on the plot, and the plot is based on secrets, you have to let it unravel naturally. This film is directed by someone who just can’t keep a secret, and it spoils the fun. When the rich man and the con woman are first living together, he completely ignores some warning signs that she’s lying. She smells of cigars and she tells him she smoked one of his. He catches her with another guy and she explains that she was asking for directions. She loves her morning coffee, even though she had written him that she never drinks anything but tea. C’mon now. There are two problems with this line of presentation:
1. Are we supposed to believe that he is really that obtuse? Being obsessed is one thing, but complete stupidity is quite another.
2. Even though he can’t see the scam, we can. The clues would have been obvious enough, but the film’s framing device shows her telling her story from prison at the beginning of the film. Therefore, when she is revealed to be an imposter, there is no surprise for us. If a film is driven by plot surprises, what is left when the surprises are not surprising?
What makes it worse is that there are so many off-the-wall plot twists. The script piles twist upon twist, but frankly, none of them are really very surprising once you realize that the author is simply going to pull out all of the stops. A film can be fun if it leads us to think one thing, then drops an opposite bombshell on us when we really don’t expect it. A film may even get away with doing this more than once. But once we become aware that the changes of direction are the entire raison d’etre of the movie, we expect everything to be a con, and are therefore subsequently unsurprised to find that things differ from their appearance. We knew it already, because everything in the film is that way. We’ve received a written invitation to our own surprise party, and we can’t even pretend we’re surprised.
David Mamet can get away with that because he is brilliant enough to manage an ambience where the absence of a plot twist is a surprise and is therefore, in itself, a plot twist. Mamet is, however, about the only person in the world with the elan to pull this off.
Having said all that, let me add that Original Sin is not as bad as the critics said (12% at Rotten Tomatoes). It’s not Plan 10 From Outer Space. It’s more like one of those potboiler Pia Zadora movies with Jolie slumming as the Zadora substitute. In fact, I thought the performances were amusing in an overwrought soap opera fashion, and I think that’s the effect they were going for. Lara Croft Jolie did a good impersonation of Kathleen Turner, except with a Madonna-like phony-baloney British accent; Zorro Banderas was convincing as a lovesick rich guy without a clue; and Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) did OK as the hammy actor pretending to be a detective.
I did love the fact that the evil guy gets to run around part of the movie in a Satan costume (the character is an actor) – man, you can’t get any further over the top in the symbolism department!