The Screengrab : the hottie and the nottie

Razzies Honor “The Love Guru,” Paris Hilton

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Lest we forget, another set of awards were handed out in Hollywood this weekend. Actually “handed out” is probably a poor choice of words, as it implies that someone actually showed up to receive their Golden Raspberry at the 29th Annual Razzie Awards. That has happened before, but as far as we know, not this year. The Love Guru was dishonored as the Worst Picture of 2008, and its star Mike Myers named Worst Actor. Myers shared Worst Screenplay with Love Guru co-writer Graham Gordy.

Other big losers include:

Worst Actress: Paris Hilton, The Hottie and the Nottie

Worst Director: Uwe Boll, 1968: Tunnel Rats, In The Name of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, and Postal

Worst Supporting Actress: Paris Hilton, Repo: The Genetic Opera

Worst Supporting Actor: Pierce Brosnan, Mamma Mia!

Worst Prequel, Remake, Ripoff or Sequel: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Your 2008 Razzie Nominees

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Getting the jump on the Oscar nominations by 24 hours, the contenders for this year’s coveted Golden Raspberry Awards have been announced. It should come as no surprise that The Love Guru leads the pack with seven nominations, including Worst Picture, and Worst Actor (Mike Myers). (The Love Guru has already suffered the disappointment of being named the Screengrab’s Worst of the Year, so this should be a cakewalk.)

Check out the major nominees after the jump.

WORST PICTURE

Disaster Movie
The Happening
The Hottie and the Nottie
The Love Guru
Meet the Spartans

WORST ACTOR

Mike Myers (The Love Guru)
Eddie Murphy (Meet Dave)
Al Pacino (88 Minutes and Righteous Kill)
Mark Wahlberg (The Happening)
Larry the Cable Guy (Witless Protection)

WORST ACTRESS

Jessica Alba (The Eye and The Love Guru)
The Cast of The Women
Cameron Diaz (What Happens in Vegas)
Paris Hilton (The Hottie and the Nottie)
Kate Hudson (Fool’s Gold and My Best Friend’s Girl)

The Worst Career Achievement award goes, of course, to Uwe Boll. The full list of nominees can be found at the official Razzies site.

Movies for a New Depression: "Kabluey" (2008)

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Kabluey, which was recently released o DVD after a brief run in theaters, is supposed to be a comedy, which given the state that its characters are in makes a statement right there. Almost ten years ago, Office Space captured an economic landscape where people had to rely on a soldierly camaraderie to keep from going insane at their shit jobs. In Kabluey, there's no camaraderie: an invisible bubble seems to have been lowered around each individual character, cutting off their ability to reach out or even empathize with their fellow sufferers, and it's everyone for himself. The movie starts with Leslie (Lisa Kudrow), who is as good as marooned in her cluttered Texas home, trying to watch over her two small sons while her husband is off in Iraq, getting his tour of duty endlessly extended. If Leslie doesn't go back to work, she's about toe get her health benefits cut off, but she can't afford day care, so she reluctantly calls in her husband's brother, Salman, a doofus and loser who is played by the movie's writer-director, Scott Prendergast. He, in turn, answers a job offer and finds himself reporting to a hollowed-out building--construction was completed just before the Internet company that paid for it hit the skids--where a harried woman (Conchata Ferrell) explains that he's part of a modest boondoggle, being used to burn off cash set aside to attract attention to the doomed company. In quick order, she stuffs him into a blue , top-heavy, foam-rubber costume that makes him look like a penis at half-mast and deposits him on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, with a pile of flyers announcing the availability of office space tucked under his arm. She's almost out of sight before it occurs to her to stop the car and yell, "You need a ride back?"

This is Scott Prendergast's first film, aside from some shorts and a small acting role in the instant-punchline Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie, which probably taught him a great deal about the demoralizing nature of taking money for thankless work perforned in the course of an ill-conceived venture. He's not exactly a natural, either as a director or a leading actor. As a director, he tends to push too hard, going for broadly zany visual effects; as an actor, he leaps at the chance to give himself an opening scene here that may give viewers the mistaken idea that his character is meant to be some sort of medium-end functioning autistic, though it develops that he's just supposed to be "quirky" and a little withdrawn. But Prendergast has caught onto two of the best-kept secrets in movies: one, that you can forgive a movie a lot if it's constructed around the right central image, and two, that it's hard to go wrong with a big, stupid-looking costume. The recurring image of the poor shmuck encased in that sweltering suit, alone on a deserted highway, his foam-rubber head hanging in the Texas sun, does for Kabluey what George Stevens seemed to think a shot of the family house framed in the center of the wide screen would do for Giant.) The movie has other attractions, such as Christine Taylor as a well-heeled mother who hires the corporate logo to entertain at a kid's birthday party, and Teri Garr as a woman who lost her money in the company and is last seen gingerly poking the (abandoned) costume with a stick. And Lisa Kudrow is terrific, as is her wont: her ability to suggest a mind that's whirling at top speed trying to think her way out of a set of circumstances so crushing that it would lay a less resilient person down for the count could make her the movies' face of a new depression. Maybe it's time for somebody to launch an all-girl remake of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

DVD Digest for May 6, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: One of the most acclaimed films of 2007 arrives to do battle with some of the most reviled releases so far in 2008. Who will prevail? Read on…

DVD of the Week: No one does musical biography like Todd Haynes. This should have been clear from his previous films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine, and his latest film, I’m Not There, lays any remaining doubts to rest. But then, when one is making a movie about Bob Dylan, how could it possibly fit into a neat little package? The Weinstein Company’s two-disc DVD of the film contains a wide variety of features, including a commentary track with Haynes, two deleted scenes, some audition tapes, a handful of documentaries, and a tribute to Heath Ledger. But most of all, there’s the film itself- I’m Not There is sometimes wondrous, sometimes frustrating, but always worthy of its subject, and this DVD should find a place in the collections of cinephiles and Dylan fans alike.

Alas, the other new arrivals on DVD aren’t nearly that noteworthy, sometimes aggressively counteracting the awesomeness of I’m Not There with their wholesale suckitude. More typical of this week’s crop is the universally detested The Hottie and the Nottie (Genius Products- how’s that for irony?), the latest attempt by its star- who I refuse to name here- to achieve total media domination. Also this week: Ice Cube and Tracy Jordan Morgan in First Sunday (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Hilary Swank in P.S. I Love You (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the long-awaited Eva Longoria Parker vehicle Over Her Dead Body (New Line); and 2006 TIFF Audience Award Winner Bella (Lions Gate). Also, this week brings the release of the heartwarming family-themed vagina dentata comedy Teeth, as well as Sony’s first step into the Bollywood market, Saawariya (also Blu-Ray). But while a few of these are worth seeing, I’d have to say this was probably the easiest week to pick a DVD of the Week in quite a while.

A few new editions of some already-on-DVD titles will be hitting stores this week as well, including: The Bridges of Madison County Deluxe Edition (Warner); Serial Mom Collector’s Edition (Focus); and a two-disc special edition of Twister (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Finally, this week’s sole Blu-Ray only release is the 2004 remake of Shall We Dance?

Sorry folks, that’s all I’ve got. Next week promises to bring more DVD goodness. Not a moment too soon, I say.

Unwatchable: The All-Time Bottom 100 Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Forget Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate, Howard the Duck and all the other renowned turkeys of cinema history. The Guardian delves into the depths of the IMDb’s 100 lowest ranked movies to find the truly toxic, the absolute worst of the worst. As Sam Richards writes, the IMDb list “differs from most critic-voted ‘worst movie of all-time’ lists, in that any film that's memorably bad - say, Swept Away - tends to get just enough positive responses to save it from total ignominy. The Bottom 100 exists to catalogue films that have been viewed out of error, obligation or last-turkey-in-the-shop desperation.”

Richards sampled a handful of the lowest-ranked entries “in a Ludovico technique-style experiment.” Number three on the list is Zombie Nation, “a staggeringly idiotic 2004 film by German director Ulli Lommel, regarded as a modern day Ed Wood…Expecting a gore-fest, you're confronted by the world's worst 'zombies': they wear aviators and lipstick, drive cars and devour their prey to the sound of perky Europop.” He also checks out Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite Manos: The Hands of Fate, “shabby piece of teensploitation” Invisible Maniac, and the number one entry on the Bottom 100, none other than The Hottie and the Nottie. “It's not the worst film ever though, just a predictable, insulting vanity project that asks you to accept that an emu-faced posho with only one available facial expression is the most beautiful woman in America.”

You can check out the complete list here. As you can see, it skews toward more recent fare like Witless Protection and the critically reviled oeuvre of spoofmeisters Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Meet the Spartans). Somebody must like those movies since they keep making money, but apparently the fans prefer to remain incognito. Our biggest disappointment is that Richards did not subject himself to #82 on the list, Anus Magillicutty. An IMDb user comment reveals one of the pitfalls of the Bottom 100: “I watched this movie because it was rated to be so bad it might have been good.” If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at the Screengrab, it’s that this is almost never true.

Joe Queenan: The Worst Movies Ever Made Aren't What They Used to Be

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Professional cranky bastard Joe Queenan surveys the current contenders for the title of worst movie ever made and finds them lacking. He is appalled that a walking answer to a trivia-quiz lightning round like Paris Hilton can take a few weeks off from doing nothing to doing nothing in front of a camera crew, and that the results can be used to scare people away from theaters for a weekend or two in the late winter season, and this gets called the worst movie ever made, as if enough work had gone into it for it to qualify as a movie, let alone the worst anything. "That is not fair," he grrumbles. "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." Queenan saves his lowest accolades for movies that are shown real misguided imagination and daring in their very conception. As examples, he cites Futz!, a 1969 hippie extravaganza based on an Off-Broadway play, written in verse, about a farmer whose very close relationship with his pig meets with the disapproval of his neighbors. Though made by the same people who worked on the theatrical production, the fil adaptation trumped the live version because they were able to use a real pig, causing many reviewers to remark that seeing the movie put the viewer in the unusual position of seeing a blameless pig robbed of its dignity. (I have never seen Futz! myself, and not for lack of trying. I sometimes wonder if there is a single remaining print out there somewhere, and if so, if cast member Sally Kirkland might not be hiding it under her bed.)

Queenan also cites Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, Salo, "the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful", and The Way We Were, which differs from those pictures in that it doesn't have any Nazis in it, though I'm not sure I'd argue that it doesn't belong. In the end, though, he takes the practical-minded position that a real contender has to have practical consequences: he's looking for "a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock..." Yes, he's giving the title to old-school favorite Heaven's Gate, the one that took down United Artists. "This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates." I'm pretty sure that the "mounted on roller skates" theme is one that even Futz! let slip through its fingers, but again, I haven't seen it and can only guess. Queenan reports that he knew someone who worked for the public relations company that handled the picture: "He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend." Of course, that was then and this is now, and while it seems unlikely that it'll ever start smoking The Godfather in the AFI polls, Heaven's Gate now has a hardy band of deeply committed, easily riled defenders, every one of whom I know in my heart is a superior person who dresses better than I do. That, too, is part of the charm of a true worst movie--enough vision, talent, and passion should have gone into it that someone will see grounds for its defense in there. I do no forsee a day in which there will be a ravening cult sticking up for The Hottie and the Nottie, but if that does ever happen, I'd keep an eye out for the other three horsemen.

"Nottie" Isn't Nice to Paris Hilton

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Every once in a while there’s an event that restores your faith in the American public. You know, like Hands Across America, or the failure of New Coke. Or this past weekend’s box office totals for The Hottie and the Nottie.

Honestly, I was surprised when I learned that the Paris Hilton comedy was getting a theatrical release in the first place; the title, poster art and premise all screamed “straight to video.” But after mulling it over, I had to concede that it wasn’t so shocking after all. Hilton is such a fixture on tabloid covers and gossip sites, she surely must have fans, and even a million or two of them would be enough to ensure a respectable opening weekend during the doldrums of February. Hell, Meet the Spartans was the number one movie in the country just a couple of weeks ago.

Well, slashfilm has done the math, and the news is good for anyone dreading a sequel. (The Hottie and the Nottie Go Potty?) “The final count will show that the critically reviled comedy featuring the seemingly talentless Hilton will sell a meager $25,500 in tickets at 111 locations over the weekend. That’s only $230 per screen for the theatres that were convinced to book this disaster. That means that, based on an $8 average ticket price, 29 paying customers showed up at each location over the 3-day. In a country that seems fascinated with Paris Hilton, only 3,219 unlucky Americans will have been suckered into seeing Hottie by Monday morning.”

Congratulations, America. You have reason to be proud this week. Except you 3,219 poor shmucks. But at least you’ll have something to tell your grandchildren.