THE WORST MOVIES OF 2002

THE TEN WORST OF THE YEAR:
(in alphabetical order)

1. ASH WEDNESDAY

Writer/director/star Edward Burns takes a detour from narcissistic romantic comedy into narcissistic crime drama with this remarkably dull, repetitive and uneventful story, wherein we're supposed to think Burns' character is a wonderful guy even though he sleeps with his brother's girlfriend (the gorgeous and seemingly ubiquitous Rosario Dawson) while his brother (Elijah Wood) is on the lam after saving Burns' life. Itís great to have David Shire back scoring features, but why oh why did it have to be this one?

2. CHELSEA WALLS

In Training Day, Ethan Hawke did the finest acting of his career so far. In order to make up for that surprising achievement, he directed this glum story of the residents of New York's Chelsea Hotel, managing to emphasize every phony moment from a group of talented actors. The digital video (I canít even bring myself to use the word "cinematography") is smeary and ugly even by the standards of such other DV films as Tadpole, Bamboozled and The Chateau, which is especially maddening since the Chelsea looks like it would be a marvelous location. I haven't heard the soundtrack album yet, but in the context of the film the Jeff Tweedy music just adds to the irritation. This film can only look better on video, but don't take that as encouragement to rent it. Perhaps Hawke made this film to make his novels look good. (I admit, that was unfair. I haven't read Hawke's books, and they can only be better than Rupert Everett's "Hello Darling, Are You Working? ")

3. DEUCES WILD

Stewart Copeland began his film scoring career with a youth gang film, Rumble Fish, and his lively, inventive score for that beautifully shot Francis Ford Coppola curiosity portended impressive things to come. Unfortunately, Copeland immediately sabotaged his own karma by giving an interview where he slammed John Williams, claiming that all of Williams' scores sound the same, and thus condemning himself to scoring films like Taking Care of Business and Deuces Wild, a period gang drama that spent at least two years on the shelf. The score is all noise and no music, the moments of high drama play as high comedy, and the actors are prettier than the actresses, though Fairuza Balk manages to give a fine performance despite the odds.

4. HARVARD MAN

You may ask, can a James Toback film be worse than Black and White? Well, this one doesn't quite attain that film's lows - there are fewer excruciating scenes improvised by non-actors - but Harvard Man doesn't have any inspired oddities like Robert Downey Jr. making a pass at Mike Tyson (Black & White's notorious highlight). What this film does have is an attractive cast - Adrian Grenier, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Joey Lauren Adams, Rebecca Gayheart - in Toback's narcissistic fantasy of what his Harvard tenure might have been like if he'd been a strikingly good looking basketball star entangled with the Mafia and involved with two women instead of, well, just James Toback. You can't blame him for fantasizing; you can blame him for putting it on film. The movie spent a year or two on the shelf, and probably only got released because of Gellar, though sadly the lengthy sex scenes are nudity-free (probably also because of Gellar).

5. NEW BEST FRIEND

Like Harvard Man, this spent years on the shelf. Two second generation filmmakers, director Zoe Clarke-Williams (daughter of maverick 70s director Paul Williams - not to be confused with the Paul Williams of Phantom of the Paradise, who made a welcome reappearance in The Rules of Attraction) and writer Victoria Strouse (daughter of Annie and Bonnie and Clyde composer Charles Strouse) teamed up for this collegiate mystery-drama, and one can only hope that this visually ugly, unintentionally hilarious mess (originally titled Mary Jane's Last Dance) wasn't really what they had in mind. My old neighbor Mia Kirschner (24's Mandy) is easy on the eyes and can actually act, so her presence here is even more distressing. If this film must be seen it's best viewed in a large and disrespectful group, where an uproarious good time may be had by all.

6. PUMPKIN

The talented Christina Ricci not only starred but produced this inexplicable film about a shallow sorority girl who falls in love with a mentally handicapped young man. The filmmakers can't seem to decide whether to go for Farrelly Brothers-style shock comedy or genuine romance, and the film's tone careens madly like the proverbial decapitated chicken. John Ottman's score sounds much better on the Citadel CD than it does on the movie, so even die-hard Ottmanites should give this film a miss. (It's great to have Ottman back on the scoring stage, but between this, Eight Legged Freaks and Trapped, couldn't he have found more suitable projects? Perhaps a snuff film.)

7. ROLLERBALL

Just a few years ago, John McTiernan scored an unexpected bullseye with his charming remake of Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair, the rare remake that managed to be superior to the original. Alas, lightning didn't strike twice with his reworking of Jewison's 70s sci-fi sports drama Rollerball. The mistakes are too many to list; here are just a few: unappealing heroes (Chris Klein, LL Cool J) set against charismatic villains (Naveen Andrews, the great Jean Reno); a finale that's a mess of confusing editing and digital tweaking; the digital shadowing of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos' (who gives a lively, entertaining performance) breasts (supposedly her breasts have been restored to the R-rated version on DVD); and, most gallingly, a huge-scale, desert action scene presented entirely in faux-night vision grainy video. John, you made Die Hard! Hunt For Red October! I refuse to believe Jan DeBont deserves all the credit for those movies (after all, look at Speed 2 and The Haunting). What the hell happened?

8. SCOOBY-DOO

A talented comedy director has a sense of timing, of rhythm, an instinctual knowledge of what's funny and what isn't. Scooby-Doo director Raja Gosnell, on the other hand, thinks that pointing the camera randomly at a bunch of young actors running around yelling is the key to cinematic mirth. Uh-uh. I found this film hard to sit through, but $150,000,000 worth of movie patrons seemingly disagreed with me. The film does have some redeeming qualities: Matthew Lillard does an exemplary Shaggy, and the scenes involving Scrappy (a much superior GGI character than Scooby) provide mild amusement. As a devoted Buffy fan, it pains me to put two Sarah Michelle Gellar films on the worst of the year list. But something's wrong when a talented actress's finest film is Cruel Intentions. Whose director brought us our next film--

9. THE SWEETEST THING

Once upon a time, Cameron Diaz was a charming performer - sweet, unaffected. Then came the awful Charlie's Angels, where her self-adoring, money-maker-shaking antics helped propel the film to an inexplicable boxoffice triumph. The new, unimproved Diaz is back in this, the worst film of 2002, a crudely made, painfully unfunny romantic comedy which demonstrates that movies written by women can be just as vulgar, badly plotted and dreadful as those written by men. You've come a long away, baby.

10. SWEPT AWAY

Trapped on a desert island with Madonna and Snatch director Guy Ritchie. There isn't really much else to say, is there? No laughs, no romance, a predictably charmless performance by the star (who wasn't that bad in her Die Another Day cameo), and a deep and ugly strain of misogyny.

11. BAD COMPANY

Chris Rock is a superb standup comedian, but except for Nurse Betty he has yet to prove himself an actor, still seeming as uncomfortable on the screen as he did in his Saturday Night Live days. I love spy movies, but if I wanted to watch another film where no one cared about the project and everyone was just cashing a fat paycheck, I'd have rented one of the later Lethal Weapons. Anthony Hopkins, at least, maintains his dignity by just being Anthony Hopkins and expending as little energy as possible. Did I mention that this film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Joel Schumacher? Nuff said.

12. BIG FAT LIAR

An obnoxious, unfunny kid comedy that managed to waste the talents of Frankie Muniz and Paul Giamatti. The director, whom horror fans may remember as the ill-fated, ponytailed young boyfriend from 1988's The Kiss, has gone on to direct Just Married and is doing a Steve Martin movie next. So thereís hope for us all.

13. ENOUGH

Michael Apted is an intelligent craftsman, a respected documentarian, and made Enigma, one of the most entertaining films of the year. So why did he follow it up with Enough? And why do they still let Nicholas Kazan (Dream Lover, Fallen, Bicentennial Man) write movies? Jim Ridley in the Village Voice expressed himself on the matter far better than I ever could: "It takes true huckster zeal to use the ads for a battered-wife melodrama to plug your latest recording, but thatís just what 'J to tha L-O' did with this piece of SH to I-T. Regarding the pack of dangerous lies this movie peddled to abuse victims, how did this ever get greenlighted in good conscience? I see some Hollywood chowderhead watching Frederick Wiseman's Domestic Violence and saying 'Y'know, Fred, why don't these babes just contact their absentee millionaire fathers, hire identical look-alikes, acquire ninja skills, buy and master a zillion bucks' worth of surveillance equipment, and get a personal trainer for a month? ' "

14. I SPY

The original I Spy featured an African-American lead who was smart, sexy, and witty, a Rhodes scholar who spoke several languages (and he certainly wasn't a glorified switchboard operator like Uhura). To update the material for today's more enlightened sensibilities, they've cast Eddie Murphy as a loudmouthed, moronic, egotistical athlete. Classy. Sure, Barry Sonnenfeld's Wild Wild West was a travesty of promising source material, but at least it felt like a big movie, with elaborate effects and visual grandeur. I Spy director Betty Thomas doesn't seem to care how a film looks, or how it sounds, or what happens in it. Owen Wilson provides a few laughs, and Famke Janssen lights up the screen as always, but Malcolm McDowell seems like he's ready to retire from acting and open a hog farm with Tim Curry. This film and Bad Company form a permanent double feature in one of those hell dimensions Buffy's always finding herself in.

15. IMPOSTOR

The untalented Gary Fleder apparently wanted to show that you CAN make a bad film from Philip K. Dick material. Mark Isham's score grinds along dully, making Klaus Badelt's Equilibrium seem like a futuristic symphony of Goldsmithian breadth.

16. MASTER OF DISGUISE

Painfully unfunny, and chopped to ribbons. Seemingly designed as a kids' film, but many of Dana Carvey's impressions will fly over the childrenís heads - how many pre-teens are well acquainted with Robert Shaw's performance in Jaws? Any film where the only laughs come from Brent Spiner breaking wind is in big trouble.

17. TRAPPED

Having your child abducted is any parent's nightmare. That nightmare is much less frightening (and far less plausible) when you happen to carry a deadly anesthetic with you at all times, when you happen to fly your own small plane, when you happen to be friends with a top exec at a cell phone company so you can have the kidnapper's calls traced at a moment's notice. There are good actors in this film, but for their sake I wonít name them.

18. THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE

There's nothing inherently wrong with remakes. After all, the classic Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon was actually the third movie version of that book. Director Jonathan Demme followed his Oscar win for Silence of the Lambs with a decade of ponderous Oscar bait (Philadelphia, Beloved), so in theory it's nice that he decided to return to the lighter fare of his early career. And remaking a film like Charade that featured too utterly peerless movie stars - Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn - may be risky, but after all, there was already a TV remake of Notorious with John Shea and Jenny Robertson and the world didn't end. Murphy's Law seems to have afflicted Demme during the making of this one (and with its release ­ it didn't even make the boxoffice top ten on its opening weekend), as he seemingly made every wrong choice he possibly could. Most inexplicable is the way Demme clumsily reworks the story to make the villain less of a villain, structures the entire finale to revolve around the villain's moral dilemma (rather than the romance between the leads), and then adds an epilogue where the villain meets his fate in a smug combined homage to Silence of the Lambs and The Bride Wore Black. On the upside, it had one of the best posters of the year.

19. WHO IS CLETIS TOUT?

Painfully unfunny comedy noir. Christian Slater limits his lead performance to one facial expression. Randy Edelman's synths zip along with numbing predictability. The plot hinges on the hero being allowed to garden freely in a prison yard where a fortune has been buried. What's most shocking is the utterly forgettable performance of Richard Dreyfuss. Love him or hate him, he usually makes an impression, but here he comes across as just some guy who happens to look and sound like Richard Dreyfuss. Bill Connolly was pretty good, though.

20. WORLD TRAVELER

For audiences who loved the narcissism of Passion of Mind and Vanilla Sky, here's the less than compelling story of a handsome (as all the other characters keep reminding us) young man who ditches his loving wife and little boy (on the boy's birthday, no less) so he can travel across the country and sleep with a bunch of women. The filmmaker's previous film, The Myth of Fingerprints, was no award winner but it had some memorable moments (especially Roy Scheider's final scene) and showed some promise. That promise is now officially squandered.

DRAGONFLY

Nutty Professor director Tom Shadyac may not be the Billy Wilder of our time, but he used to have a good sense of what's funny. Then he made Patch Adams, and discovered that his true calling is horror. So why is Dragonfly so funny?

FORMULA 51

Samuel L. Jackson can do no wrong. Except for this movie. Guy Ritchie films are bad enough - imitation Guy Ritchie is inexcusable.

MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING

Okay, it's not quite as bad as the other ones, but it isn't any good. Comedy requires funny lines; narrative requires conflict. Talented performers like Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan and Andrea Martin manage to make this intermittently watchable, but still. Nia Vardalos is reputed to be a very nice woman. Let's see how far that gets her when the pact with Satan expires.

THE NEW GUY

I won't go into detail on this one because Lukas's cousin wrote it, but it does have a delightful scene of Eliza Dushku trying on bikinis. And that's pretty much the only thing I can recommend about it.

ONE HOUR PHOTO

Whatever you can say about David Fincher, at least he knows enough not to write his own movies. Fellow video director Mark Romanek lacks such Fincherian wisdom. Some movies show you the entire plot in the trailer - One Hour Photo's trailer shows you every idea the film has, and they aren't plentiful. If you want to see Robin Williams give a creepy, memorable performance as a psychopath, rent Insomnia.

TEDDY BEARS PICNIC

The gifted actor and satirist Harry Shearer takes a prize opportunity for comedy - Northern California's Bohemian Grove, a retreat for the wealthy and powerful - and fails to find any humor in it. A lot of good actors are wasted, but Justin Kirk has a funny bit about clown school.

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