THE WORST FILMS OF 2007, PART ONE

1. AUGUST RUSH

August Rush is one of those films that I hate more than it is actually bad (please forgive the muddled grammar), but it is still truly a lousy film, and annoys me so much that I have trouble organizing my thoughts coherently; the months since I saw the film have not softened my hatred for it. So instead, I'll merely list some of my criticisms:

A. First off, some viewers may give August Rush more slack than it deserves because it was directed by Kristen Sheridan, who co-wrote her father Jim's well-regarded film In America, which was based on the family's experiences as poor Irish immigrants in New York. Unlike many viewers, I found In America to be one of Jim Sheridan's least satisfying films, and one of the things that grated on me was its slippery hold on reality. While it was refreshing that a sizable chunk of screen time was spent with the characters trying to scrounge together change to pay for an adapter for their used air conditioner to make a Manhattan summer liveable, the kind of grindingly realistic detail that movies about poverty rarely provide, that welcome verisimilitude was utterly thrown out the door every time we saw a daughter in the same struggling family with own camcorder and her seemingly endless supply of blank videotape.

I assume that the younger Sheridan and the other August Rush creators consider their film a "fable" and thus immune to any logic-based criticisms, but the film's violations of reality both large and small are similarly galling, from the way that the 11-year-old August has never heard anyone whistle before (he's been in living in a well-tended upstate New York orphanage, not a kidnapper's dungeon), to the abandoned theater the street kids live in which magically has a full power supply, to the fact that a Central Park concert is based around an 11-year-old conducting his own composition yet his long-lost mother (who's taking part in the same program, and who is desperately seeking her son) hasn't encountered any photos of the boy prodigy.

B. The editing, by talented veteran William Steinkamp (Tootsie, Out of Africa), is awful -- in a feeble attempt to make the treacly story seem edgy and hip, the filmmakers constantly cut to different angles, often multiple times within the same line of dialogue. Strangely, edginess and hipness does not actually result.

C. We're supposed to believe that the young couple, Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, are meant to be together and to raise their son August, even though their entire courtship consists of a vapid five minute conversation on a rooftop ("What are you looking at?"/"You") so trivial that they don't even establish that they're both musicians, leading immediately to sex, a night's sleep, and an instant parting in the morning.

D. The inane plotting, the mixture of cloyingness and faux-edginess, and Robin Williams' irritating performance as the Bill Sykes/Fagin combo might not even matter so much if the music were actually memorable. Like Mr. Holland's Opus, another film about a protagonist's struggle to have his music heard by the world, the original music written for the character is mediocre at best (Mark Mancina wrote the score, with Hans Zimmer co-writing the main theme). The Oscar-nominated song "Raise It Up" is decent enough, and the scene where August and his long-lost father have a guitar duet (a piece written by Heitor Pereira) is not bad, but August's untrained musical abilities are prodigious to the point of ludicrousness, while his climactic composition makes such conspicuous use of "Moondance" (for plot reasons I haven't the heart to go into) that, as one critic pointed out, August seems more plagiarist than prodigy.

Despite all these crippling flaws, the plot of August Rush could conceivably work as a traditional break-into-song musical, as long as the songs were actually good. The five-minute courtship of Russell and Rhys-Meyers could work with a memorable duet, and August's incessant prattling about his love of music could be palatable if expressed in song (especially if it was actually a good song). If someone wants to make that film (not anytime soon, I presume) I'll go see it.

One of the films on my 2006 worst list was Date Movie, a remarkably unamusing parody of contemporary romantic comedies -- because what genre lends itself more to parody than comedy itself? Holocaust documentaries, maybe? Apparently the way to parody comedy is to provide unfunny jokes, as Date Movie, instead of riffing off the cliches of the genre (a ripe target, especially given the cookie-cutter nature of most films of that type in this post-Nora Ephron era) merely provided lame parodies of specific scenes from recent rom-coms. At least the contemporary romantic comedy formula provides an inherent structure to hang jokes on (tragically unfunny jokes, in this case), but Epic Movie merely strings together a bunch of lame reworkings of then-recent hits (Narnia, Pirates, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Superman Returns) adding the shoddiest and laziest of jokes, usually involving body functions. It's not the most unwatchable film ever -- Edward Shearmur's parody score is well done, Darrel Hammond's Captain Jack Sparrow-imitation is spot-on, and Crispin Glover is genuinely inspired casting as Willy Wonka -- but it's close. People who aren't funny simply shouldn't make comedies, and Epic Movie filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are apparently the least funny people in the entire movie industry (for even more evidence, rent their latest, Meet the Spartans. But please don't).

Though I regularly attend arthouse films, I had managed to spend the last decades of relentless moviegoing without seeing a single Hal Hartley film. He's one of those artists where even the rave reviews of his work make them sound like something I would rather avoid, but this latest entry (a sequel to his well-regarded Henry Fool, a film I was actually tempted to see but discouraged by its 137-minute running time) was something I couldn't resist -- a serio-comic international spy thriller starring two of my favorite performers, Parker Posey and Jeff Goldblum. I walked into the theater thinking that this might be the film to turn my feelings about Hartley around, that now I'd be compelled to go out and rent Trust, The Unbelievable Truth, No Such Thing, Amateur and Henry Fool, and curse myself for depriving myself of the work of a wonderful filmmaker for so many years. But, as it turns out, not so much. Though Jeff Goldblum's droll wit is always welcome, even my beloved Parker Posey turned in an awkward, mannered performance, and Hartley's humor is suffocatingly smug, not helped by his ugly, self-conscious tilted camera angles (probably an homage to The Third Man, but Carol Reed and Robert Krasker's shots were striking and dramatic; Hartley's are merely ugly and poorly framed), and the film proves even more intolerable in the second half when we're expected to take it seriously. I suppose if Hartley next makes a film featuring Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Rupert Graves and a Thomas Newman score I'll have to go see it too, but fortunately that isn't going to happen.

Quentin Tarantino may not be quite the sensation he was in the early/mid-1990s when he broke on the scene with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (especially since he's been followed by countless dire imitators), but though Kill Bill Vol. 1 is still my favorite of his films (thanks to its mixture of dazzling action scenes and remarkable filmmaking craft), I saw Pulp Fiction again recently and it really holds up -- it may be even better than it was 14 years ago. This makes it even harder to admit that his segment of last year's Grindhouse, the feature Death Proof, is a chore to watch, feeling more like imitation Tarantino than the real thing. The film is not completely worthless -- Kurt Russell is terrific, as always, and the stuntwork is genuinely impressive -- but the set-up for the car chase is so ridiculous (we're really supposed to worry about a stuntwoman who deliberately straps herself to the hood of a car just for thrills?) and the characters are so extraordinarily unappealing (after the lead girls leave their friend in the clutches of a backwoodsman -- after telling him that she's a porn actress and thus likely to put out -- I was ready to see them all die slowly) that I simply couldn't wait for the film to end. The idea of watching Tarantino's longer cut (which screened at Cannes) is unimaginable. I only hope this is just a blip in Tarantino's otherwise impressive career.

This is a more competent film than many of the entries on this list -- it's technically well made, Matthew Leonetti's location cinematography is pleasing to the eye, and Ben Stiller again proves himself the ideal actor for sexually embarrassed everyman roles (though I can't say that I need to see him play that part ever again), but for anyone who remembers the Elaine May-Neil Simon comedy from 1972 that inspired this film, an unusually witty and inspired twist on the romantic comedy genre (with especially great performances from Charles Grodin as the anti-hero and Jeannie Berlin as his hapless bride), what the Farrelly Brothers have done with the material is nothing short of sacrilege. I've never been a huge Farrelly Brothers fan -- I've always felt that There's Something About Mary is perhaps the most overrated comedy of our time, though I do have a great fondness for Dumb and Dumber and Shallow Hal -- but even in their weakest films, there was a generosity of spirit which helped counteract their often tiresome striving for greater and greater grotesquerie. While the May-Simon Heartbreak Kid was about a caddish young man who dumps his bride on his honeymoon to pursue a gorgeous shiska, the remake is about a man whose bride turns out to so unspeakably awful that he has no choice but to dump her. It's a rarely amusing and remarkably hateful film, epitomized by the tag where the jilted bride finally finds the idea sex partner -- a donkey from a Tijuana sex show. Oh, how I wish I were making that up.

This thriller with Lindsay Lohan as (BIG SPOILER!) a pair of separated-at-birth twins, one an A-student kidnapped and mutilated by a serial killer (in scenes so graphic that this film is ultimately much closer to torture porn than was the widely reviled Captivity), the other a stripper who mysteriously starts experiencing the same wounds -- at one point, her finger falls off in her glove during her act, and later she sews the dead finger back onto her hand in one of the most revolting scenes of an especially violent movie year. If this film weren't so cheaply and tackily made (the incessant use of the color blue smacks of student film pretension) it could be a crazy delight, and even so, the combination of its insane storyline and Lohan's truly bizarre double role are likely to make it a cult classic, but the shoddy filmmaking makes an already unpleasant story simply depressing to watch. However, I can certainly see the culty appeal of such scenes as the amputee stripper Lohan seducing her twin's boyfriend, and Joel McNeely's score is much more credible than the film deserves (like Lohan herself, he must have been glad to get away from all that squeaky clean Disney crap for a while).

I found Blood Diamond to be an uncomfortable mixture of old-fashioned Hollywood romantic adventure and real-life atrocity, but Primeval, along with being truly terrible in pretty much every way, ups the ante by mixing a similar backdrop of war-torn Africa with a ridiculous CGI monster crocodile. The advertising promised a movie about a serial killer, but even audiences knowing they were in for a killer croc film had to suffer through endless scenes of Africans being mistreated and slaughtered. The closest thing to a redeemable moment is when ill-fated comedy sidekick Orlando Jones expresses his gratitude to a helpful African boy by offering to smuggle the boy up his ass to get him safely into the U.S. Yes, it's really that bad.

Having spent decades enjoying Anthony Hopkins's performances, it gives me no great pleasure to report that his latest film as a director is the worst movie of 2007. Some of his later performances (like Legends of the Fall) showed an entertaining eccentricity, but the surreal, amateurish Slipstream suggests that Hopkins may actually be clinically insane, or else just the world's oldest film student, as his pretentious, incoherent mess about a screenwriter losing his grip on reality is a mixture of bad acting from a name cast (Christian Slater is especially intolerable) and irksome editing tricks (subliminal images, repeated shots, inserted stock footage) that nearly chased me out of the theater. But I stayed. Oh, how I stayed. Hopkins is still a wonderful actor, but the next time I watch The Edge (probably my favorite film he's appeared in) I'll be rooting for the bear.

I never saw Joe Carnahan's directorial debut, Blood, Guns & Octane, because it sounded like an nth-generation Tarantino clone, but his second film, Narc, was a skilled police thriller and character study, with a memorable performance from Ray Liotta as a possibly murderous detective. Unfortunately, his latest, Smokin' Aces, combines the modern ADD style of filmmaking with the worst of sub-Tarantino violent comedy, and makes the additional mistake of trying to make us care about his characters. Ryan Reynolds brings surprising credibility to his non-comedic hero, and Chris Pine (the new Captain Kirk) makes an impressively scruffy redneck thug, wiping out the memory of Princess Diaries II, but the film is almost entirely witless yet mysteriously convinced of its own wit.

Thanks to Anthony Hopkins, Richard Kelly did not in fact make the worst film of 2007 -- though if Southland Tales had been released in 2006 as originally planned, it might have readily topped that yera's list. Richard Kelly is a genius; okay, he isn't really, but he apparently heard enough people say that after his filmmaking debut, the promising but wildly overrated Donnie Darko, that he felt he had the talent to make a political satire/paranoiac thriller/dystipoian sci-fi drama with Tarantino-esque offbeat casting (though in Kelly's defense, Jon Lovitz as a murderous cop is one of the few entertaining aspects), but given the evidence of Southland Tales, Kelly has nothing to say, his jokes aren't funny, and he considers himself a great visionary. It's only fitting that in 2007, the year the movie musical returned, even a film as dreadful as Southland Tales should have a decent musical number, the hallucination scene where Justin Timberlake lip-synchs to The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" as dancers cavort around the Santa Monica Pier's arcade, and there are fleeting pleasures to be had throughout -- Steven Poster's soft-yet-slick, '70s style cinematography, the surprising conviction Sarah Michelle Gellar brings to even the worst project, and Seann William Scott's unexpectedly effective serious role -- but the self-important witlessness is much more depressing than Kelly's view of a totalitarian Los Angeles. For his next film, Kelly adapts a Richard Matheson story; Matheson deserves so much better. Frankly, we all do.

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