Top Ten Overblown Pieces of Crap

--Chuck

• INDEPENDENCE DAY
  An assault on common sense. The beginning of the end of intelligent film making. The End OF Cinema. This one is the high water mark of stupidity in movies. Plotholes the size of Texas. Inconsistencies that make one weep. Example: A single wounded alien takes out a roomful of humans using less effort than you or I stepping on ants. Yet Will Smith knocks one of this same species out with a single punch. The painfully obvious inclusion of the Randy Quaid character setting him up for the Big Win scene in such a clumsy fashion that Ray Charles probably saw it coming. Add to that the cliched dialogue and moron-level science and Judd Hirsch's embarrassing turn as an unfortunate Jewish stereotype and you have a movie fit for continuous play in Hell.

• AWAKENINGS
  Oliver Sacks' touching, heartbreaking and chilling story of man brought out of catatonia for a tragically brief period is turned into Hollywood tripe as the odious Robin Williams dares to go head-to-head with Robert DeNiro. Williams is in "serious actor" mode but his beard seems to carry the majority of his role. He displays his simpering nebbish personality for the entire film, never straying from that one note characterization for a single frame. To his discredit, DeNiro gives one of his weakest and least imaginative performances. It's as though Williams sucked all of the talent from everyone around him. I still think DeNiro's character returned to catatonia to escape Williams' performance.

• BRAVEHEART
  Everything should have gone right with this one. But rather that cleave to historical accuracy, Mel Gibson and screenwriter Randall Wallace bring us the life of William Wallace as Mad MacMax. In this flick Wallace looks like a heavy metal guitarist and acts like Conan. Edward Longshanks is shown in accurate detail as a brutal son of a bitch but his son was an infant at the time of Henry Wallace's uprising. And the queen was no hot young chick (let alone the fact that Wallace could never have gotten within sighting distance of her). And the much lauded battles? I've seen better improvised melees in low-budget Italian gladiator flicks. It was the usual movie idea of "tactics" being that you simply do something to surprise your enemies and then you'll win. The idea that the English cavalry would have been surprised by the Scots showing up with stakes to discourage charges is ludicrous. This defense was a thousand years old by this time and standard fare in war. The movie GETTYSBURG stands alone in movie history as showing the ebb and flow and waxing and waning of fortunes in battle.
  The other thing that annoys me the most is that (in the actual events) the Scottish lairds worn armor identical to that of the English. Wallace wore a very distinctive armor and helm. Not blue paint and fur.
  
  Dopey and silly but I'd watch it again as it still qualifies as great Hollywood junk.

• SILVERADO
  This western has so much wrong with it I don't know where to begin. Plotlines start and then peter away to be forgotten. An "everything but the kitchen sink" style of plotting makes this movie wander aimlessly in search of a spine. The town of Silverado is built up in dialogue to a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah of the prairie. The letdown, after a stirring crane shot and booming musical swell, is incredible. The town is just another dusty flyspeck, Hollywood backlot set. Other problems? The sandwiching in of a "social" issue with Danny Glover's character. Wardrobe? Atrocious. Kevin Costner looks as though he picked his suit from a 1958 Sears catalog for children. And, sorry girls, but no cowboy ever wore his clothes that tight. Then there's Jeff Goldblum's "ratskin" coat. When he gets off the stage you get the idea that the stop before Silverado was Today's Man. The movie clumps and stumbles along endlessly from there. By the time the cliched tumbleweed blows by behind Kevin Kline during the climactic (anti-climactic) gunfight the whole folly has collapsed. That tumbleweed's appearance evinced gales of laughter when I saw it at a theater. How do you write a terrible western, the simplest Hollywood formula of them all? Here's the roadmap.

• JURASSIC PARK: THE LOST WORLD
  The most aggravating movie ever committed to film. Spielberg dispenses with the plotline and theme of the Crichton novel as well as any kind of logical sense and comes up with the kind of movie you'd have if an hyperactive six year old's book report on dinosaurs were optioned for the screen. Once Jeff Goldblum's (poor Jeff. He's in three of the films on my list so far and I really like him as an actor) daughter is introduced and you realize that gymnastics will play a role in the climax of the film you know you're in for a long and fruitless ride. An environmentalist releases dinosaurs captured by SUV driving white hunters (boo! hiss!) and sets a violent chain of events in motion that results in hundreds of deaths. But the environmentalist never meets his comeuppance and is continued to be seen as a hero! The film's potentially most memorable scene (Pete Postlewaite facing an angry T-rex armed only with an elephant gun) happens offscreen 'cause Spielberg would never want to glorify hunting or recommend shooting an already extinct species! A movie predicated on all of the characters being idiots. It actually manages to top itself for stupidity when an obviously tacked on fourth act has a T-Rex running rampant in LA. The sequence makes THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS seem like CITIZEN KANE.

• HEAT
  Let me start by saying that I am a major, MAJOR Michael Mann fan. I've been following this guy's work since he was a scriptwriter for the old POLICE STORY television series. But here he goes WAY overboard. But this exercise in tedium is almost like self-parody. Firstly, the plot and action are taken wholesale from a TV movie Mann did for NBC called L.A. TAKEDOWN. In this big screen version he repeats all the deficiencies of the small screen version. The dialogue is stilted and the characterizations overblown and pretentious. There's no clear motive for the criminals who move from daring daylight armored car stick-up to burglary to the dumbest bank robbery ever in cinema history.
  Pacino is fresh from his latest facelift and in full "shout every word" performance. DeNiro looks uncertain of his purpose in this whole mess. Val Kilmer looks pouty and pseudo-tough. I can't remember the actresses who were in this because their characters were cardboard placeholders. Kind of "female love-interest here". The meeting between DeNiro and Pacino (probably studio-directed) is painfully contrived and comes to less than nothing.
  But, as a gun aficionado, the most aggravating scene is when DeNiro and his hoods are choosing their arsenal for the big robbery that climaxes the movie. Up until this point they've armed themselves with Sigs and Steyers and HKs and other quality weapons. But for their last hoorah one of them picks up an AK-47. This is like a race driver saying, "I think I'll take the family mini-van to Indy."
  Maybe it was my heightened expectations for this movie. But it sucks all the more for the complete waste of all talent involved.

• LEGENDS OF THE FALL
  Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal summed this one up beautifully as, "an episode of Bonanza as done by Monty Python."
  Coming off of the brilliant GLORY, Edward Zwick returns to his THIRTYSOMETHING schmaltz with a messy generational western. Kind of a paean to THE BIG COUNTRY or THE FURIES and that sort of BIG western story. But all come away worse for the experience. Brad Pitt is over his head. Aidan Quinn looks like he wandered onto the wrong set. Julia Ormond is the cinema equivalent of cold oatmeal. But special rancor must be reserved for Anthony Hopkins who dominates the movie with a performance so overblown, so bloated and so monumentally awful that they should have created a sort of Anti-Oscar for him. He's chewing scenery and ranging all over the place with his accent and nuances and then his character has a stroke! After this the movie crosses the double yellow line and never comes back. Hopkins roars and mewls incoherently making noises that sound more like a wookie than the scion of a great frontier family. This ends with someone (I can't remember who and it really doesn't matters) wrestling a bear (I'm being kind here. Even fuzzy slo-mo photography can't disguise the worst "guy in a bear suit" scene since Grizzly Adams went off the air.) in a scene so embarrassing that one wants to hide ones face in an empty popcorn tub.

• DEEP IMPACT
  This movie has the dubious distinction of actually making a Michael Bay film look good in comparison. The cheerfully dopey ARMAGEDDON comes off like an Eisenstein classic in comparison to this overly earnest, empty-headed and soft-hearted piece of nonsense.
  From its tres-Hollywood title to its self-indulgent contemplation of divorce in the face of global destruction all this one misses is Mike Nelson and the robots seated in row one. The moronic plot points race by at dizzying speed even as the plot itself seems to crawl slower than the speed of mozzarella.
  While the population of the world faces total annihilation America comes up with a lottery system to decide who will get to go into the subterranean shelters and who will remain on the surface to be atomized. The decision makers are consumed with "fairness". And the list of "essential" personnel who will gain automatic access to the shelters reads like it was created by Public Radio producers. Artists and teachers are considered essential. Sure, if I'm facing a post-apocalyptic world I want some clown who got a federal grant to arrange light bulbs in oatmeal. Heart surgeons? Dentists? Plumbers? Who needs 'em? We can all discuss John Irving's last novel while the toilets back up.
  The zenith of stupidity is when endangered animals are trucked in past masses of people mobbing the entrance to the deep subterranean shelter. Hey, who's the genius who made the location of the entrance public? And why save already endangered species when all life on earth is endangered? And where the hell is a giraffe gonna live when the surface of the planet is turned into a lifeless frozen wasteland?

• HIGH NOON
  Considered by the misinformed to be a classic American western.
  They could not be more wrong.
  The entire story is predicated on the notion that the same people who fought Indians, plague, fires, drought, famine and weather would suddenly become wimps upon learning of the imminent arrival of three saddle tramps to their town. Everyone abandons the hero (played by Gary Cooper) who spends three quarters of the film begging for their help. This is a hero? He also turns down the entreaties of Grace Kelly, which only shows he's missing more than one major organ. And when this town of ingrates opts to hide behind their curtains he goes and faces the killers alone in the lamest gunfight ever filmed in a western. Yes, even lamer than Silverado.
  The most laughable portion of this film (beyond overwrought performances that would shame the cast of any incarnation of Star Trek) is the idea that a train in the wild and wooly west would actually arrive on time. Trains would be DAYS late. And even without this truth we are expected to believe that this dusty western flyspeck is actually in tune with Greenwich Mean Time. Those dudes step off that train at the STROKE of noon.
  The other asinine thing about this movie is, that at the end of filming, the filmmakers realized they had neglected to include clocks in any of their sets. They mounted a number of clocks on a wall and filmed them after setting various times on them. When you see the clocks in the film they are obviously mounted on the same wall in the same lighting that it's embarrassing.
  My other gripe (when is Dixon gonna get off this dead horse?) is that the movie is often seen by the sub-literate and over-educated as an analogy to the McCarthy Era. Why is it that all these "courageous" filmmakers had to mask their anti-McCarthy sentiments within other genres so that their message was entirely obscured? Where's the courage in that?

• CAST AWAY
  Starting to get the drift for why I don't try my hand at screenplays? I admit that I'm out of step with popular taste and darn proud of it. For example: this bigtime blockbuster that pulled in a half a billion in gross profits.
  The always-appealing Tom Hanks leaves the always-adorable and feisty Helen Hunt behind to deliver packages all over the world for Fed-Ex. His plane crashes and he spends four years on a deserted island with only a volleyball for company.
  Robinson Crusoe this guy ain't. In four years he manages to re-discover fire and live in a cave. The most primitive Fiji Islanders would laugh at this guy's place on the technological ladder. And his only salvation (besides being Tom Hanks who's the only possible reason this bankrupt piece of entertainment broke even.) is that he loses his mind. He and the volleyball conspire to build a raft that would have had the Skipper kicking Gilligan's ass. Hanks sets set sail and miraculously crosses the shipping lanes and is seen.
  Then, after four years away he returns some kind of shattered wreck and doesn't make even half an effort to win back Helen Hunt's affections.
  This is one of the few movies where you see a guy de-constructed through adversity. He starts out as a moral guy. He won't open those sacred Fed-EX boxes for the longest time (one of the few genuine suspense elements in the film) even though their contents might save his life. You gotta respect that. But over time solitude takes its toll and suddenly he's one banana shy of a bunch and begins relating to sporting goods. This is a hero?
  Just an enormous waste of time for us and the rigors of dieting for Mr Hanks.

©2004 by Chuck Dixon. All Rights Reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without permission.

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