Column #7 - The Movies Keep Getting Worse And I Just Keep On Trucking

I sometimes get asked why I keep going to the theater when it seems that my hopes and high expectations are dashed faster than Oral Roberts-at-a-kegger. I want to see really good movies, really I do. This doesn't mean pretentious or foreign or action-spectacle so much as good old-fashioned quality entertainment. Not a return to the Westerns of yore, so much as a good story well told. It's really that simple: "Good story, well told"...If only it were really that simple.

The best film-going experience of all is when a movie surprises and shocks and challenges me. I can't tell you how satisfying it is to be surprised, to be on the end of a satisfying mental massage. Unable to predict the predictable climax, not knowing how a plot will resolve, not having the conventions of the story thrust back in my face; these are exciting possibilities. Memento was just such a movie, just such an experience. I didn't know what to expect, but the idea was so brilliantly original, so brilliantly simple, that to this day I still chide at not coming up with it myself. If you haven't seen it, do. It's moviemaking at its best. It's a great story, very well told. Unfortunately, this year there has been a usually high quotient of 'lesser works', films that aspire to Saturday-night matinee rotation on TBS.

I lean back and rack my encyclopedic knowledge of movies, for only Quentin Tarantino is my equal in the crap-tactular, in the bombastic, in the first-hand experience that is...lacking. For I have seen movies bad and worse, movies painful and pungent, movies whose directors should be lashed to the projector and raced around the parking lot by teamsters. Movies so bad that I can't tell you what happened that month but verbatim can recall the moment when I realized that this was going to suck. I make note of the three worst.

I paid full-freight for Dreamcatcher, money that I'm never going to get back, a tragic loss, second only to the two hours of my life that were high colonic-ed right out of my soul. Easily the worst movie of the last year, just terrible. Actually, terrible isn't strong enough. Awful, nope. Anguish-ifying, getting closer. Irritable-bowel-syndrome inducing, almost there. Watch checking, check. Yes, the worst thing a movie can make you do, aside from leave or demand your money back or shoot-out calls to your friends, is to induce you to check the time. Over and over and over. Just to see if it's three minutes past the last time or four. That and anything that makes you run for the border, or the bathroom, is a really bad movie experience. Dreamcatcher was guilty of all of the above.

Underworld comes a close second in the race to the worst. It had a superior premise but Dreamcatcher had the superior pedigree. Once again my filmic hopes and dreams have gone...unfulfilled. Underworld collapses so completely that I venture far enough out a limb to say the following: "No film for the rest of this year could be worse than this movie." I know, I know. That's like pointing at the sky after crossing a desert and screaming "Nothing can stop me now!" and feigning surprise when that oasis turns out to be a mirage. Sometimes you just have it coming and still you dare the movie-gods to smite you.

Bulletproof Monk was a bad movie, with a title so dumb, that I can only explain it as the work of a particularly dissatisfied studio exec. "Hey, here's an idea, let's combine the artistry of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with the freewheeling good times of Stifler from American Pie, add a Supermodel, shake, let simmer, and drain out any semblance of plot, character, and story". This will give you Bulletproof Monk. The irony of it all was the only person I wanted to shoot after seeing this movie was myself

I know there will be some worse movie this year, there always is, the future is so just full of potential...Elf, Bad Santa...There seems to be a real anti-Christmas bent to fall flicks this year. The titles alone get my hackles up. What are hackles, you ask? Kinda like cockles except there nowhere near my heart. I guarantee, absolutely guarantee, that out there right now is somebody working his or her ass off to make the worst movie of the year since the last worst movie of the year. It's inevitable, like the tide or a Deuce Bigalow sequel.

I can't retire without mentioning one film that still sets my hackles, my cockles, and my rankles on fire. And if you've ever seen flammable rankles, they are not a pretty sight. I speak of Anaconda, a movie remarkable for early pre-Affleck Jennifer Lopez and an example of the insane energy that haunts Angelina Jolie to this day: Jon Voight, her dad. He chews more scenery than the large computer-generated snake. Think about it for a second, this is not an easy thing to do, because a giant snake by definition actually chews scenery, but Voight does it. I'd recommend you see the movie just to see how exactly, but this goes against my ardent belief that pumping money into crappy movies just encourages crappy movie making. Deep, ain't it?
Jess Nakaska is an aspiring screenwriter always on the lookout for the next great script idea. He'll let you know if he finds it. Feel free to contact him at jessnakaska@hotmail.com.