Attention: You will see I Love You, Phillip Morris when it hits theaters Friday. It's a blitz of romantic desperation, flash, and (sigh!) gayness. You must go. To prepare you for Jim Carrey's gloriously shady role as Steven Russell in Phillip Morris, I give you this week's Bad Movie We Love, where Jim Carrey plays the most gloriously shady role of all -- Death in High Strung. Join us as we revisit writer/comedian Steve Oedekerk's low-budget, low-meaning flick, and discuss how Carrey's uncredited part might be his most genius.
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We revived Bad Movies We Love last week with Cher's Chastity, a quaint '60s jam full of boring monologues and menacing lesbianism. But Movieline is barreling ahead with a film that combines superhero glitz, melodrama and the campy pizazz of a Gwen Stacy dye job: Spider-Man 3. You think James Franco is fancy now with his Oscar buzz and amputee cred? Wait until you revisit him in Spider-Man 3, the film that pinned our disbelief under a boulder and forced us to saw it off using Topher Grace's frosty tips. Are you emotionally ready to revisit when Spider-Man went emo?
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The original Movieline magazine ran a bunch of great features, but the most lamented one has to be Bad Movies We Love. The world never runs out of horrible, adorable films, and that's because they're the most gratifying to talk about. I haven't discussed my favorite movie, Rear Window, as much as I have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, and that's because James Stewart and Grace Kelly never rapped with Vanilla Ice about crime-fighting humanoids (though you never know about Thelma Ritter). The point of it all: Thanks to the infinite, Biblical, pathetic joy that bad cinema produces, we're exhuming Bad Movies We Love in weekly installments. Throw your vanities in a bonfire and join us!
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We're exactly a month away from opening night of the Cannes Film Festival, and aside from that evening's screening of Robin Hood, speculation and conjecture regarding the fest's competition selections remain heading into this week. So when Movieline's "Cannes" alarm filled the office this morning with its customary accordion jig, I raced to see what putative masterpiece of world cinema had triggered it. My only reaction was two words -- and they weren't "false alarm."
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Yesterday's birthday boy Christopher Walken makes no secret of the fact: he loves to work. And that's one of the reasons he makes as many bad movies as good ones. For every Deer Hunter, Dead Zone, King Of New York, Pulp Fiction or Hairspray, there's a Kangaroo Jack, Man On Fire, Click or Domino. But where does The Mighty Haired One's first lead role in a movie fall fit in the spectrum? In 1972 -- coming off a supporting part in Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes -- the 29-year-old scored this adaptation of Dennis Reardon's Off-Broadway play The Happiness Cage. Given the snazzier title of The Mind Snatchers when it hit cinemas, Bernard Girard's film was praised as "a frightening contemporary thriller" by Judith Crist. Walken, however, was more succinct when he reappraised it as "piece of garbage" and said "it seemed my career in film was finished." Who's right?
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I saw 1990's Captain America for my bad-movie quest and was surprised by how much I liked it. Hell, my original notes read, "I honestly enjoy it more than Transformers or Fantastic Four 2". Sure, there was the dogs-playing-pool-painting kitsch appeal but the film was also genuinely engaging in parts and possessed of a scrappy charm throughout. This week, though, I couldn't quite put my finger on exactly why I recalled it so fondly. There was only one thing to do: while the rest of the world held its breath to see whether Chris Evans would accept the shield of destiny, I'd revisit the movie which had Matt Salinger, son of J.D, as its main masked man.
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While it's right and just that B-movie aficionados everywhere today celebrate the 70th birthday of Chuck Norris, it'd be tough to argue that any of the conservative chop-socky master's efforts actually belong on any list devoted to the best -- or worst -- cinema has to offer. The exception is 1982's Silent Rage, which even three decades on stands as a strong contender for the most bizarre tagline in Hollywood history. It's not so much a marketing blurb as a short synopsis that also manages to blur actor and character. And like the poster, the trailer leads us to think it's all about Chuck.
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There are just two sleeps to go to the big night! The odds have been calculated and the prognostications made! The votes are in and now can't even be changed by Harvey's semitic signage, Nicolas's nincompoop e-natterings or James revealing that the Na'vi aren't actually CG but real genetic freaks he cooked up in his garage. Yet we can't keep having the same conversations for the next 48 hours. What we need is something to feed the appetite and stoke the fever -- something that's of the Academy Awards but not about their 82nd iteration. And The Oscar is that filmic fondue, a cauldron of cheese cooked up by director Russell Rouse, writer Harlan Ellison, stars Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett, and a who's who of Hollywood donating cameos.
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As you read this, audiences are going to be of, um, two minds about Shutter Island. Is Martin Scorsese's thriller a rollicking example of an A-list filmmaker having fun with B-movie conventions? Or is it a bloated waste of time and talent that hinges on a switcheroo we could see coming back when Engor met Oomo? Either way, there's no doubt that you can do a lot worse with island-set schlock. I know, I've visited those grim shores -- read on for a guided tour.
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This week marks the publication of Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made, a rollicking new tome by Movieline's "Bad Movies We Love" guru Michael Adams. Part comic memoir, part grueling critical experiment, Adams's book chronicles his journey through more than 350 of the most obscure, confounding, surprising, and yes, appalling cinema known to man. In this Movieline exclusive excerpt, Adams unearths not only one of the very worst films, but one of the worst genres as well.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, whenever we'd go to visit my grandfather in his leafy suburban abode, my younger brother David would race out into the old man's garden to capture little lizards basking in the morning sun. Once we'd tired of our catch-and-release program, we'd spend the afternoon luxuriating in the spare room that contained decadence beyond compare in the form of a second TV, free of parental interference. On such days, there was one show that unfailingly made our world a bigger, more fascinating place: In Search of... Part National Geographic documentary, part Twilight Zone, it was narrated by Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy with the cool detachment of his half-Vulcan science officer. While his investigations into killer bees, ancient astronauts and Stonehenge were, quite frankly, f*cking awesome, it was Bigfoot who always stood head and shoulders above the rest.
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"Looks good!" Those words, from my 4-year-old daughter, don't usually inspire horror, especially in this age of sublime children's movies, from Up! and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs to Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline. But when they're uttered in response to The Rock sprouting wings in the name of kiddie comedy, my only recourse is a silent resolution: We'll catch the Tooth Fairy when Ava's much, much older; when she's 50 and I'm sucking food through a straw and no longer able to summon the mental energy to use the Neural Changer on my old Sony Holograph. And glancing further down the list of coming "attractions," there are 10 more titles in 2010 I plan on avoiding as long as I can until, bad-movies sucker that I am, my curiosity gets the better of me. (Find conveniently, refreshingly brief trailers where available.)
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Usually my instinctive reaction to any remake news is to scoff and ask, "Why?" Not so with the recent announcement that James Cameron will be producing another go at the 1966 non-classic Fantastic Voyage. That's because I revisited this childhood favorite five years ago and found it sorely lacking. Another more recent, post-Avatar viewing just confirmed that the King Of The World is the perfect person to take the terrific concept -- an Abyss/Titanic style submarine miniaturized and injected into the Aliens/Avatar-like alien-landscape of the human body -- and make it, you know, actually fantastic. Here's how he'll do it.
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Artists of all stripes repeat themselves, whether through themes, motifs or hues, and James Cameron is no exception. So the question I've been asking myself as I count down the days to Avatar's debut is this: just how much of the long-awaited 3-D space blockbuster was predicted by the man's inauspicious debut, 1981's Piranha Part Two: The Spawning?
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For a certain percentage of the population, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen is the Sexiest Man (Kinda) Alive. For the rest of us, he's much too emo to get worked up about. But all is not lost! With Extreme Makeover tips from even the crappiest vampire-themed flicks, he might sparkle for everyone yet!
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This weekend sees a planetary alignment that even the ancient Mayans couldn't have predicted. First, their misinterpreted calendar becomes the "basis" for 2012, which will surely sweep the box office like a five-mile tsunami over the Himalayas. Second, the high priest of Hollywood schlock, Roger Corman, will be inducted into the Academy pantheon with his very own honorary Oscar. When he's formulating the outline for his putative TV follow-up, 2013, Roland Emmerich could do well to pay heed to this synchronicity -- and then send himself off to mine Corman's first take on the apocalypse, 1955's Day The World Ended.
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