The decade in movies: Vol. 1, the biggest disappointments

The sound and the fury.

This decade of ours is nearly over, thank God, and debate still rages as to what to call it. The Decade From Hell? Thanks Time. Apt. The Naughties? Imprecise. The ought-ohs. Not bad but it’s silliness masks the serious shit that went down. Roger Ebert suggested The Zeros. But I think the generally accepted term, at least at this point (with two weeks of it remaining) is “the naughts.” As in A Zed and Two Naughts. Where’s Peter Greenaway when you really need him?

Rather than (or perhaps “in addition to”) doing yet another boring old list, I’ve decided to take another approach to winding up the past ten years. A series. I’m calling it “The decade in Movies,” and I’ll be covering, basically, whatever I feel like covering. For our first edition, I decided to trawl back through what I consider to be a few of the decade’s biggest film-related disappointments. 

Southland Tales.

Totally inconceivable?

In some ways it’s not fair to pick on a misfire like this. There were plenty of awful films made in the last decade, and many of them were made expressly to be awful. Or rather, whoever it was behind them didn’t give a shit one way or the other. It was a bottom line deal. “Oh, it’s a profit game! Step right up and win some crap!” That’s right. So why pick on Richard Kelly’s spectacularly craptastic attempt at a film disaster to beat even Heaven’s Gate in film disaster lore? I admit, it’s not fair at all. But as we all know, that’s life. And it’s not even Kelly’s fault. The guy hit it so far out of the park with his very first movie, the epochal Donnie Darko, that the bar was set very, very high. So of course Southland Tales was hyped to high heaven. It happens, as we’re well aware by now. Avatar. Inglorious Basterds. Batman. Et cetera. But Tales was not just a bad movie, it was completely unwatchable. It was aggressively idiosyncratic, ruthlessly unconventional, and it didn’t work on a single level (although The Rock was pretty good). Even still, give me twenty crazy ambitions like Southland Tales for every Night at the Museum they pump out of the factory. Just don’t make me sit through them all.

It’s not a bad trailer. Nice use of The Pixies. Kelly shoots impressive moments of celluloid, and they cut together well. But.

Franchise Fever.

Okay, who glued the tip of my tongue to the crook of my mouth?

Did we really need more than 1 mediocre movie based on a fairly lame ride at a family theme park? If it turns out that yes, we actually did need more than 1 mediocre movie based on a theme park ride, did we really need 4? I think I’m gonna have to ask you to prove it. And while you’re at it, is it a good idea to keep making Harry Potter movies when the kids are now obviously, like, full grown adults with jobs and student loan debt and a crushing sense of impending failure carving tell-tell lines into their once pubescent foreheads? Harry Pottery and His New Baby. Harry Potter and His Shrinking 401k. I’d rather not see that. And the clever Hollywood types behind Transformers – a movie based on a toy, people – had to go and make the first movie actually enjoyable. People ate it up, so guess what? Seconds. Sloppy seconds. And coming soon? I hope you left some room! That’s right, #3. On the way. If these go-bots aren’t trannies in the third movie, Bruckheimer and Bay don’t know a thing about our collective dreams.

Quentin Tarantino.

Image via Wikipedia

No one wants to admit it, but since Pulp Fiction, it’s been a case of diminishing returns. Tarantino gambled on Jackie Brown, thinking his casting goose would lay not just one golden egg this time out but two, and the bird was plugged up! Pam Grier seems like a cool lady, but she couldn’t carry the movie. Robert Forster fit the role of the worn down bale bondsman, but lacked a star’s charisma. To shove these two into the middle of this movie was to build outward from a near black hole. That said, it wasn’t a bad movie. He shot it well, and he had the good sense to cast an actual heavy weight, Robert De Niro, slightly off-type. The result, in my opinion, is De Niro’s last great performance, and reason enough to watch the movie. Then came Kill Bill, and an even longer leash, with which Quentin was allowed to hang himself. I like Kill Bill, particularly Vol. 1, more than I like Jackie Brown, but it’s got serious flaws. He should have been forced to make a single movie of less than two and a half hours. This flabbiness betrays a lack of focus that is the downfall of many an overpraised artist. When a billion people say, “You rock!” you can tell the half dozen who say, “Wait a minute” to fuck off. But the films are gonna suffer. Which brings us to Inglorious Basterds, probably the most divisive film of the year (or was that Public Enemy?). It just. Wasn’t. Good. Tarantino needs to do something radical – call it his own Schizopolis – to get his groove back.

It's time to talk severance.

Not Knowing When Enough is Enough.

I like The Office (I know, technically not a movie). It’s a really good show. But come on already, people. There’s no longer even debate as to whether or not the shark has in fact been jumped. The bike’s engine is cold. The shark has died of old age. Go out with some dignity left. Don’t turn into The Simpsons. Which brings me to:
The Simpsons. Great show. Love it to pieces. But do we really need 450 episodes of it? This show has been on for 20 years! 20 years! You people today do not know a world without the constant presence of Homer Simpson. It’s time to put it away. It’s made enough money. P.T. Barnum wasn’t a moron. “Leave ‘em wanting more!” he said. That’s right. Not, “Leave ‘em wondering when the hell this damn thing’s gonna be over.”

Iran.

That's Scandanavia in your rear view.

The country that virtually owned international cinema in the 90’s went very quiet in the naughts. Why? Kiarostami made a series of cinematic masterpieces in the 90’s, but his international stardom lead him, in the last decade, to a more diverse series of projects, like documentaries and omnibus films. Okay, great, that’s cool and all, but I hope he returns to making gorgeous full length feature films sometime very soon. Majid Majidi, of Children of Heaven fame, also turned to documentaries, and even made a short film, in the naughts. Moshen Makhmalbaf, who made Gabbeh, made six films in the naughts, including Kandahar in 2001, but I’m not certain that more than one or two even made it to the U.S. Which is obviously not Makhmalbaf’s fault. The world looked at Iran in the 90’s and in the naughts, it simply looked elsewhere. “Next!” we shouted. “What have you done for me lately?”

That the ‘Ban on Blowing Up The World Movies’ didn’t last all decade.

You could have just quit the club, you know.

Which is entirely thanks to freaking Roland Emmerich. Remember how, right after 9-11, people everywhere were like, “Let’s come together,” “Let’s be nice to each other,” “Let’s not clog our cinemas with expensive CG images of shit we just saw for real and don’t really want to pay to see in our movies, thank you very much.”? It was nice while it lasted. Projects were put on hold, or even canceled. Approaches to cinema were rethought. We looked inward for a change. “What should we be doing with this precious gift called life?” right? Yeah. Sure. For about 3 years. Then Emmerich decided he needed another castle and The Day After Tomorrow came out. Great. So this is how the world ends!? Good to know. I guess I should stock up on ski booties. Then there was that little “indie” Cloverfield, featuring an overgrown chipmunk chomping its way through Manhattan (Part 2, on the way!). Destroying Manhattan again, already? Wasn’t that, you know, verboten? Guess not. So it’s only fitting that we end The Decade From Hell once again at the abusive hands of Roland Emmerich. This guy really really hates us. And I think I kinda hate him back.    

Remake Everything.

Remakes are as ubiquitous now as Starbucks, and usually just as disappointing. Of course there’s the occasional “reboot” that is, in fact, better than the real thing. Like, The Thomas Crown Affair (sometimes the only way to go is up), and Dawn of the Dead. But that’s about it.

On the one hand, America’s bald-faced pillaging of Asian cinema continues, bordering now on frenzy. We’ve seen redos of The Departed, The Ring, Dark Water, The Grudge, The Eye, One Missed Call, Shall We Dance? and scores of others, sometimes with as little as 2 years between original and the U.S. Grade-A Chuck version, which suggests that there’s a new cold war in town and its base of operations is in downtown Burbank.

Even Michael Myers is bored.

And the horror genre has become a roiling incarnadine repository for cast0ff remakes, for some reason. Let me think… what could it be…? Profit? Pretty much any horror movie you’ve ever heard of has been remade, from classics like Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween to awful stuff like My Bloody Valentine and The Last House on the Left. Nothing is sacred, no one is spared. To fans of the genre, this will come as no surprise.

But for the most part, most of the remakes were most often banal, completely unnecessary, somnolent at best, which made their presence on our screens even more depressing. Did we really need big budget reboots of The Manchurian Candidate, Fame, The Stepfather, and Clash of the Titans (the trailer and the above-the-line credits tell me all I need to know)?

More than perhaps anything else, the last decade – the decade from hell – has taught us a very cynical truth: That remaking everything has become just another interest of the Hollywood business machine, a new holding, and as long as it continues to generate revenue, its performance will be kept at peek. See you in 2010. Again.

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