Day: January 2, 2016

It hit me last night that I’ve never posted a 2015 Worst Films list, and that I’d better get down to it today. I’m figuring we’re still in a New Year’s Eve hangover mode and that 2016 doesn’t really begin until Monday, 1.4. The problem with worsties is that I rarely see movies with really bad advance word. Reverse Tolstoy: All good movies have qualities and undercurrents that are very particular and specific to themselves while all bad movies exude pretty much the same poison. So it’s probably better to just ask HE readers to post their own hate lists. Please, fire away.

What was my absolute personal worst, a movie I despised more than all the other toxic releases combined? I’m going to go with John Eric Dowdle‘s No Escape, which I paid to see at the Westside Pavillion last August. Review quote: “This is the kind of movie that makes you feel nauseated and humiliated. You want to escape before the closing credits start and hide your face and not look at anyone else who was in the theatre with you. You just want to run down to the garage and get the hell out of there.”

And: “No Escape caters to the fears of every whitebread moron who’s afraid of visiting anyplace the least bit exotic or even a wee bit unfamiliar, and who prefers to go on Carnival Cruises and visit Disneyland France and Cancun and Club Med hideaways.”

My second most hated viewing experience was Magic Mike XXL. Excerpt from my 7.3.15 review: “I called Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike ‘one of those summer films that comes along once in a blue moon — a fun romp filled with yoks and swagger and whoo-hoo, but also sharp, wise and shrewdly observed, and flush with indie cred.’ Magic MIke XXL, by contrast, is a film that smirks and piddles around but also pisses on you. A big yellow stream shooting out of the screen and onto my lap.”

Read more

I was struck this morning by a phrase in Larry Karaszewski‘s appraisal of James Bridges‘ Mike’s Murder (’84), as contained in a March 2012 “Trailers From Hell” essay. Larry notes how the film really captures the enervated spirit of ’80s Los Angeles, “the emptiness, the transitory lives, the relationships of people who only see each other every six months but still think they’re close.” Hey, that’s me. Well, kind of. I feel a genuine kinship with several people whom I almost never hang out with. I “see” some of them at screenings, parties and film festivals, but we never get together just to get together, not even “every six months.” Partly because some of these pallies are far flung (geographical distance isn’t what it used to be) and partly because I spend all my time banging this column out.

Straight question: How many HE readers have close friends whom they trust impeccably and feel entirely relaxed with, but whom they see once or twice a year, if that?

“A few days after seeing the newly manufactured, disposable Legal Eagles, I noticed that Debra Winger‘s last picture to be released, Mike’s Murder, was listed in The New York Times TV schedule, and that the Times‘ advice was ‘Skip it.’ Please, don’t skip it next time it comes around. I wasn’t able to see this film during its unheralded, minuscule New York run in 1984, but I caught up with it on HBO last year. [I]t has two superb performances — a full-scale starring one by Winger, and a brief intense one by Paul Winfield. She’s a radiantly sane young bank teller who has an affair with Mike (Mark Keyloun). She likes him — you can see her eagerness, even though she knows how to be cool and bantering with him…”

Read more