Without further adieu... the worst films of 2006. And a big congratulations to Parker Posey, who had a double showing of crappy movies this year!
10.
The Hills Have Eyes - dir. Alexandre Aja - USA - 20th Century Fox
With the promise he showed in
High Tension (
Haute tension), Alexandre Aja could have been one of the finest of the contemporary horror directors, as long as he wasn’t allowed to write the screenplays.
The Hills Have Eyes may be a faithful remake, and it might have earned necessity if it actually had anything to say about the American nuclear family and social outsiders, instead of just having the American flag used as a tool for gore. Regrettably, it becomes another forgettable failure by Hollywood to reclaim the horror glory of the 70s.
9.
Nathalie... - dir. Anne Fontaine - France - Koch Lorber Films
Filmmakers that want you to applaud them for their supposed cleverness make me ill. Essentially a lame excuse to get three respected French actors (Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, Gérard Depardieu) together onscreen,
Nathalie… screams deception from its earliest moments. The director may pass off her stupid surprise ending that she uncomfortably hints toward throughout the entire film as a way to explore the inner workings of bored, middle-aged Ardant’s sexual and personal reawakening through her relationship with stripper Béart, but the irony of that statement would be that this exploration is just as false as her cinematic trickery.
8.
The Black Dahlia - dir. Brian de Palma - USA - Universal Studios
If you needed the definitive proof that Brian de Palma has lost it, see
The Black Dahlia, his epic misfire about one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases in California. Though Hilary Swank, as the femme fatale, adds a certain spunk to the otherwise limp film, the rest of the cast, especially Aaron Eckhart as Josh Hartnett’s partner and the horrible Scarlett Johansson, whose good looks seem to have blinded Hollywood execs to her lack of talent, as Eckhart’s goody-two-shoe wife, seems like they have no idea what they’re doing here. There’s a scene or two that recall some of the best moments in
The Untouchables or
Dressed to Kill, but within the lousy film, they just frustrate and become sad reminders of what a fine American director has become late in his career.
7.
The OH in Ohio - dir. Billy Kent - USA - HBO
Though her performance in
Adam & Steve might have suggested that Parker Posey was back at what she does best,
The OH in Ohio is a frightening counterexample, placing her in one of her most rotten, least interesting roles as a stuck-up ad exec who can’t orgasm.
Sex & the City is likely to blame for paving the way for a film that’s premise follows a woman searching for clitoral stimulation and then becoming addicted to her vibrator, but it’s writer/director Billy Kent who should be slapped for not only placing the vibrant Posey in such a crummy role, but for thinking we care about any dramatic conclusions she might come to throughout the course of the film.
6.
Art School Confidential - dir. Terry Zwigoff - USA - Sony Pictures
It’s one thing to be a flat satire as
Art School Confidential is, but it’s quite another to be a confusing mess of a film that has little idea of what it’s trying to say or do.
Art School Confidential is a such a mystifying muddle that it’s almost difficult to put into words how bad the film is. I wanted to just plainly state, “this movie totally sucks,” but that wouldn‘t successfully explain my hatred for the film.
Art School Confidential’s breed of satire reduces characters to the most inane variety of pretentious art school snob from characters who function as a talking thesaurus to oversensitive social rejects whose mommies told them their paintings of kittens were beautiful. All of this was better portrayed and examined in the later seasons of
Six Feet Under, so to see a dumbing down of these criticisms feels unnecessary. Yet if
Art School Confidential were simply lacking necessity, it would have been forgettable instead of awful. Instead, Daniel Clowes (who worked prior with Zwigoff on the overrated
Ghost World) adapted his own comic, stretching it into a colossal disaster of superfluous side-characters that rivals Peter Jackson’s
King Kong and a shockingly miscalculated murder subplot. Basically, in a year where mediocre films flourished at the box office,
Art School Confidential would have been refreshingly bad if it weren’t such an unsatisfactory pile of shit.
5.
The Puffy Chair - dir. Jay Duplass - USA - Roadside Attractions
Though it didn’t make my official ten best of the year,
I Am a Sex Addict is the direct counter of a film like
The Puffy Chair. Using the digital technology as a way to expertly combine documentary and fiction in a stunning examination of the self,
I Am a Sex Addict was the best use of this media this year.
The Puffy Chair, on the other hand, does precisely what worried film purists when the technology became consumer-level. Though maybe better than a bunch of overweight kids with black-eyeliner making their own backyard horror flicks,
The Puffy Chair takes us on an annoying road-trip with Josh (Mark Duplass, screenwriter and brother of the director), his girlfriend (Kathryn Aselton), and brother (Rhett Wilkins) as they pick up and deliver an ugly reclining chair to his father on his birthday. Personal revelations and conflicts ensue, predictably, in a film that mistakes awkward moments where characters speak in silly, cutesy voices to one another as intimate drama. As the film is entirely surface-level, it’s hard to tag along with the brothers’ road-trip when you can’t stand the people with whom you’re traveling. Josh’s girlfriend accomplishes the feat of being the most irritating character committed to video since Fran Drescher became the nanny of a lame white gentile‘s three children.
The Puffy Chair falls apart as a result of its good intentions, a film that’s exposure of characters’ flaws alienates instead of reaching the greater truth it hoped to achieve.
4.
The Wicker Man - dir. Neil LaBute - USA - Warner Bros.
One of the perks of working at a video store is the sigh of relief you can make when you've rented a movie that certainly wasn't worth the four bucks you would have wasted otherwise. Unfortunately, it also permits you to rent movies that are guaranteed to suck because you don't have to pay for them. Neil LaBute's remake of
The Wicker Man is a fine example of a "well, we don't have to pay for it" waste of time. In all honesty, I ended up fast-forwarding most of the film, as I found Nicolas Cage and his fear of bees too much to handle. But what I did see was one of the most undeniably laughable shitstorms ever. In watching any of LaBute's other films, specifically the ones based on his own plays, you can gather that he has little flare as a cinema director, but this prior knowledge wouldn't be sufficient warning for the atrocity of
The Wicker Man. With a bizarre supporting cast that includes Frances Conroy as a creepier version of Ruth from
Six Feet Under, Ellen Burstyn wearing make-up leftover from
Braveheart, and Helen Hun... I mean, Leelee Sobieski, Cage cluelessly wanders around a town of women trying to find a missing girl. There's potential for
The Wicker Man to be resurrected as some sort of midnight movie, but you won't find me in the audience.
3.
Another Gay Movie - dir. Todd Stephens - USA - TLA Releasing
I usually reserve a spot on my worst of the year list for whatever passes as queer cinema in a given year. Last year I chose another TLA Releasing turd,
Slutty Summer, and this year, the prize goes to
Another Gay Movie.
Slutty Summer managed to be a vacant,
Sex & the City for gay men vanity project, but this is far worse.
Another Gay Movie is a thankless remake of
American Pie, another shitfest, and this alone should be enough for inclusion. Instead,
Another Gay Movie is offensive in ways it didn't try to be. It's hateful, thoroughly unpleasant, and simply ugly. As my friend Bradford put it, queer history beyond the first airing of
Queer as Folk is presented as a graveyard for tired fags and old queens. Stephens, who wrote the screenplays for
Edge of Seventeen and
Gypsy 83 (which he also directed), masks what one might suspect as subversiveness with a celebration of filth and ignorant hatred.
2.
Hard Candy - dir. David Slade - USA - Lionsgate
Seldom does a film so nauseatingly call attention to its craft as artlessly as
Hard Candy does. As a thriller, it pretends to be socially viable, turning the tables on predatory child molesters having the young girl as the tormentor, without really saying anything. In every frame, you can’t help but notice that
Hard Candy is an assembly of people “doing their job.” With the annoyingly flashy cinematography, simply passable acting and, especially, the by-the-numbers duplicity of the screenplay, the film’s ability to thrill, shock, or awe washes away to reveal the inner devices of a hammy, nasty movie, devoid of the passion that drives the more artfully-inclined to create cinema.
1.
For Your Consideration - dir. Christopher Guest - USA - Warner Independent
It probably goes without saying that
Phat Girlz is worse than Christopher Guest’s latest, but you’d already avoided seeing that one. Guest continues his downhill plunge with a film that makes his middling
A Mighty Wind look as funny as the superb
Waiting for Guffman. As a satire, it’s trite and obvious (do we really need someone to make fun of
Entertainment Tonight?), but as a comedy, it’s dim-witted and unfunny (unless you think a joke about Hollywood exec not knowing of Internet is comedic brilliance: “that’s the one with e-mail, right?”). Guest never commits to the promise he made of stepping away from the mockumentary-style here, creating a film that consists almost entirely of characters being interviewed for television. Most of us can appreciate a good slap at Hollywood, especially the year after it awarded an Oscar to what will go down in history as the worst Best Picture winner ever, but when it’s delivered in such a self-congratulatory, witless package as
For Your Consideration, I start to get angry. The great irony of it all is the award attention the usually wonderful Catherine O’Hara, as the lead actress Marilyn Hack (get it?), is getting for her clueless performance in a film that’s unknowingly as awful as
Home for Purim, the hammy 1940s melodrama at the center of this picture.
Jeanne and the Perfect Guy (Jeanne et le garçon formidable) - dir. Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau - 1998 - France
Jeanne (Virginie Ledoyen) fits the perfect image of a musical heroine. She’s bubbly, humble, yet beautiful. She’s looking for love (of course) in the form of numerous young men, including a coworker and a motorcycle courier. Her character flaw that makes her relatable and the film hurried is that she’s constantly late for her appointments, providing us with stunning tracking shots of rushed razzle dazzle between destinations. She’s constantly drawn to the boys she meets in a never-ending search for “the perfect guy.” At the beginning of the film, she’s test-driving her two lovers while still on the look-out for that one. On the subway, she falls into the lap of Olivier (Mathieu Demy, son of Jacques and Agnès Varda), a young man who happens to fit the bill. Things progress lovingly until he reveals his HIV-positive status to her. The knowledge doesn’t pose as hindering on Jeanne’s feelings, but unconsciously adds a sense of immediacy and importance upon her feelings. Naturally, Olivier has a different perspective, as he doesn’t want Jeanne to suffer alongside him.
Perhaps easy to miss at first, but each of the musical sequences directly mirror most of the social problems in France (and most developed countries). The first number finds Jeanne, a receptionist, dancing with the African janitors as they sing about the false sense of salvation they’ve found as immigrants in France. Other numbers include Jeanne’s friend François (Jacques Bonnaffé) singing about his lover who died of AIDS, Jeanne’s sister (Valérie Bonneton) and her boyfriend naïvely dancing about bank loans, and Jeanne’s brother serenading her on the appeal of the military as an alternative to unemployment. All of this sounds a bit heavy-handed and possibly ridiculous, and it may have been if the film weren’t handled so beautifully. The musical sequences are nearly flawless, and it’s this perfect faithfulness to its genre that makes Jeanne and the Perfect Guy so exceedingly relevant. Jeanne and the Perfect Guy is a harsh portrait of contemporary France under the alluring and deceptive guise of splendor.
One truly understands the film in its final moments where the grand omission of the musical finale digs a giant, haunting void in the film. It’s in these final moments that the severity of Jeanne and the Perfect Guy becomes apparent. There is no happy ending, and really how could there be? In the shadow of the Hollywood musical, things appear to be much more clear. Most contemporary musicals (specifically Dancer in the Dark, 8 Women, The Happiness of the Katakuris, and even South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut) exist in a separate category than Oklahoma, Singin’ in the Rain, or Carousel. They have simply adopted the shell of the musical and replaced its hollow core with both a critical eye and relevance. Social relevance isn’t always a good thing (you can probably think of many examples), but quality comes in the method. As a musical, Jeanne and the Perfect Guy is one of the best examples of false escapism, void of unnecessary irony and adorned in the grandeur that we expect and cherish.
