The SDMB Stupid, Stupid Movie Awards

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Case Sensitive

That doesn’t excuse it from not having a plot. Or wasting good actors. Or the ridiculous “Hey, kids, isn’t old people’s music stupid? It’s so stupid it kills Martians! Hah hah hah hah! Here’s an “ironic” Tom Jones song to end with so you can feel even more smugly hip. Now fuck off and buy the toys.”

Well, a disclaimer: I saw it on a first date with a woman I really liked, so that may have colored my impressions of it.

That said, I didn’t get that it was mocking old people’s music so much as it was suggesting that one particular song had a really weird vocal quality to it that sorta sounded like a science-fiction weapon noise. Were I the singer (I forget who the singer was), I would’ve been pretty tickled at their use of the song: it was good-natured teasing, not smug mocking.

That was one of the least pretentious movies I’ve ever seen. Yeah, it was dumb in places, and at its best it just rose to inspired zaniness, but it had some great moments (DO NOT RUN! WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS!)

Daniel

[Omniscient]

My take on Mars Attacks! is that it was a campy parody that was done in by the insistant desire to pack as many cameos and cross-type characterizations as possible into it. This movie could have been funnier if it didn’t drag on so often with pointless exposition and extraneous scenes.

In any case I feel that it doesn’t deserve an award like the OP opines because it’s intended to be stupid, nominating Mars Attacks! would be like nominating a Naked Gun or Hot Shots movie.

@lissener

They’re cartoon characters. The director cast those actors very carefully, specifically because they ARE cartoon characters. He uses bad actors intentionally sometimes, just like John Waters does. Even Hitchcock sometimes very carefully chose stiff, polished, unemotive actresses when he was going for an archetype rather than an authentic human being. (Tippi Hedren? Doris Day? Kim Novak?)

Wheeeeew, that’s a bit of a stretch for me. Sounds like an after-the-fact revision to excuse the casting. Granted I never read the book, but the movie as a whole didn’t play as a propoganda film in it’s entirety. If thats what was intended, it wasn’t executed very well IMHO. Were those “cartoon” characters were used in the recruitment/propoganda clips within the movie I’d agree, but if the argument is the whole film being a propoganda film of sorts they really let the screenplay get away from the goal.
I will however agree that Starship Troopers doesn’t deserve to share the green room with Shark Tale, that cartoon is in a class of it’s own for it’s work on the dumbening of America.

[EllisDee]

Well, reading about Starship Troopers here reminds me of that other Verhoven crapfest Showgirls. I don’t know if I’d classify it as the stupidest movie ever, as the stupidity of it was only a peripheral aspect of its sucktitude.

More on topic, I’ve got two doozies to add, and they both involve the most perfectly bad actress to ever contaminate celluloid: Tara Reid. They are Van Wilder, which was painfully stupid, and My Boss’s Daughter, which was impossibly stupid.

Seriously, I was in shock from how bad they were, and it was the sheer stupidity of them that made them so bad.

[lissener]

@Omniscient

Wheeeeew, that’s a bit of a stretch for me. Sounds like an after-the-fact revision to excuse the casting. Granted I never read the book, but the movie as a whole didn’t play as a propoganda film in it’s entirety. If thats what was intended, it wasn’t executed very well IMHO. Were those “cartoon” characters were used in the recruitment/propoganda clips within the movie I’d agree, but if the argument is the whole film being a propoganda film of sorts they really let the screenplay get away from the goal.

Well, that was the specific intention. The screenwriter and director tried to imagine a propaganda film as made by a future fascist-military government. Their intent was to take what they saw as serious political issues in modern day America, extrapolate and exaggerate them into a future society, and then make a film from that imagined perspective. The movie itself is “from the future,” not just its subject matter. Whether or not they pulled it of is, of course, open to debate. (Eternal, ongoing, neverending, contentious debate. Which of course I love. )

In other words, director’s commentary on a DVD can be extremely enlightening. With ST, the commentary is a running conversation between the director and the screenwriter. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the director defend his choice of “bad” actors, but I’ve heard explain exactly the qualities he was casting for, which often amounts to the same thing. And again, it’s something we accept without fuss from John Waters and Alfred Hitchcock, but they don’t piss people off as much, so there’s that.

[lissener]

@Ellis Dee

Well, reading about Starship Troopers here reminds me of that other Verhoven crapfest Showgirls. I don’t know if I’d classify it as the stupidest movie ever, as the stupidity of it was only a peripheral aspect of its sucktitude. . . .

The reassessment, which I predicted in these pages, continues apace.

Don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted.

[mks57]

Venting the ship’s atmosphere to space isn’t an “obvious” way to kill the alien. There’s a good chance that it would cause severe damage to the ship. Your average electronics device depends on the presence of gravity and an atmosphere to provide adequate cooling. Hard drives will suffer catastrophic damage in a vacuum. Sealed containers may burst. Liquids and lubricants may boil off or evaporate. Electrolytic capacitors will out-gas and fail.

[mazinger_z]

LHOD, I’m not looking to argue, I was just curious, so I’ll make this quick and dirty: I’ll concede the first point, and I typically frown upon stuff like that, see Titantic. (Don’t even get me started. You will see a rant that burns with the heat of a thousand suns). The second point has merit, but it overlooks the fact that that little tidbit, iirc, isn’t necessarily revealed to the public, and, on it’s face, is highly inconclusive. If this happened IRL, the SMDB would explode. (or should that be )

[mazinger_z]

Huh, I think I just realized that I automatically supress bad memories to the point of non-existence. Put my vote down for Titantic. And, just so that we get this out of the way, I will preemptively answer: Why yes, my heart is a souless, black pit of a void.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

The Shape Of Things To Come (1979) was a steaming pile of poo.

Appearing a couple-three years after Star Wars, you’d have though somebody would have realized!…but no. Spaceships with glowing engines, the lightbulbs in the engines clearly visible. :smack: Cheesy robots. And spacesuits with helmets made from plastic Baggies. :smack: :smack:

And lets not get started on G.I.N.O..

Trashy sci-fi produces the ripest cheese.

[lissener]

@mazinger_z

Huh, I think I just realized that I automatically supress bad memories to the point of non-existence. Put my vote down for Titantic. And, just so that we get this out of the way, I will preemptively answer: Why yes, my heart is a souless, black pit of a void.

Titanic has one of the lamest “plots” in the history of cinema, and some of the worst writing and acting ever. Ever. DiCaprio is the only one who even attempted to find a real human being within his character, which unfortunately made it look like he was acting in a different movie; everyone else was content to become the crap they were wallowing in. But I saw it twice for the sheer spectacle of the final hour.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@mazinger_z

LHOD, I’m not looking to argue, I was just curious, so I’ll make this quick and dirty: I’ll concede the first point, and I typically frown upon stuff like that, see Titantic. (Don’t even get me started. You will see a rant that burns with the heat of a thousand suns). The second point has merit, but it overlooks the fact that that little tidbit, iirc, isn’t necessarily revealed to the public, and, on it’s face, is highly inconclusive. If this happened IRL, the SMDB would explode. (or should that be )

Uh, what post are you responding to?

Daniel

[Merijeek]

@Ellis Dee

Well, reading about Starship Troopers here reminds me of that other Verhoven crapfest Showgirls. I don’t know if I’d classify it as the stupidest movie ever, as the stupidity of it was only a peripheral aspect of its sucktitude.

I have seen the future and it looks like the past…

Still, Showgirls provided me with a topless Berkley and an actress that few can agree on her attractiveness (Gershon).

-Joe

[C_K_Dexter_Haven]

Weirddave: you are goddam fuckin’ OUT OF LINE, and you goddam well know it.

This is an Official Warning, and your last one on this particular topic.

What you posted was about as deliberately provocative as any troll that I’ve ever seen, and was baiting a particular member besides.

I have moved the offensive thread out of sight.

Wake up, and stop being a jackass, or you’re gonna be suspended so fast it’ll make your head spin.

You may detect that my normally calm, quiet, polite tone is not present in this note. That’s because your offense is WAY the fuck over the edge, and you knew it when you typed it.

[Omniscient]

@lissener

Well, that was the specific intention. The screenwriter and director tried to imagine a propaganda film as made by a future fascist-military government. Their intent was to take what they saw as serious political issues in modern day America, extrapolate and exaggerate them into a future society, and then make a film from that imagined perspective. The movie itself is “from the future,” not just its subject matter. Whether or not they pulled it of is, of course, open to debate. (Eternal, ongoing, neverending, contentious debate. Which of course I love. )

If that was the goal, I can accept the craptastic acting, but I think it opens up a different critisism. If this was supposed to be a futuristic propoganda film then it makes no sense to have all the supposed family sentimentality and love interests. It portrays several scenes as being sad and/or tragic which is incongruous in a propoganda film. To include the characters grief and the family strife is head scratchingly out of place. I’d argue that Verhoven compromised his goals and vision in those regards, and the end result is instead of a propoganda film just a uneven, at best, and bad, at worst, movie.

Even though we disagree on the quality of the movie, I will agree that Starship Troopers is a long ways from the winning the Stupid Prize. Even if you hate the movie with a passion, you have to conceed that much of the “bad” aspects of it were intentional, much like Mars Attacks!. It just can’t be compared with the simmering retardedness of films that were intended to be serious and/or literally taken yet fail with such a force as to make you question if it were monkeys or humans thats greenlighted it.

[Omniscient]

@Ellis Dee

More on topic, I’ve got two doozies to add, and they both involve the most perfectly bad actress to ever contaminate celluloid: Tara Reid. They are Van Wilder, which was painfully stupid, and My Boss’s Daughter, which was impossibly stupid.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Now, you won’t catch me defending Tara Reid’s acting ability (though she is pretty fun to look at), nor will you see me trumpet the virtues of My Boss’s Daughter, but I will be damned if I sit here and listen to someone defame Van Wilder in this way.

Van Wilder is immensely quotable and contains some first rate T & A, at the very least. I applaud a movie that’s capable of combining flavors of Animal House, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with a dash of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose. This is a DVD I proudly own and rewatch whilst drinking booze.

[Snooooopy]

@Omniscient

If that was the goal, I can accept the craptastic acting, but I think it opens up a different critisism. If this was supposed to be a futuristic propoganda film then it makes no sense to have all the supposed family sentimentality and love interests. It portrays several scenes as being sad and/or tragic which is incongruous in a propoganda film. To include the characters grief and the family strife is head scratchingly out of place.

I also can’t see why a propaganda film would admit to its audience that the good guys bungled so badly, as the humans did in underestimating the capacity of the bugs to fight back.

Verhoeven could have picked up a few pointers from NFL Films, which managed to make a 3-13 Tampa Bay Buccaneers team look like a bunch of real ass-kickers thanks to judicious editing.

[Manduck]

I can only guess that the reason that nobody has mentioned Stayin’ Alive yet is because I’m the only one who’s seen it. This is a movie that doesn’t realize that it’s protagonist is actually the bad guy, so that in the end when he gets the girl and the lead in the Broadway show, it isn’t a happy ending, it’s a travesty! In an intelligent movie he would have been attacked by wild dogs and killed.

[Dr.Rieux]

My favorite line from the **Rolling Stone **review of Starship Troopers:
“Ed Neumeiers script bears about as much resemblance to Heinlein’s novel as *Showgirls *does to Art.”

[OtakuLoki]

My personal bete noir is Pearl Harbor.

First off, let’s talk about the plot in general terms, and how that affected the movie. Any movie titled Pearl Harbor, one might think would focus on, say, the attack on 7 December, 1941. Instead in a three hour long schmaltz-fest they spend barely one half hour showing the attack, and even less than that on the clean up or recovery. They go almost directly from the attack, and the burning ships on Battleship Row to planning the Doolittle raid.

Then, let’s consider this: in a movie about a naval attack, they make the three main characters all Army personnel? WTF? And much of the time they actually do spend on the actual attack, they have the Army Air Corps pilots whacking the Nip fighters. Like that is particularly representative of the attack, itself?

Now, for the specifics…

The love triangle isn’t really something I can fault them for. Having a plot without individuals to hang it on, and a romance within that, isn’t really going to fly.

But, lord love a duck!, why couldn’t they set up the triangle with more sense? The one pilot (Sorry after four years, the names of the various characters have finally been leeched out of my brain.) who’d gone to the UK to fight in the Blitz gets shot down in the channel, and everyone assumes he was killed. At the time of the crash, the audience is shown the image of the White Cliffs of Dover as the canopy gets flooded. So he’s within sight of the frigging island. But he turns up alive because he was rescued by the flaming French Resistance? WTF? The whole of the romantic tension of the second two thirds of the movie hinges on this. That the French Resistance would pick up a Brit pilot and then choose to take the pilot back to Occupied France to help him recuperate, instead of putting him ashore in the UK, when the frigging cliffs are right over there! In what way is this a rational decision? Let’s see, a one-time smuggling trip, when you’re already far enough across the Channel that any SS man who knew of it would have you shot on general principles, or bringing the airman back, who will involve even more members of the Resistance in caring for and hiding him. And will require another penetration of German Security to get him back to the Allies, anyways?

Then, when the flyboy does show up alive, he’s given leave to go catch up with his fiancee, but prevented from sending a telegram? Army censorship rules are harsh, but that’s particularly nonsensical.

Then there’s using a B-25 as a frigging strafing plane? With the turret guns fired by the pilot? First, IIRC, the B-25’s used on the Doolittle Raid were so concerned about takeoff weight I think that all small arms were taken off the airframes. I might be wrong about that, and don’t care to spend the time it would take to check one way or the other. But the B-25 was a crewed plane, not a single pilot fighter. All the small arms were fired by seperate people.

<mutter mutter> Stupid, stupid, stupid movie.

(Yes, it’s my hobby horse, dammit, and I’ll keep riding it til it drops dead! :p)

[Terrifel]

Saw, starring Cary Elwes and Danny Glover. I just ran across this little gem the other day, and was so impressed that I felt compelled to mention it here. It’s a fairly low budget effort compared to some of the other films listed in this thread, but nonetheless succeeds in achieving a remarkable level of dumbness. The filmmakers have managed to assemble an extraordinary number of movie cliches in their attempt to simultaneously rip off every successful action-suspense film of the past decade or so. The result comes across as the hobbled, developmentally impaired crack baby of The **Usual Suspects ** and Seven, abandoned in the wild and raised by the idiot savant from Cube.

The movie features an off-the-rack Movie-style Psychotic Serial Killer, complete with quirky modus operandi, who gads about in various idiotic costumes and taunts his victims via the now-standard Distorted Phone Voice. Despite the fact that he maintains several hidden lairs and constructs excruciatingly convoluted deathtraps, he easily manages to evade capture due to his quasi-omniscient powers, frankly unbelievable luck, and the fortunate circumstance that everybody else in the movie is dumber than rocks. The movie’s crowning glory is its conclusion, which features a revelation fully as astounding as your average *Scooby-Doo * episode. It’s not so much a twist ending as it is a severe sprain. Please do not reveal the shocking secret of Saw. It turns out that the killer is ]Merv Griffin. Well, not really, but it makes about as much sense.

This movie also establishes the curious fact that, if you turn the lights out, people can not hear you.

As luck would have it, word on the street is that **Saw II ** is out in theaters Friday. I’m there, seventh row center. Can the sequel recapture the magic of the original? Will people be able to hear it in the dark? We’ll see.