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What's up guys?
Jared here with another more personal vlog.
I enjoy talking about bad movies almost
as much as good ones.
And the search for the worst film of all time
is something I think about a lot.
To name a few of the common contenders, "The Room".
- I did not hit her.
It's not true.
It's (beep}.
I did not hit her.
I did not.
- Troll 2
- Oh my God!
- Anything by Uwe Boll, "MONOS:The Hands of Fate",
"Supergeniuses: Baby Geniuses 2", "Birdemic",
or anything Jason Freidman, Aaron Seltzer.
And while these movies are clearly bad,
I'll never be convinced that any of them deserve
the distinction of worst ever.
Why?
Well being bad just isn't enough.
For me to earn the title of worst ever
it needs to be tragic.
So join me on this journey into the abyss
in this vlog on my pick
for the worst movie ever made.
But before we get into it,
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And now back to the show.
First, lets establish what constitutes a bad movie.
Everyone has their own criteria,
which usually include awful dialogue
- Freezy, I'm feeling hot.
- I find that unlikely.
- Nonsensical plot, bad lighting and sound,
or cheesy special effects.
But in my mind there's an important distinction
between a bad movie and a tragic movie.
We can all easily spot the bad movie,
but a movie's tragic potential lies in the discrepancy
between its ambitions and its actual achievement.
Basically the harder a movie tries, the harder it can fail.
And when it does, oh boy does it hurt.
I think Francis Ford Coppola said it best
while on the set of "Apocalypse Now".
- Nothing is so terrible as a pretentious movie.
I mean a movie that aspires for something really terrific
and doesn't pull it off is (beep).
It's scum, and everyone will walk on it as such.
And that's why poor filmmakers in a way,
that's their greatest horror.
Is to be pretentious.
- Sure the recent "Fantastic Four" flick
may be bad,
but it's just bad at being a fun superhero movie.
But my pick for the worst movie ever
is bad at being at monumental sci-fi, pop art,
magnum opus that penetrates the social
and political anxieties of America circa 2006.
I'm talking about "Donnie Darko" director,
Richard Kelly's sophomore effort,
"Southland Tales", starring Dwayne Johnson,
Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Seann William Scott.
Some of you may have never heard of it,
and some of you may be saying,
"Hey I like this film."
Or "I've seen it and its not that bad."
I know people who like it too
and if it works for you, great.
This is just my opinion.
- Leave you stupid comments in your pocket.
- Whether you love it or hate it you gotta admit,
this film is just one audacious swing
for the fences after another.
It is an onslaught of ambition.
Believe me, I appreciate risk talking in film,
but one of the harsh realities of being an artist
is coming to terms with the fact that
the harder you swing, the harder you can miss.
And make no mistake,
even though I dislike this film,
Richard Kelly is still a bad ass in my book
for making something bold.
Although not a theatrical success
"Donnie Darko" had amassed a cult following
and killed it in DVD sales by the time
"Southland Tales" had been greenlit.
So Kelly,
like most people with kind of success under their belt,
was probably thinking that he was a genius.
As a result,
nobody questioned any of his creative decisions,
He was given complete control to do whatever he wanted.
Sometimes this can be great, and sometimes it can be bad.
This is an example of when it goes bad.
So what makes this film so tragic?
An obvious criteria for a bad film
is that the plot is either unbelievable,
incomprehensible, or just plain uninteresting.
"Southland Tales" takes place in a post nuclear 2008,
where World War III is currently being fought,
and American streets are heavily militarized.
The Patriot Act has been expanded
into the "Big Brother" esque USIDent.
- Ew, your doing bathroom detail?
- And the neo-Marxist movement is trying
to tear it to the ground.
We follow Boxer Santaros,
an amnesiac movie star with vague prophecies
of the World's end,
and officer Roland Taverner, a cop dealing with PTSD.
The dude from the "Princess Bride"
figures out how to solve the energy crisis
using the the ocean and quantum entanglement,
causing a rift in the fourth dimension
that has made duplicates of Boxer and Roland.
Roland finds his past self, shakes his hand,
and ends the world.
The end.
Honestly, just from that recap,
the film might even sound cool.
But then again the short pitch of man struggles
with his wife's infidelity can describe
both "The Room" and "American Beauty".
So its often the execution that matters more.
Regardless, the film takes on big themes relevant
to the late 2000's, American militarism, celebrity culture,
consumerism, resource scarcity, climate catastrophe,
and political polarization.
And what does it have to say about these things?
Its hard to say,
because the film doesn't make a ton of sense.
That's partly due to the fact
that like a certain Galaxy far far away,
we start the story from four chapters in.
I actually saw this film at an early screening
in 2007 at Fantastic Fest.
I remember after the movie ended,
Richard Kelly handed everyone in the audience
three "Southland Tales" prequel graphic novels and told us,
it makes more sense after you read these.
According to Wisecrack writer
and fellow festival attendee Tommy Cook,
it did not.
But what really makes this movie tragic
is that any attempt to speak to these big issues
is undercut by how off putting the film's tone is.
One of the most important things for a film
to achieve is a strong consistent tone,
and "Southland Tales" never really finds one.
And it's worse,
the film tries really hard to maintain a tone
of deep introspection,
but it ends up sounding like pseudo-profound
ominous sounding gibberish.
- Do you ever feel like there's a thousand people
locked inside of you?
- Sometimes.
- But its your memory that keeps them glued together.
Keeps all those people from
fighting one another.
- Right.
- Maybe in the end that's all we have,
the memory gospel.
- As a result,
the film ends up feeling like a grab bag of incomplete ideas
propped up by a mysterious tone.
When your dealing with the really important topics,
but the only thing you can offer
is the err of importance, it gets cringy fast.
Now what takes this to next level tragic for me
is that Kelly actually did a really smart thing,
and tried to blend his self serious condemnation
of modern decadence with some comedy to lessen the weight.
Problem is, we get this.
- If you don't let me suck your (Beep),
I'm gonna kill myself.
- Yeah, it just doesn't work.
- The jokes that are supposed
to balance out the sense of foreboding,
come off as to bombastic.
And result in something that feels totally dissonant
for the whole two plus hours.
This brings us to another hallmark
of bad filmmaking, dialogue.
The mark of bad dialogue is usually that it's too generic,
or on the nose.
- I Haven't been happy since I married my first husband.
I didn't even want to marry your father.
- The best way I can describe the dialogue
in "Southland Tales" is deliberately cryptic,
pseudo-mysterious gibberish.
- You're not really here.
- Who am I?
- None of your business.
Now get the (beep) out of here.
- Basically the characters say vague poetic
sounding lines that perhaps sound thoughtful
when you first hear them,
but if you think about it for more than a second,
you realize,
it just cryptic for the sake of being cryptic.
- We saw the shadows of the morning light,
shadows of the evening sun,
until light and shadows were one.
♪ Walk too fast ♪
Go, before it is to late.
- The movie is trying to get you to say,
"Whoa, deep."
But, its not.
The first lines we hear Sarah Michelle Gellar's character
say is a completely spontaneous.
- Stigmata.
- Couple that with getting to hear Justin Timberlake
whisper unrelated bible verses throughout the movie.
- "Revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave unto him
"to shew unto his servants things which
"must shortly come to pass;
"and he sent and signified it by his angel
"unto his servant John."
- And Jesus bleeding into the Rock's back
and you've got yourself one of the least subtle
and least motivated Christ motifs ever.
I really don't know what this is supposed to mean.
The Rock is dying on a Zeppelin in order
for the World to end?
This is how it all had to go down in order
for the World to start anew, so he knowingly died there?
I don't know.
I can sit here all day and do the heavy lifting
to make this movie seem deep,
but in my mind a movie has to motivate me to do that work
with awesome characters, a compelling story, et cetera.
So again, high ambition, abysmal delivery.
Another very important criteria for identifying
a bad movie is performance.
- No no we can't stay here.
- It'll be fine.
I'll clean it up.
Don't worry about it. - There's no way in hell
we can stay here, no!
- This one is hard to argue with,
bad performances are one of the few things
that an audience will never forgive.
Your film can have egregious sound problems
or be horribly lit and it won't matter
if the audience cares about the characters.
But if the audience doesn't buy into the performances
your movie has no chance.
But for me,
a movie reaches the heights of tragedy
when you have good actors trying their best
to make a bad script work.
This film is saturated with great performers
having to deliver lines like
- I'm a pimp.
And pimps don't commit suicide.
- By the way this isn't just
some cherry picked awkward line.
This line is repeated three times,
the last of which is literally the final line of the movie.
- He is a pimp,
and pimps don't commit suicide.
- I remember someone at the film festival
ask Richard Kelly what this meant
and he gave a vague answer about American egoism
in the face of moral defeat.
To be honest, I felt bad for the guy.
The film had recently been booed
at the Cannes Film Festival,
and I think he was still coming to terms
with what he had spent years creating.
Also Dwayne Johnson does this bizarre thing
with his fingers that feels forced every time he does it.
And it seems like
the only direction Justin Timberlake's character
ever got was look vaguely crazy.
What makes this even more painful,
is how awesome his thinking was behind the casting choices.
Kelly claims he was trying to make a piece of pop art
casting figures like The Rock, Sean William Scott,
Sarah Michelle Gellar, Wallace Shawn, Mandy Moore,
Christopher Lambert, John Lovitz, Amy Poehler,
and still primarily a musician, Justin Timberlake.
If you watched my other vlog on the movies
that changed my life,
you know I am a big fan of "Spring Breakers".
So I love pop art.
So its all the more painful to me
that all these actors just end up looking silly.
But still kudos to them for trusting a director
with a strong vision,
that takes guts.
Perhaps the easiest way to identify a bad movie
is with its technical feats such as
editing, special effects, sound design, et cetera.
Often times cheap looking film making can break
the illusion and alienate the audience from the story.
The editing, special effects, and production design
in "Southland Tales" however,
are top notch,
and for me that just makes it all the more tragic.
The idea of having thousands of extremely
talented people being paid to work on your (beep) idea,
hurts me in the feels way more than
a low budget rag tag team of filmmakers doing the best
with what they have.
If you have every took at your disposal
including dump trucks full of money,
and its still doesn't work
(inhales)
(exhales)
Ouch.
Oh and I can't not mention the part
where Justin Timberlake spontaneously breaks out
into a produced musical number singing
"All These Things that I've Done" by the Killers
in the middle of the movie for now apparent reason.
♪ With all these things that I've done ♪
- Up until this point
there were no other musical numbers,
nor did we really know much about Timberlake's character.
Kelly once described this scene as the heart of the movie,
which makes no sense, but whatever.
This hurts me because moments of magical realism,
and otherwise realistic narratives
are one of my favorite things in movies.
This scene in "Trainspotting" works so well
partly because its a visual metaphor for heroine addiction.
It drags you to the depths of squalor but also allows you
to experience serene beauty.
This moment in "Southland Tales" however,
just feels random and try hard.
Now some of you may be thinking that "The Room"
also falls under this rubric of this high ambitions,
but poor delivery.
It after all aspired to be
an emotional Tennessee Williams esque narrative
and ended up being,
well not that.
- You are lying,
I never hit you.
You are tearing me apart Lisa.
- But hears the thing,
watching "The Room" is fun.
Similarly "Troll 2" may be incompetently made,
but if it can sell out a revival theater
and people laugh their asses off the whole way through,
it's clearly sparked joy and can't possibly
be the worst movie ever.
But "Southland Tales" isn't even laughably bad.
Its just bad.
In fact its the kind of bad where you're
either constantly rolling your eyes,
or feeling bad for the filmmaker.
You can see the ambition.
You can see the try hard.
And honestly,
you just feel a very slight sinking feeling
in your stomach every time something that's supposed
to be funny or profound fails to land.
- If you don't let me suck you (beep),
I'm gonna kill myself.
(inhales)
(exhales)
- To me the worst movie ever made is an honor reserved
for a film that makes you sigh more than it bores you.
It's not so bad it's good.
It's not fun to watch ironically.
It's not fun to watch under the influence of any substances.
It just hurts.
It hurts bad enough to scare aspiring creatives
from getting to ambitious.
And that to me is a tragedy.
Anyway I'm curious to hear some of your picks
for the worst movie ever made is?
And do you agree with my distinction
between bad movies and tragic movies?
Let me know what you guys think in the comments
and before you go,
I want to give another shout out to our sponsors
over at Honey,
because who doesn't like free money.
Just download the extension from joinhoney.com/wisecrack
to start getting access to discounts
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And as always guys thanks for watching.
Peace.
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