Level: Upper-Intermediate
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| Tommy Wiseau - Genius or Idiot? |
There are bad movies and there are terrible movies. There are movies so unbelievably awful that you leave the cinema halfway through the film and thank god you haven´t an incendiary device at hand. While there are other movies so incomprehensibly rubbish that they´re actually quite good, sometimes great and on rare occasions masterpieces.
| Derek Jarman´s Blue - Crap |
Throughout our lives as cinemagoers we will be exposed to hundreds of half-assed screenplays, ham actors, cheesy plots and hackneyed cliches. Often we are so numbed by 3D, surround sound and billion dollar budgets that we can just about grunt a complaint before slipping into a popcorn induced coma. Worryingly, we are so used to bad films, the majority of us wouldn´t be able to tell a good film if it kung fu kicked us in the face. ´Uh, this film is too arty farty, pretentious, or subtitled for my tastes... where´s Michael Bay?´ This cultural malaise is so ingrained that even the Oscars are a celebration of anything but the best films of the year, rather a pageant of the mediocre: best historical epic depicting Bad Brits, best actor in a retarded role, best Meryl Streep in a Meryl Streep film. On the other hand, foreign and arthouse film makers do their best to steer storytelling from things that are fun by poking a camera into the deep recesses of their own navals. Take Derek Jarman´s Blue, perhaps the laziest arthouse film in the history of cinema since Andy Warhol left his camera running outside the Empire State Building for 8 hours. In Blue, we have a Blue Screen and some voices talking for 3 hours. This film is lauded as a masterpiece but it´s really just crap and not redemptive crap but crap crap.
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| Love Actually - like being slapped in the face with a fish |
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| No one saw it! |
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| Raspberries award films that blow! |
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| Right Said Fred´s new music video? |
The worst films I´ve seen are ones I paid to go to the cinema to see and was bored to tears. I fell asleep during Twilight the sequel (one of them) and The Spirit, so they´re on my list. Ones I managed to stay awake watching like The Wolfman, Armageddon, Cowboys and Aliens, Pirates of the Carribean and Prometheus, still keep me awake at night even now. Thus we have a remake, a comic book adaptation, a fun fair ride adaptation and a prequel. Of all these films, only Armageddon is an original work though it follows the template of all disaster movies. Apart from the cliches and american propaganda, I didn´t enjoy Armageddon because the pyrtotechnics and shaky camera movements made me feel like a pet puppy in a washing machine on bonfire night.
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| What a shame this wasn´t the only frame in this film! |
Prometheus is close to being so bad it´s good, and is the worst movie by far in this list. It had a once-revered director at it´s helm (Ridley Scott), is part of one of the most exciting franchises and fictional movie universes (Aliens) and had a good cast, but it was utter bullshit. The story if you haven´t seen it is thus: a group of scientists head to an alien planet to examine a giant donut that may explain the origin of the human species. There they are attacked by a soya sauce virus created by giant alien gimps,and one by one escape the terrible movie. I´ve read better pop-up books.
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| Plans 1 to 8 were even worse! |
Historically, the title of worst movie ever made belonged to Plan 9 From Outer Space. The film was ridiculed for it´s camp and absurd storyline, rickety sets, paper plate UFOS on strings and z-grade performances. The plot is thus: aliens that want to stop mankind from destroying the planet initiate Plan 9: the turning of half the population into zombies. In spite of its shortcomings or indeed thanks to them, Plan 9 is a cult classic with fans including Tim Burton who made a biopic of its director Ed Wood, once dubbed the worst director ever. A truly great bad film is one you can laugh at. Like a bad audition on X-Factor,we can enjoy in seeing delusions of grandeur undermined by stupidity or ineptitude. Perhaps we even feel better about ourselves. ´I could have made a better flying saucer´ we think. But much more than this, there´s the charm of the gormless and clueless, which is no more evident than in the film The Room - the best and worst film ever made.
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| THE ROOM - the San Francisco Skyline has been blue screened |
In the Prince Charles Cinema, just off Leicester Square in the heart of London, there is a monthly showing of the most ´´ unique´´ film of all time, The Room. To me it is a masterclass in comedy film-making, a masterpiece that had every scene, gesture, line delivery been purposefully rubbish then it would be the astounding work of genius of our time, and had it not been so intended then it is proof of Darwin´s evolutionary theory and an infinite universe where monkeys can screenwrite and humans can evolve from amoebas and art can come of nothing. Written, Directed, Produced by and Starring Tommy Wiseau, it´s the story of a love triangle between a successful banker, his manipulative girlfriend and his best friend. Most of the action takes place in rooms or on the rooftop where against a bluescreened San Francisco skyline, drug deals go down, psychologists get pushed about and truths come out . Much of the joy comes from Tommy Wiseau himself, the most unlikely banker you´ve ever seen with his weird unplaceable accent, his haggard, gormless face and his bohemian long hair, you can´t tell if he´s stoned or stupid or a genius but even his fellow actors appear a little on edge when he´s in the scene. There are several overlong sex scenes, several overlong establishing shots, restablishing several times the same scene, several forgotten subplots; there are thousands of ´oh hi´s and dozens of quotable lines like ´leave your stupid comments in your pocket´. It has as many classic scenes as, say, The Godfather and it is quite rightly the Citizen Kane of bad movies. Trust me, you´ll want to watch this film again and again.
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| I´m fed up with this world! |
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| Bollshit |
Tommy Wiseau is the idiot sauvant of bad movies and I doubt any film will ever eclipse his achievements in the Room, but there is another contender for worst director currently at large today. Uwe Boll, director and dreamweaver, has been using loopholes in German tax law as a way to finance video game adaptations and straight to video rubbish. Despite his low budgets, big names like Ray Liotta and Jason Statham have stained their reputations in Bollshit. In 1996, a bunch of critics tried to convince Boll to stop making movies, he challenged them to a series of boxing matches, the idea was if any of them beat him he would never sit in a director´s chair again! Unfortunately, Uwe Boll who had trained as a boxer, beat them all and so he continues to commit celluloid atrocities, his latest being Auschwitz.
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| In the Name of the King by Boll |
TASK 1: VIDEO LESSON - TRASH GETS DEEP ABOUT LIFE
| Help! Quicksand! |
1. Why did Anne want to leave Trash?
2. What does Death do with us?
3. How many reasons does she have to leave Trash?
4. How old is Anne?
5. What does the Manhattan corporation control?
6. What adjective does she use to describe the Manhattan corporation?
7. What would give Trash´s life meaning?
TASK 2: WRITING 100 words
Write the synopsis (summary) of a terrible movie you have seen or invent your own worst movie ever!
| Battlefield Earth - Tom Cruise´s favourite movie after The Birdcage |
GLOSSARY:
hackneyed banal
budget orcamento
pretentious pretensioso
subtitled legendado
malaise mal-estar
pageant espetaculo publico
recesses recessos
belly button umbigo
box-office gross bilheteria bruta
campy extovertido
shortcomings deficiencias
manipulative manipuladora
gormless ingenuo
ham a bad actor
to be on edge estar na borda
dreamweaver tecelão de sonhos
loopholes brechas
shoddy de qualidade inferiore
dopey drogado
trash lixo, brega
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