Twas the Best of Movies, Twas the Worst of Movies

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I love disaster movies. If there's a flick that has meteors hurtling to the earth, tidal waves that topple New York, people getting flash-frozen in the midwest or Los Angeles getting smoked in an earthquake/volcano/alien invasion, I'm there. Which is to say why the Smithie, her girlfriend and I were recently in the audience for GEOSTORM, despite its abysmal rating of 11% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The terrible reviews are well deserved. This movie didn't just ignore actual science (which, frankly, is to be expected in this genre. There's zero explanation, for instance, of why the planet starts cracking like a hardboiled egg in 2012. The Mayans said it would, that's good enough for us.) GEOSTORM also ignored human nature, political reality, basic engineering standards, OSHA, the passage of time and the fact that a deputy undersecretary at the US State Department wouldn't show up for work with shaggy hair and a three-day SexyStubble(TM).

Nonetheless, we had a GREAT time watching it. We snorted at the ridiculous plot twists, whispered, "Wait, didn't he say earlier..." to each other, and every time a character said, "There's going to be a GEOSTORM!" (which happened, I'm happy to say, frequently) we would make faces like the Screamer in Edvard Munch's painting. The movie lasted an hour and three quarters, and we spent at least twice that long afterwards tearing it apart. It was that rare bird; a deeply enjoyable, thoroughly Bad Movie.

Reds, do you have any cinematic stinkers you love?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I burst out laughing, picturing you two. SO many great bad movies. And they are definitely a different animal than just a bad movie. Take, for example POINT BREAK. So ridiculous, with Patrick Swayze as an enlightened surfer who moonlights with the presidential mask-wearing surfing colleagues as bank robbers. So, of course, FBI agent Keanu Reaves learns to surf so he can infiltrate the gang. I forget the rest. but it is wonderfully bad. Especially the "ending."

BEETLEJUICE, but wait, that's actually good, right? And SPEED, again, sorry, Keanu Reeves as a state cop who has to keep driving the bus at 50 miles per hour so the speed-detonated bomb on it doesn't go off.  Or wait, does Sandra Bullock drive the bus? Anyway, fabulous.  CONTAGION, with Dustin Hoffman, I think, trying to stop the world from dying of plague or something.

There was recently a movie that I almost made Jonathan go to that was supposed to be so bad that it was famous for being terrible. Anyone know what that was? And forgive me, but I thought WONDER WOMAN, though fun to watch, was absolutely ridiculous. Made NO sense whatsoever. I KNOW it's fantasy. But fantasy still has to make sense. Don't get me started on what didn't make sense, because the list is too long.

I can't wait to hear what movies you all pick. And the old horror movies don't count. The Incredible Shrinking Man. That was great.


JENN McKINLAY: I saw SPEED eight times. In the theater. I am not kidding. It is bad and my girlfriend and I loved it so hard. Still do.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Hank, you can't diss SPEED! I love SPEED! Who cares if Sandra Bullock could really drive the bus? But, seriously, the first thing that comes to my mind is THE LAST STARFIGHTER. In case anyone has missed this gem, it came out in 1984 and starred Lance Guest (did he ever make another movie?) and Robert Preston. Yes, THE MUSIC MAN. It's about a poor boy from a trailer park in New Mexico who is a whiz at video games, so aliens recruit him to fly a spaceship and SAVE THE UNIVERSE!!!! There is a car that takes off, and Robert Preston pulls off his human face to reveal his alien face! The space battle scenes look like they were done in somebody's garage with Star Wars toys. The dialogue is dreadful. But, still, there's something so charming about the trailer park that I'd watch it just for those parts. And, no big spoiler, Alex (Lance Guest) really does save the universe.

HANK: I LOVE The Last Starfighter. Brilliant. Genius.  What a great plot, right?  And Robert Preston, perfection.

HALLIE EPHRON: My vote goes to STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE. I'm afraid Jar Jar Binks hammered the nail in that coffin for me. But I've heard the SWs movies have gotten better since. In that one, it was like they fired all the writers and the actors ad libbed. Dreadful, except for special effects.

My daughter and I just disagreed on LA LA LAND. I loved it. She HATED it. Unbelievable, she said. Well duh, I said.

JULIA: Hallie, I just pretend the prequel trilogy never happened.

RHYS BOWEN: I am so picky about movies that I rarely see stinkers. I don't like disaster movies. I would have had to be dragged to Sharknado which my daughter in LA thought was screamingly funny. I enjoyed the first three Star Wars but my interested quickly waned from then on. I actually quite liked WonderWoman, but then I did watch it on a plane, snuggled in my pod with a glass of wine, with nothing else to do and nowhere else to be! Loved LA LA LAND. I've seen it since twice on planes (I seem to do much of my movie watching on long flights). I really hated THE HOBBIT--so different in tone from the book that they missed the point of it. But since most of the movies I go to seem to star Judi Dench or Maggie Smith or Kate Winslett or all three, nobody ever has to save the world from sharks or aliens!

HANK: Rhys, you had me at snuggling in a pod with wine.

JENN: Hank, you aren't alone with POINT BREAK. Hub loves that movie while admitting it's ridiculous. TREMORS with Kevin Bacon, we both adore. I mean, giant worms in the desert, come on, what is not to love? And, Julia, I hear you on disaster films. My favorite disaster type movie is Twister. Helen Hunt chasing tornadoes with Bill Paxton. Cows fly by. This is great stuff! Am I right?

JULIA: Oh, yes.

INGRID THOFT: SPEED is not a bad movie!  SPEED is fabulous!  I think I saw it about five times in the theaters, Jenn, and I watched a year ago on a long plane flight.  It held up after all this time!  I also share Julia’s love of disaster films.  TOWERING INFERNO is a winner, as is THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.  I was so hopeful that the recent THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US starring Kate Winslet and Idris Elba was going to be good, but it tanked on Rotten Tomatoes and in the theater.  Fingers crossed it’s the good kind of bad, and it will become a new favorite when I can watch it on demand.

JULIA: Let us know, Ingrid! How about you, dear readers? What are your favorite bad movies?

Bad Movies We Love

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Were you at Malice when Rosemarie and Vince Keenan accepted their award? They described their manuscript as a mystery featuring Edith Head. Wow. The entire audience swooned. All agreeing it was a fabulous idea, and I can tell you, the wave of “why didn’t I think about that” washed over the entire crowd. Led by me.

Well, that book, DANGEROUS TO KNOW, is an Agatha nominee for Best First now! And hurray. And of course it’s deeply and fabulously rooted in old Hollywood.  So what better for the Keenans (writing as Renee Patrick) to talk about—than movies!

They DO Make ’em Like That Anymore…

                  Rosemarie and Vince Keenan

Return with us now to the Second Golden Age of Movie Magazines, the early 1990s—which was twenty-five years ago, and doesn’t that give one pause? Using the standard boy band system of classification, Premiere was the serious one, Entertainment Weekly the cute one, and Movieline the scruffy, pouting troublemaker. Movieline ran blind items, just like Hedda Hopper used to do. And each issue ended with the column that was our shared guilty pleasure: Bad Movies We Love.

BMWL cast its net fairly wide, taking aim at disaster films (the entire Airport series, The Swarm), films that were disasters (Myra Breckinridge), and even Academy Award-worthy fare like The Greatest Show on Earth, Butterfield 8 and Fatal Attraction. (Also making the failing grade: not one but two movies in which half of our sleuthing duo, costume designer Edith Head, appeared as herself: Lucy Gallant and The Oscar.) The spotlighted titles came from a range of eras and genres, but each possessed some element that captivated—a hypnotic atmosphere, a galvanizing performance. They fascinated despite, and often because of, their flaws.

They were, in short, bad movies we love.

And they’re still making them, though Movieline is no longer around to keep track of them. Permit us to share a pair of favorites, joined in a number of ways. They’re both show business biopics from 2004 with leading men named Kevin that employ the same unusual—some would say baffling—structure. And we watch them over and over.

Vince’s choice is Beyond the Sea, a passion project for Kevin Spacey who co-writes, directs and stars as singer/actor Bobby Darin. 

Funds for the movie were cobbled together from several European sources, which accounts for the staging of the title song on what looks like a blustery afternoon in Bavaria with Spacey in a canary yellow suit crooning to Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee, so cold you can see her breath. Spacey is several years too old for the role—a fact the movie clumsily acknowledges—and hits a few clams when he recreates Darin’s singing. But his enthusiasm for a bygone era of entertainment when the nightclub was king lends this cracked pinwheel of a movie an undeniable verve.

Rosemarie, meanwhile, harbors a soft spot for 

De-Lovely, which chronicles the life of Cole Porter. Most of the maestro’s songs are sung by what K-Tel used to call ‘contemporary artists’ with varying degrees of success. Robbie Williams tosses off the title song with such élan it’s mystifying he never became a bigger star in America, while the less said about Sheryl Crow’s “Begin the Beguine” the better. 

The more traditional musical numbers are uniformly dreadful—Louis B. Mayer singing “Be A Clown”?—but the movie has a refreshing openness to using the tunes in different ways. Anchoring it all is Kevin Kline’s performance as Porter. He’s wholly believable as a man who wears his genius lightly. His talent brings him joy, and it brings him joy to know it brings others joy. Kline may find himself in the middle of cacophonous chaos, but the twinkle in his eye cannot be faked.

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Both movies use the same framing device, taking place in the afterlife with the protagonists telling their own stories in formats they understand: Darin’s as a movie, Porter’s a Broadway musical. And it’s this risky metaphorical gambit—life as a show, and the show as life—that accounts for the films’ strange hold over us. Darin, knowing that illness would eventually claim him early, develops a hunger for performing that sustains him—and is matched by Spacey’s own zeal for the spotlight. And De-Lovely’s ending, with every figure from Porter’s life appearing onstage to serenade him to the Pearly Gates with a rendition of “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” never fails to reduce Rosemarie to tears. Hokey? Absolutely. But it also succeeds in dramatizing the totality of a person’s existence, all the missed chances and found love, in a single rousing sequence.

 There was a third show business biopic in 2004. Ray was a critical and commercial hit, earning a Best Picture Academy Award nomination and a deserved Oscar for Jamie Foxx’s turn as Ray Charles. We enjoyed the movie, but we never revisited it. Maybe it’s not bad enough.

Or perhaps it needed a Kevin.

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HANK:  So Reds, what bad movies do you love? (I loved De-Lovely.) And um, French Kiss. And Speed. And best/worst of all, Point Break.  

(Yesterday's winner of an advance readers copy of You'll Never Know, Dear is Finta! Send me your mailing address: hallie "at" hallieephron "dot" com.)

Renee Patrick is the pseudonym for married authors Rosemarie and Vince Keenan. Rosemarie is a research administrator and a poet. Vince is a screenwriter and a journalist. Both native New Yorkers, they currently live in Seattle, Washington. Learn more at reneepatrickbooks.com

Dangerous to Know

Los Angeles, 1938. Former aspiring actress Lillian Frost is adjusting to a new life of boldfaced names as social secretary to a movie-mad millionaire. Costume designer Edith Head is running Paramount Pictures’ wardrobe department, but only until a suitable replacement comes along. The two friends again become partners thanks to an international scandal, a real-life incident in which the war clouds gathering over Europe cast a shadow on Hollywood.

Lillian attended the Manhattan dinner party at which well-heeled guests insulted Adolf Hitler within earshot of a maid with Nazi sympathies. Now, secrets the maid vengefully spilled have all New York society running for cover – and two Paramount stars, Jack Benny and George Burns, facing smuggling charges.

Edith also seeks Lillian’s help on a related matter. The émigré pianist in Marlene Dietrich’s budding nightclub act has vanished. Lillian reluctantly agrees to look for him. When Lillian finds him dead, Dietrich blames agents of the Reich. As Lillian and Edith unravel intrigue extending from Paramount’s Bronson Gate to FDR’s Oval Office, only one thing is certain: they’ll do it in style.