BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (12 OF 100)

"League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (2003),
Dir: Stephen Norrington
 

$78,000,000 in Budget vs. $179,265,204 in Gross

 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is one of the best/worst blockbuster films ever made. Based on the comics by famed Watchmen-writer (and part-time magician) Alan Moore, the film attempts to be Jules Verne's answer to DC Comics' Justice League. And for all intensive purposes, this idea probably looked great on paper, combining all these fictional characters in a similar way to the movie Tall Tale, but already proved not to work back in good old 1995. But what makes this movie so great are all the ways it doesn't work and still remains entertaining.

Based on a comic and thus subject to fantasy, the movie claims to be set in the year 1899, so we presume that's our 1899... yet there's submarines, machine guns, automobiles, rockets, etc., so any divide between Fantasy 1899 and Reality 1899 is never made clear. Not like the opening credits to Watchmen, where the movie's different world setting is much more evident. Now, a lot of people blame the movie's poor reception on the C.G.I. and it's overuse, but they might be surprised to discover the movie has a lot less of that than some would think. For example, I always thought Mr. Hyde was a C.G. character. Turns out it's just a bad-looking latex suit as seen below. And the car chase scene through Venice (with the first automobile ever created apparently) is actually all miniatures... Hmm. Interesting. Still looks like sh&^%, though.

Special effects aside, the main problem with LXG is the poor decisions on the creative teams' part. Coming out of The Matrix craze of all early-2000s superhero movies (X-Men and Norrington's Blade included), they chose to follow this visual trend of dark costuming and bullet-time action sequences to sway audiences into believing these story-lines. But for a movie set in the Victorian era, lifting the style of a movie about cyberpunks seems like an odd choice.

Now, maybe I am just ignorant, but I had no idea who Allan Quatermain was before seeing this movie. My inability to read anything beyond the back of a shampoo bottle didn't help. But the bigger question is, what audience going to see a superhero action movie would be brushing up on their Victorian era writings first? I knew Tom Sawyer (hardly Victorian and not as some f*&%ing secret service agent), Dr. Jekyll (the original Hulk), The Invisible Man (who spends most of the movie naked apparently), Captain Nemo (but only Disney's version), and Professor James Moriarty (with no Sherlock Holmes in sight).

Allan Quatermain? No idea. Mina Harker (Dracula's wife and former protagonist of the comic books) I only knew from Wyona Ryder's soulless portrayal in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where she wasn't a vampire and had me confused. And Dorian Gray (from The Picture of Dorian Gray, an Oscar Wilde story) was definitely the most obscure. Also, the movie provides no background to these characters, so if you don't know the story of Dorian Gray, Stuart Townsend's action movie one-liner seen in this clip really makes no sense...

LXG's legacy was less so informing audiences about these classical characters and more so about killing a lot of careers. After its release, Sean Connery quit acting all together. Director Stephen Norrington has not directed a feature since this. And this mess was the last film to carry Alan Moore's name. For all its infamy, though, this movie is immensely entertaining, from its over-the-top action sequences and general lunacy. You will be laughing out loud and have a great time with it.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (5 OF 100)

 

"The Room" (2003), Dir: Tommy Wiseau

$6 Million in Budget vs. $1,800 in Gross

Inspired by the dramas of Tennessee Williams, watching Tommy Wiseau's The Room, one feels a lot like Stella in A Street Car Named Desire... And by that, I mean brutally getting the crap kicked out of you by Stanley... Oh, man, where to begin? We could talk about Wiseau himself, and what the hell is up with that guy? Namely, his weird, unhealthy-looking body that you unfortunately have to see naked several times throughout the movie. (In my own cowardliness, I made excuses to duck-out during those parts.) We could go on for days about his poor decisions as a movie director, such as shooting the film in both 35mm and video at the same time and then cutting the two together later. (The cost of film vs. video never really entered his mind apparently with the film's $6 million dollar budget.) With that kind of brand of thinking, I suppose it makes perfect sense why his script makes absolutely no sense at all. Characters flip-flop at the drop of a coin, no one is quite sure of their motives for anything, and everyone says "hi" whenever a character enters the room. But when it comes down to it in the end, it just seems to me that Wiseau's whole reasoning for making "The Room" was to put himself in gross sex scenes with poor Juliette Danielle and subject his audience to really awful R&B. Yes, these are all signs of a horrible filmmaker (and person I might add), but the thing that gets me the most is why Wiseau would want to have rooftop scenes in a movie and not use a real San Francisco rooftop. Instead, the roof is obviously a green-screened cityscape and badly at that. Why not just film on a real rooftop, goddamn it?! Why?! See if you like bad movies, but avoid if you like sex.



For your viewing displeasure, The Flower Shop scene, which I would argue is probably the stupidest and most senseless twenty seconds of cinema ever. I showed it to a co-worker and his reaction was "It's like watching a Commodore 64 programmed to make a movie scene, or interpret the most fleeing of human interaction."