by Nathan Rabin
Also By The A.V. Club
Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great
Songs Nearly Ruined By Saxophone, And 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists
The Tenacity Of The Cockroach: Conversations With
Entertainment’s Most Enduring Outsiders
Also By Nathan Rabin
The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture
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For Danya, who loves movies and books
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Contents
My Year Of Flops: An Introduction
Chapter 1: Disastrous Dramas
Bataan Death March Of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown
Book-Exclusive Savage In Its Barbaric Intensity Case File: The Conqueror
Upside Down And Starting To Like It That Way Case File #58: The End Of Violence
Misunderestimated Book-Exclusive Case File: W.
Book-Exclusive Patented, Pain-Free Case File: The Great Moment
Testifying Book-Exclusive Case File: Gospel Road: A Story Of Jesus
Chapter 2: Calamitous Comedies
Tenacious Teen Terrors Case File #54: O.C. And Stiggs
Woody/Not Woody Case File #57: Scenes From A Mall
Book-Exclusive $20 Million Case File: The Cable Guy
Fun With Animals Case File #61: Freddy Got Fingered
Hippified Book-Exclusive Case File: Skidoo
Good-bye Blue Monday Case File #88: Breakfast Of Champions
Hickory Dickory Dock, George H. W. Bush–Era Playground Shock Book-Exclusive Case Files: Dice Rules And The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane
Trigger-Happy Teutonic Book-Exclusive Case File: Postal
Kicking A Man While He’s Down Case File #132: The Love Guru
Chapter 3: Musical Misfires And Misunderstood
Masterpieces
Beatles Smile-Time Variety Hour Without The Beatles
Case File #51: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Madcap Musical Miserablism Case File #59: Pennies From Heaven
Biblical Disco Freak-Out Case File #79: The Apple
Seven-Octave Butterfly-Shaped Case File #90: Glitter
Seasons Of Cynicism Case File #98: Rent
Let’s Go Crazy Case File #102: Under The Cherry Moon
All-Singing, All-Dancing Book-Exclusive Case File: The Musical Version Of I’ll Do Anything
It Ain’t Over ’Til The Old Lady Sings Book-Exclusive Case File: Mame
Chapter 4: It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s A Flop! Superheroes,
Science Fiction, And Action
Lady And Gentleman, You Are Now Floating In The
Floposphere Case File #46: It’s All About Love
Mad Mutated Case File #64: The Island Of Dr. Moreau
Spaced-Out Oddity Case File #91: Southland Tales
Big Green Brooding Case File #100: Hulk
All-Time Action-Comedy Classic Book-Exclusive Case File:
Last Action Hero
Disgustingly Patriotic Case File #122: The Rocketeer
Chapter 5: Unsexy Sexy Films
Reality Bites Case File #56: The Real Cancun
Book-Exclusive, Freely Adapted Case File: The Scarlet Letter
Desperotica Case File #86: Body Of Evidence
Sex-Fantasy Island Case File #97: Exit To Eden
Maniacal Death-Orgy Case File #107: Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Dominant-Paradigm-Subverting Case File #137:
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
How Do You Solve A Problem Like Lolita? Book-Exclusive
Case File: Lolita
Chapter 6: My Year Of Flops Jr.: “You Know, For Kids!”
When Middle-Aged Puppet-Men Attack! Case File #78:
Pinocchio
Fuck You, Jew Case File #96: Santa Claus: The Movie
Totally Tween Case File #118: Bratz: The Movie
Chapter 7: The Floppiest Flops
Honestly Unpopular Case File #3: Ishtar
How The West Was Sung Case File #50: Paint Your Wagon
Fucking Original Straight First Foremost Pimp Mack
Fucking Hustler Original Gangster’s Gangster
Case File #52: Gigli
Bicurious, Hankie-Waving Case File #63: Cruising
Rat-Brained, Man-Animal-Friendly Case File #66:
Battlefield Earth
Animal-Abusing, Studio-Wrecking, Career-Killing Case
File #81: Heaven’s Gate
Trapped In A World It Never Made Case File #94:
Howard The Duck
Pointlessly Postmodern Case File #103: Psycho
Epic, Extravagant, Excruciating Book-Exclusive Case File:
Cleopatra
Chapter 8: A Fairy-Tale Ending; Or, Manic Pixie Dream Girls
I Have Known
Constant, Total Amazement Case File #40: Joe Versus The Volcano
Full Circle Case File #1, Take 2: Elizabethtown
Death Is Not The End: An Afterword
Appendix: Waterworld: Director’s Cut, Minute-By-Minute
Acknowledgments
If He made me in his image, then He’s a failure too.
—Laura Marling, “Failure”
My Year Of Flops: An Introduction
From an early age, I learned to stop worrying and love the bombs. I’ve always been a failure junkie. I get giddy over toxic buzz, noxious press, and scathing reviews. I’m fascinated by the art and sociology of flops. You can learn a lot about society by the pop culture it embraces, and just as much by what it angrily rejects. As parents are keen to remind their children, there’s no shame in failure, only in not trying. The biggest, most notorious flops generally fail because they try too hard, not because they lack ambition or audacity.
My solidarity with misfits, outsiders, and underachievers helped define my professional development. I began my film-reviewing career happily critiquing the dregs of cinema, forgotten ephemera like Chill Factor and Gone Fishing. As the first head writer of The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion, I’ve immersed myself in the dark, shadowy corners of the entertainment universe, where saner folks
fear to tread: direct-to-video movies (for a column called Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD Purgatory), cheaply produced books by C-listers and hangers-on (for Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club), the NOW That’s What I Call Music! series (for THEN That’s What They Called Music!), and audio commentaries on terrible films (for Commentary Tracks Of The Damned).
In The A.V. Club, I found a home and an audience willing to indulge my pop-culture masochism. Ah, but maybe “masochism” isn’t the right word, because I love what I do; a trip to the multiplex to see the latest Tyler Perry movie or not-screened-for-critics dancesploitation cheapie fills me with anticipation rather than dread. Thirteen years on, I still sometimes can’t believe I make my living writing about pop culture.
So when I decided to embark on a twice-weekly yearlong blog project in early 2007, I naturally gravitated toward an in-depth exploration of the biggest failures in cinematic history. I called the column My Year Of Flops. To qualify for My Year Of Flops, a film had to meet three unyielding/slippery criteria. It had to be a critical and commercial failure upon its release (domestically, at least). It had to have, at best, a marginal cult following. And it had to facilitate an endless procession of facile observations and labored one-liners.
Along with providing a forum for jokes, japes, and jests, My Year Of Flops had a serious goal. I wanted to fight our cultural tendency to associate commercial failure with artistic bankruptcy. I wanted to give flops something everyone deserves but precious few ever receive: a second chance. When I look at failures, cinematic and otherwise, I see myself. I welcomed the opportunity to provide a sympathetic reappraisal of some of the most reviled films of all time.
During the first year of My Year Of Flops, I found acceptance and validation from readers who cheered me on throughout my quixotic quest. Internet commenters, those nattering nabobs of negativism, transformed into perspicacious proponents of positivity. An online community that all too often resembles an easily agitated lynch mob turned into a band of angels. For I had created not just a blog project but an entire weird world of failure, regret, and bad ideas: a floposphere for pop-culture rubberneckers and schadenfreude enthusiasts. Fulfilling my wildest dreams, My Year Of Flops steadily grew to become that rarest and most wondrous of creatures: a moderately popular ongoing online feature. It was such a surprising success that readers wouldn’t let go after the initial year was over, so I was “persuaded” to continue it indefinitely as a twice-monthly feature at avclub.com. At gunpoint.
Then My Year Of Flops became something even more rare and more wonderfultastic: a book. Not just any book—the book you currently hold in your hands! That you bought! With money you earned doing chores and robbing student nurses! And are going to read! Using your brain bone and imagination!
After much consideration, consultation with our pastors, and several rolls of the 12-sided die, we here at The A.V. Club have decided to augment 35 of what SCTV’s Guy Caballero would call My Year Of Flops’ “Golden Classics” (which is to say, columns, aka Case Files, that already ran online in some form) with 15 brand-spanking-new Case Files of films too explosively floptastical for the Internet. But that isn’t all! In a bid to break up the oppressive tyranny of my literary voice, we’ve included mini-interviews with some of the people involved in the flops I’ve covered. You angrily demanded Austin Pendleton’s wry recollections of the making of Skidoo. We happily acquiesced.
The flops have been grouped according to genre, beginning with the first Case File, on Elizabethtown, which also provided the series with a ratings system dividing all films into three nebulous categories: Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success. As Orlando Bloom stiffly declaims at the start of Elizabethtown, anyone can achieve failure, but a fiasco requires mad-prophet ambition and woeful miscalculation. At the top of the scale lie Secret Successes, films that have been slandered by history yet remain worthy of critical rehabilitation.
After chapters devoted to drama, comedy, superhero/science fiction/action films, musicals, the unsexiest sex films ever made, and family films that qualify as child abuse under the Geneva Conventions, we have a murderer’s row of the most notorious flops ever made. Even a book about flops needs a happy ending and redemptive arc, so I conclude with the fairy-tale ending that fate wouldn’t grant the films I’ve documented. There’s an entry on Joe Versus The Volcano, a life-affirming fable about a miserable Failure who becomes a Secret Success because of a Fiasco. And I close with a reconsideration of the film that began it all—Elizabethtown—and then a blow-by-blow account of the three-hour-long director’s cut of Waterworld.
I never intended My Year Of Flops to be a book about the 50 biggest flops or worst films of all time. There are plenty of books like that. This is not one of them. Rather, it’s a deeply personal, deeply idiosyncratic journey through the history of cinematic failure populated both by the usual suspects (Gigli, Battlefield Earth, Ishtar) and intriguing semi-obscurities like Johnny Cash’s Gospel Road and Thomas Vinterberg’s It’s All About Love.
I chose many of these flops not because their failure casts a huge shadow over pop culture but because they reflect the mythology of their creators and the cultural epoch they inhabited in fascinating and revealing ways. With each Case File, I set out to write about much more than the film addressed, to use an entry to explore, for example, the curious communion of Otto Preminger and the free-love movement in Skidoo or the perils and limitations of literary adaptations epitomized by The Scarlet Letter, Breakfast of Champions, and Adrian Lyne’s Lolita.
Welcome to my wonderful world of flops. I’m psyched to explore the curious geography of celluloid bombs with you. It’s a colorful realm of pee-drinking man-fish, inexplicably floating Africans, psychedelic disco/biblical freak-outs, time-traveling action heroes, an effeminate green alien only Fred Flintstone and Marlon Brando can see, and Rosie O’Donnell in leather bondage gear. Ignore all the road signs warning you to stay away. You’re in Failure Country now, with me as your disreputable guide. Enjoy the ride.
MY YEAR
OF
FLOPS
Chapter 1
Disastrous Dramas
Bataan Death March Of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown
Originally Posted January 25, 2007
As somebody once said, there’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-scoe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folktale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn’t. Happen. To. Them.
—Drew Baylor, Elizabethtown
After that opening piece of voice-over narration, Cameron Crowe’s 2005 flop Elizabethtown goes on to illustrate by example just what a fiasco looks and feels like. Elizabethtown was cursed from its inception. Crowe cast, then uncast, Ashton Kutcher (in the role eventually played by Orlando Bloom) and Jane Fonda (in the role Susan Sarandon ultimately played) in the lead roles: Kutcher as a soulful superstar-shoe-designer-turned-suicidal-pariah who travels to Kentucky to bury his dead father, and Fonda as his mother, an eccentric who spirals into impish lunacy once she’s widowed. Like Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, Elizabethtown is a populist morality play about a cocky young man humanized by failure who becomes a success in life only after failing spectacularly in business. After a disastrous early screening at the Toronto Film Festival, the film was drastically shortened and its ending altered.
So by the time Elizabethtown arrived in theaters, it was already a wounded duck. Going into the film, I thought, “How bad can a Cameron Crowe movie be?” Before Elizabethtown, I could say without reservation that Crowe was one of my favorite filmmakers. I don’t just love his movies, I want to live in his world. The universe of Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, and Say Anything is an infinitely humane realm ruled by an endlessly benevolent deity: Crowe himself. It’s a world where no existential quandary is so great that it can’t be solved by the perfect combination of classic rock song and dream girl. It’s a world of happy pop ep
iphanies and gentle humanism, bravely devoid of protective irony or sneering cynicism.
In Elizabethtown, all Crowe’s formidable virtues as a filmmaker betray him. His palpable affection for his characters devolves into pathological emotional neediness. Every frame and character screams, “Love me, love me, love me!” Elizabethtown feels like an X-ray of Crowe’s soul set to the soundtrack of his life.
Crowe has never been afraid to go for big, pop-operatic moments that bound past realism in their quest for immortality. There’s nothing naturalistic about lines like Jerry Maguire’s “You complete me,” “You had me at hello,” and “Show me the money,” or John Cusack playing “In Your Eyes” on a boombox outside Ione Skye’s window in Say Anything. Yet they spoke to moviegoers’ deep, unfulfilled hunger for grand theatrical gestures and outsized declarations of love.
With Elizabethtown, Crowe subscribes to the logic that it’s never enough merely to try; no, one must try way too fucking hard. It isn’t enough that Drew is the corporate pariah behind a failed shoe; no, he has to be the man behind the greatest athletic-shoe debacle of all time, a nearly billion-dollar fuckup. Similarly, Crowe can’t just have Drew contemplate suicide; he has to have his sad-sack protagonist create a homemade suicide machine with knives affixed to the handlebars that’s 90 percent exercise bike, 10 percent gimmicky instrument of permanent self-negation. It’s like the secret love child of Dr. Kevorkian and Rube Goldberg. In Elizabethtown’s universe, even suicide can be oppressively whimsical.
And he can’t just have Drew’s mom go a little loopy following her beloved husband’s death. No, Crowe has Drew’s mom use her late husband’s memorial to introduce the world’s first You-might-be-a-widow-manic-and-raw-with-grief-if … stand-up comedy routine. For example:
If the bank teller looks at you funny because you forgot to rinse off a green facial mask before leaving home … You might be a manic widow raw with grief!
If you think a memorial for your dead husband is the appropriate place to launch your stand-up comedy and tap-dancing careers … You might be a manic widow raw with grief!