My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  Then, with the help of shopping-and-trying-on-makeup montages, the Bratz resurrect their friendship. These montages contain the film’s defining sequence, in which a gaggle of prepubescent girls gaze adoringly at the Bratz. In their infinite kindness, the Bratz decide to provide makeovers for these 8-year-old representatives of the target audience for the Bratz film and toy line. The moppets begin as ordinary girls, a little awkward and ungainly. Then the Bratz slather on the whore makeup and transform their pint-sized protégés into creepily sexualized Jon-Benét Ramsey doppelgängers. Oh, if only they could reach through the screen and do the same for all the 8-year-olds in the audience! In spite of such blatant pandering, Bratz mercifully bombed at the box office, thereby sparing the world an endless procession of theatrically released Bratz sequels and knockoffs.

  The girls’ bond and commitment to subverting the dominant paradigm threatens the school’s most popular student, a pretty blond tyrant named Meredith that Chelsea Staub plays as a cross among Josef Stalin, Paris Hilton, and Tracy Flick from Election. Meredith’s father, incidentally, is played by Jon Voight, though to be fair, he probably took the part only to pay back Bratz producer Steven Paul for giving Voight his career-making role in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, as an ascot-wearing, smoking-jacket-and-Hitler-mustache-sporting German businessman engaged in a decades-long, multi-continent struggle with a superscamp who travels around in a flying car and never ages. Voight is nothing if not loyal. And insane.

  To thwart the Bratz’s sinister campaign to spread fashion, friendship, and montages set to peppy pop songs across clique divides, Meredith decides to throw herself a second sweet 16 party. The catch? In order to attend her chichi soiree, attendees are forced to agree to associate only with their cliques. Even worse, Meredith hires one of the Bratz’s mothers to cater the affair. In Bratz’s fantasy world, even the girl without money has money. The film’s idea of poverty is a mom who owns a catering business, and a computer-owning teenager who scoots around on a moped instead of in a sports car.

  At said party, Meredith humiliates the singing, personality-devoid Brat by showing a video of her singing “La Cucaracha” with mom/all-purpose ethnic Lainie Kazan. Ha! That girl totally has a mother! And she doesn’t always look like a runway model! Could she be any lamer? Tragedy turns to triumph, however, when a sympathetic DJ fucks up the mix, and soon everyone is boogying to a hip-hopified version of “La Cucaracha.” But triumph soon morphs back into tragedy when a party elephant kicks Meredith into the pool. An enraged Meredith blames the Bratz for ruining her party, when we all know an unruly pachyderm was at fault. Must party elephants always spoil everything?

  Suddenly, the same classmates who embraced the Bratz as liberators from the tyranny of cliques shun the fashion-forward foursome for costing them sweet 16 gift bags. Clearly, only a climactic performance of a song espousing the virtues of “Brattitude” at the big talent show can set things right and put Meredith in her place. Meredith and her nemeses are all about clothes, glamour, and performing forgettable synth-pop ditties. The crucial difference is that Meredith uses clothes and generic dance-pop to destroy; the Bratz use it to uplift and edutain.

  Watching Bratz the first time around, I was filled with profound amusement, albeit not with the film so much as the culture that would produce such a shiny pink monstrosity. It’s tempting to argue that the toy-pimping opus represents the evil of banality, but Bratz is far too stupid to be worthy of hate. I was less amused by Bratz the second time around, in part because the insane incongruity of watching such disposable pop-culture ephemera while surrounded by middle-aged men was gone. I was amused, however, by the DVD’s coming attractions for animated adventures starring Bratz: Kids and Bratz: Babies. Can Bratz: Fetuses (“When your womb needs a makeover, these style-conscious prehumans take over!”) and Bratz: Spermatozoa (“You will not believe how they accessorize their flagella!”) be far behind?

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure

  Chapter 7

  The Floppiest Flops

  Honestly Unpopular Case File #3: Ishtar

  Originally Posted February 2, 2007

  Comic genius Elaine May has led a schizophrenic existence as both an in-demand script doctor and a ferociously independent, obsessive überauteur who would rather feed her children to wolves than let a script doctor (or studio head) tinker with her vision.

  May’s control-freak tendencies are legendary. She made her directorial debut with 1971’s A New Leaf, a dark screwball comedy about a deliciously sour misanthrope/professional ne’er-do-well (Walter Matthau, channeling W. C. Fields) who leads a pampered life happily devoid of substance until his inheritance runs out and he sets upon marrying, then murdering a daffy heiress (May) for her money.

  In a troubling omen, producer Howard Koch Jr. tried unsuccessfully to get May fired. The film’s budget more than doubled. After 10 months of editing, May still wouldn’t let Paramount see the film. Paramount essentially had to wrestle the film away from her. A New Leaf ’s paltry box office, coupled with Paramount’s trials trying to wean the film from May’s clutches, would be enough to kill the careers of most filmmakers. But May was too talented and strong willed to let that happen. A New Leaf was followed by May’s sole box-office success: 1973’s The Heartbreak Kid, a trenchant exploration of the perils of assimilation and the spiritual emptiness of the American dream.

  An acidic companion piece to The Graduate (which was directed by May’s former comedy partner, Mike Nichols), Heartbreak follows a directionless young schmuck (Charles Grodin) who dumps his sunburn-addled new wife (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter) on their honeymoon to recklessly pursue shiksa goddess Cybill Shepherd. Where The Graduate ended on a famously ambiguous note, Heartbreak’s ending borders on emotionally apocalyptic. In a neat inversion of romantic comedy orthodoxy, pursuing an impossible dream girl turns out to be not just wrong, but immoral. Heartbreak’s bleakly ironic ending asks, “What does it profit a man to get the girl but lose his soul?” Grodin ends up with Shepherd, but it’s a victory so empty it doubles as a crushing defeat.

  May’s follow-up, 1976’s brilliant John Cassavetes homage Mikey & Nicky, found the enfant terrible once again inducing mass aneurysms in the Paramount executive suites. Her budget once again ballooned to more than twice its original size, and May again retreated to her bunker and steeled herself for another round of warfare with her corporate overlords. This cinematic David couldn’t help picking fights with the Goliaths of her industry.

  Lawsuits were filed and release dates missed by over a year. May was fired in postproduction, then rehired when she cunningly hid two reels of the film to ensure that it could not be completed without her. Paramount was not amused, and it buried the film.

  By this point, May embodied “box-office poison.” She should have been unemployable as a director. She was litigious. She was expensive. She was difficult. She viewed studios as enemies rather than collaborators or benefactors. From a commercial perspective, investing in an Elaine May film made only slightly more sense than purchasing magic beans or building a building a bonfire out of out of hundred-dollar bills.

  Then in the mid-’80s, something inexplicable happened; Columbia gave Elaine May somewhere between $30 to $55 million to direct a comedy with two of the biggest movie stars in the world. If one of the marks of insanity involves doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting a different outcome, then the studio executives should have been fitted en masse for straitjackets.

  Where A New Leaf and Mikey & Nicky were small films that grew big and unwieldy, 1987’s Ishtar was a big film that became the poster child for Hollywood excess. It embodies a phenomenon I call “the Curse of Bigness.” The Bing Crosby/Bob Hope road movies that Ishtar riffs on reveled in cheapness and artifice, in rear projection and back-lot “deserts.” So it seems perverse that Ishtar goes all David Lean with the production values, roping in the great Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now) as cinematographer and filming on location in Morocco. Ishtar’s ballooning b
udget became the story instead of the film itself. The question became less, “Is it funny?” than “Does it provide $30 to $55 million worth of laughs?”

  What could inspire studio suits to abandon their solemn fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders and re-up for another voyage onboard the Elaine May Express to Pauperville? The answer lies with the film’s producer and star, Warren Beatty. If Hollywood is a status-obsessed high school, then Beatty is the valedictorian, class president, lead in the class play, and star quarterback in one shimmering package. And if the class president says his friend the weird girl who edits the yearbook should get Richard Avedon to shoot photos of the glee club, then who are we to doubt his wisdom?

  According to a talk she gave with Mike Nichols after a sold-out screening of Ishtar at the Walter Reade Theater in 2006, May semi-seriously designed the film as a Trojan horse to smuggle a trenchant critique of American foreign policy inside a seemingly innocuous broad comedy. May was going to reach Ronald Reagan, no stranger to back lots himself, through a medium she was sure he understood—the Hope/Crosby road picture.

  Since her pioneering days as half of Nichols & May, our intrepid heroine has struggled to rid comedy of its lazy reliance upon setups and punch lines, and invest it with the awkward, uncomfortable rhythms and painful silences of real life. She’s spent her career doggedly chasing truth, so it’s fitting that Ishtar, the pinnacle of her lifelong love affair with principled failure, opens with its sad-sack protagonists (Beatty and Dustin Hoffman) haplessly cocomposing a monstrous ditty about how “telling the truth can be dangerous business / honest and popular don’t go hand in hand.”

  Hoffman and Beatty play best friends and songwriting partners leading lives unsullied by accomplishment. Beatty portrays a doe-eyed naïf too pure for a corrupt world; Hoffman plays a nebbishy hustler with a big mouth and a million doomed schemes. He’s a cleaned-up Ratso Rizzo with a guitar and delusional dreams of becoming half of the next great songwriting team.

  In composing songs for the film, Paul Williams, May, and Hoffman faced the unique challenge of writing tunes that aren’t just bad, but painful. Ishtar walks a fine line between abusing audience eardrums and cleverly spoofing the clumsy wordplay and agonizing sincerity of clueless aspiring tunesmiths.

  I adore Ishtar’s songs, though critics at the time probably wished the main characters had taken the advice of crusty, alcoholic agent Marty Freed (Jack Weston) to “sing songs people already know. That way, if they don’t like it, they’ll still have something to applaud.”

  Marty is understandably mortified by the duo’s performance at an open-mike night but assures the boys he can book them in a Honduras hotel where, he confides casually, “the last act got nervous because of the death squads. But there’s no danger if you don’t drive into the countryside.”

  In flashbacks, we learn that Beatty’s Lyle Rogers was once a humble ice-cream-truck driver, while Hoffman’s Chuck Clarke tickled the ivories at a restaurant where the clatter of utensils and squawking diners drowned out his crooning. Separately, Lyle and Chuck aren’t much. But when they join forces, they become even less than the sum of their negligible parts.

  By the time Lyle is teetering along the ledge of an office building to try to keep Chuck from killing himself, Ishtar has become more than just a buddy comedy; it’s a heterosexual romance, the sunshine flip side of Mikey & Nicky. Chuck and Lyle feed into each other’s fantasies. They’re miserable, but they aren’t alone. That’s tremendous comfort. When Chuck concedes that he lived with his parents until he was 32, Lyle tenderly tells him, “It takes a lot of nerve to have nothing at your age. Don’t you understand that? Most guys would be ashamed! But you’ve got the guts to just say, ‘The hell with it.’ You’d rather have nothing than settle for less.”

  Ishtar smartly exploits the softness at the core of Beatty’s persona. Without that dreamy vulnerability, it would be easy to hate Beatty for being too goddamned goodlooking, too goddamned successful, too goddamned perfect. But that cockeyed innocence renders Beatty human and allows him to fully inhabit the soul of a loser without irony.

  Beatty and Hoffman decide to take their show on the road, hightailing it to the fictional kingdom of Ishtar for a gig only slightly less fraught with danger than the death-squad-riddled booking they’re passing up in Honduras. CIA agent Jim Harrison (a wonderfully deadpan Charles Grodin) recruits Chuck in Ishtar. Chuck’s naïveté makes him an easy mark for Jim, who discusses the brutal pragmatism of Middle East realpolitik with the studied nonchalance of a grill salesman pontificating about propane. It’s all just a game to the CIA veteran, who hides his relentless scheming behind a perfect poker face.

  In the crazy world of Ishtar, the U.S. government and CIA prop up a brutal Middle Eastern dictator/torture proponent because he provides a bulwark against Communist expansion. Isabelle Adjani costars as Shirra, a mysterious left-wing operative whose brother left her a map with the power to destabilize Ishtar and throw the nation into chaos and civil war.

  Ishtar offers a sly, Duck Soup–like take on the last days of the Cold War and a spy-vs.-spy milieu where KGB agents dress as Arabs, Arab agents dress like Texans, CIA operatives sport fezzes in addition to the regulation black shades and dark suits, and Turkish agents wear Bermuda shorts. Oh, and the people in the Hawaiian shirts? Those are just tourists.

  In a prescient scene, Jim meets with the emir of Ishtar, who demands that Lyle and Chuck be killed by next weekend, before they’re hailed as saviors or martyrs. Jim responds with a droll, “The United States government will not be blackmailed. However, I see no difficulty in meeting your timetable.” The CIA, as embodied by Jim, doesn’t flinch at cosigning off on the deaths of two American citizens; it just doesn’t want to get its hands dirty. Appearances are everything; reality is irrelevant.

  Jim won’t be blackmailed, just as George W. Bush wouldn’t negotiate with the terrorists his dad and Ronald Reagan supplied with weapons throughout the ’80s. The emir of Ishtar even utters the old aphorism, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” recycling the logic that led the United States to arm Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, and the Taliban during their righteous struggle against the Soviet Union.

  Equal parts sly political satire, oddly poignant buddy comedy, road movie, and showbiz spoof, Ishtar runs into serious, if not fatal, third-act problems as it devolves into the movie its detractors accuse it of being, a borderline sadistic farce wherein Chuck and Lyle wander the desert for a seeming eternity after being led astray by both an angry, blind camel and the CIA. Also, it would have been nice if one of our most brilliant female filmmakers had written her female lead some funny lines. Or a character, really; Adjani is on hand exclusively to move the plot forward. Yet the film’s exquisitely jaundiced take on the oily, malevolent pragmatism behind so much American foreign policy sustains it during its dry patches, as does Beatty and Hoffman’s lived-in chemistry.

  In her conversation at the Walter Reade Theater, May concedes that, in a fit of paranoia, she feared that the toxic buzz that sank Ishtar well before it opened to paltry box office and vicious reviews emanated not from enemies within Columbia but from the CIA. That’s giving herself and the film entirely too much credit; nobody at the time seems to have noticed that the film was a sharp political satire, let alone a potentially dangerous one.

  In its own strange way, Ishtar stumbles onto penetrating truths about American foreign policy and our willingness, even eagerness, to get in bed with murderous dictators when it suits our objectives. And it’s fucking funny. As the protagonists warn us in the film’s very first scene, telling the truth can be dangerous business; honest and popular don’t go hand in hand. Amen.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success

  How The West Was Sung Case File #50: Paint Your Wagon

  Originally Posted July 17, 2007

  An entire generation knows the 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon as the movie the Simpsons rent expecting a typical Clint Eastwood bloodbath, only to discover, t
o their shock and horror, a toe-tapping musical about the fun of painting wagons. Bart cheers up upon Lee Marvin’s arrival, proclaiming, “Here comes Lee Marvin. He’s always drunk and violent!” only to watch in disgust as Marvin begins singing about painting wagons as well.

  The Simpsons’ deliciously literal-minded spoof of Paint Your Wagon has usurped Joshua Logan’s film in the public imagination, but it turns out the real Paint Your Wagon is far stranger than the Simpsons parody suggests, and it involves considerably less wagon painting.

  Paint Your Wagon represents an odd marriage of convenience between the manliest cinematic genre (the Western) and the girliest one (the musical). It’s a ragingly homoerotic film about a three-way marriage and two cowpokes who just can’t quit each other, even after a fetching little lassie gets in the way of their partnership.

  In a rambunctious lead performance, Lee Marvin plays drunken, lovable scoundrel Ben Rumson. Rumson teams up with Pardner, played by Clint Eastwood, after he discovers gold while burying Pardner’s brother. Rumson makes it clear from the get-go that his conception of partnership is as much emotional as financial. So he expects Pardner to “solace” him when he’s feeling melancholy, pick him up when he’s lying in the mud dead drunk, and lovingly caress his muttonchops while wearing a purty dress when the black dog of depression is hot on his trail. Okay, that last part is an exaggeration, but the homoerotic subtext to Rumson and Pardner’s friendship is so glaring it barely qualifies as subtext. In this relationship, Marvin is clearly the dominant one. Eastwood’s nickname conveys his fragile state of dependency: It’s as if he’d shrivel up and disappear if he didn’t have a strong-willed friend to rely on.