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

by Nathan Rabin

  Our maddeningly blank hero Drew (Orlando Bloom) begins the film as the man behind the most disastrous product launch since New Coke: Mercury Shoes’ Spasmotica. Drew’s boss, Phil Devoss (Alec Baldwin), runs Mercury Shoes as a cross between a dot-com start-up at the height of the Internet bubble and a benign cult. Its employees aren’t just worker bees, they’re “denizens of greatness.” At Mercury, success is a secular religion and failure is heresy. So when Drew is flown to company headquarters to face a grim reckoning, the employees regard him with looks of pity mixed with scorn.

  It’s the closest Drew will ever come to attending his own funeral. This invites the question, “Why would a successful company like Mercury invest nearly a billion dollars in a shoe without testing it extensively?”

  In moments like this, it’s important to remember that Elizabethtown is an American fairy tale. Fairy tales play by a different set of rules. No child has ever demanded to know the scientific basis for Snow White being woken from an endless slumber by her true love’s kiss. Crowe plays everything big. So it’s fitting that Drew’s boondoggle should be world-class and unprecedented. Any fool can accomplish failure. It takes a special kind of dreamer to lose a company a billion dollars.

  Drew decides to commit suicide, but before he can head to the great corporate retreat in the sky, he receives a call from his sister, Heather (Judy Greer), informing him of their father’s death. Suddenly he has a reason to live. He’ll head down to the titular locale, drop off his beloved father’s blue suit, then head straight back home and commit suicide. Here’s what his lifetime checklist looks like:

  1. Drop off blue suit in Kentucky

  2. Kill myself

  Little does he suspect that the entire world is conspiring on a massive plot to turn his frown upside down and restore his lost faith in humanity and himself. The conspiracy of joy’s chief agent is an almost psychotically perky stewardess/Manic Pixie Dream Girl named Claire, played by Kirsten Dunst. Claire decides she’s going to fill his soul with sunshine even if she has to kill him in the process. While bidding Drew good-bye, possibly for the last time, she leaves him with the parting words, “Look, I know I may never see you again, but we are intrepid. We carry on.”

  When Drew finally hits Elizabethtown, every front lawn becomes a Norman Rockwell painting: children bouncing ecstatically on a trampoline, a shaggy-haired kid mowing a lawn, American flags waving happily in the breeze. Everyone shoots him a smile and a wave that implicitly says, “You seem to be suffering from a crippling, perhaps failed-shoe-related suicidal depression. That’s nothing a few enchanted days in our magical town won’t cure.”

  That night, Drew’s girlfriend (Jessica Biel) dumps him by phone as he juggles calls from her, his sister, and Claire. In Crowe’s benevolent world, when Jessica Biel dumps you, you literally have your next gorgeous love interest on the other line. That night, Drew and Claire fall in love over the phone in a thrilling sequence that captures the butterflies and manic energy of fresh infatuation. Suddenly, the breathless bigness of Crowe’s dialogue seems perfect. What is flirtation, if not an attempt to make ourselves seem cooler, smarter, and infinitely more clever than we actually are? Drew and Claire are trying to impress each other with their wit, wisdom, and verbal dexterity just as thoroughly as Crowe is trying to dazzle us.

  Drew reconnects with his family at a potluck where cousin Jessie Baylor (Paul Schneider) announces theatrically, “This loss will be met with a hurricane of love.” I nearly groaned when I first heard that line; by the third time, it struck me as equally cringe-inducing and heartwarming, in large part due to Schneider’s laid-back charm. If anyone can sell that line, it’s Schneider. Jessie epitomizes everything I love about Crowe. He easily could have come off as a cartoon redneck, but when Schneider’s character tells his father (Loudon Wainwright III), “I teach [my son] about Abraham Lincoln and Ronnie Van Zant, because in my house, they are both of equal importance,” it’s ridiculous, but also glorious. As someone who venerates music, former teen rock journalist Crowe is not one to cast judgment on, well, anything. So if Jessie is disproportionately proud of the time his old group Ruckus almost opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd, there’s something sweet and endearing about that as well.

  A revitalized Drew ends the film by embarking on a road trip Claire has organized seemingly down to the second, accompanied by a mixtape of songs beloved by either spacey twentysomething stewardesses or former rock journalists in their late 40s.

  The road trip might be the quintessential sequence in Crowe’s career; it’s nothing but sound, image, music, history, and the world outside exploding with life, color, and vitality through the windshield and the rearview mirror. It’s Crowe’s love letter to the South, to road trips, to mixtapes, to music, to God’s own United States. Claire, of course, is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Twenty thousand roads Drew goes down, down, down, and they all lead straight back home to Claire.

  Elizabethtown is blessed and cursed with an incredible generosity of spirit. Crowe loves everyone and everything. Crowe shows us not who we are, but who we could conceivably become. His films are aspirational rather than realistic. Like Frank Capra, Crowe wants to show us what life could be like if we were all just kinder, more hopeful, and had better taste in music. So it would be churlish of me not to match Crowe’s tremendous generosity of spirit with my own.

  As one of her many life lessons, Claire tells Drew, “You want to be really great? Then fail big and have the courage to stick around and make ’em wonder why you’re still smiling. That’s true greatness to me.” Accordingly, I hope the two-and-a-half-hour-long cut of Elizabethtown makes it to DVD someday. Crowe hasn’t made a film since Elizabethtown. Nevertheless, I have faith in Crowe. He is intrepid. He will carry on. So will we all.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success

  Death Is Not The End: An Afterword

  As Joe Versus The Volcano indelibly conveys, death sentences can sometimes be illusory. Being diagnosed with a fatal brain cloud can become an invitation to embrace life. Dying at the box office is not the end. Devastating reviews are not the end. There is always hope. A film’s reputation is not static; it evolves over time. Critics and audiences rendered harsh, even cruel verdicts on the films in this book. Hell, I often rendered harsh, even cruel verdicts on the films in this book. But history can be kinder. Yesterday’s failures sometimes become tomorrow’s masterpieces.

  Hope springs eternal every time someone pops in a DVD or the lights go down in a movie theater. At this very moment, there is a brave soul out there deciding that maybe Waterworld isn’t so bad. There’s a weird kid who’s discovered that Freddy Got Fingered is his all-time favorite movie. Every day, we’re afforded the opportunity to rebel against the tyranny of mass opinion.

  As a troubled youth, movies provided me with a means of escaping the world. As an adult, they’re a way of engaging with the world. My Year Of Flops began as one man’s journey deep into the heart of cinematic failure, but it quickly became a communal experience. The Internet is often a powerful incubator for cynicism and spite, but it can also be a glorious conduit for love, so it has been deeply satisfying to see how many people share my passion for movies like Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar, The Apple, Pennies From Heaven, and dozens of other Secret Successes that didn’t make it into this book.

  I began My Year Of Flops not to bury cinematic failures but to praise them. I have strayed early and often from that mission, yet I’ve tried my damnedest to live up to the good intentions I laid out in my introduction. I love the idea of watching, thinking about, and writing about movies because of their resounding failure with critics and audiences, not in spite of it.

  My alliteration- and malapropism-prone father sometimes accidentally refers to My Year Of Flops as “My Decade Of Disasters” or “My Century Of Calamities.” Could documenting cinematic failures be my life’s work? Have I found my true calling? I don’t know. So I encourage you to embark on your own Year Of Flops. Don’t let a cul
tural consensus scare you away from these films. This may be the end of the book, but it isn’t the end of this journey, for you or for me.

  Appendix: Waterworld: Director’s Cut, Minute-By-Minute

  In You’ll Never Make Love In This Town Again, a transcendentally trashy tell-all by an all-star aggregation of dirty, dirty whores, a high-priced call girl recounts a memorable encounter with James Caan. Caan, it seems, loves oral sex. (And you thought this book wouldn’t be educational!) When it comes to oral pleasure, Caan is a believer in the aphorism, “’Tis better to give than to receive.” So he spent three or four hours performing cunnilingus on the prostitute.

  At first, it was exciting. Sonny Corleone was feasting lustily on her honeypot! Then her legs started to cramp and mild enthusiasm turned to annoyance and frustration. By the two-hour mark, her mind had probably left her body and she was reduced to thinking random thoughts like, “Why did we reject the metric system? It was good enough for the rest of the world. Why must we always be so goddamned different? Why do we always have to be the lone wolf?” By the three-hour mark, she was probably ready to give Caan his money back if only he would stop.

  I share this anecdote not to pollute your mind with the horrifying image of Caan’s leathery visage covered in vaginal secretions and pubic hair, but rather to illustrate that even something widely considered pleasurable—receiving oral sex from a Godfather cast member—can become tedious and even excruciating if done for too long. Everything wears out its welcome eventually.

  But what happens when you devote three endless hours to something you’ve found borderline unbearable even in a much shorter version? To find out, I decided to watch the 177-minute director’s cut of the 1995 boondoggle Waterworld and record my observations on a minute-by-minute basis. Why? So you wouldn’t have to. (Oh, and if you’re looking for a correlation between the preceding paragraphs and what you’re about to read, Caan reportedly turned down the villain role in Waterworld, which eventually went to Dennis Hopper.)

  1:03—Waterworld opens with the Universal globe logo losing its landmass and devolving into some sort of world of water, accompanied by the mellifluous sounds of Hal Douglas, a prolific trailer voice-over artist, doing a mild variation on his “In a world where …” shtick. When Douglas melodramatically intones, “The future—the polar ice caps have melted, covering the Earth with water. Those who survive have adapted to a new world,” I’m reminded of Criswell’s Plan 9 From Outer Space narration, which includes the line, “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” That’s probably not what the filmmakers intended.

  1:34—Waterworld opens with a tight close-up of Kevin Costner’s ass in striped leather pants, followed by …

  2:06—Urine filtration/guzzling!

  3:57—Costner’s character, Mariner, is pruning his bonsai tree. He may guzzle urine, but he’s no philistine.

  5:32—Popular sartorial statements in a Dry Land–free hellscape: soggy leather and camouflage vests, chokers, fingerless gloves, and loincloths.

  11:18—Mariner’s lowly drifter has some dirt. This makes him King Shit of Fuck Mountain in his World of Water, and the atoll where he comes to pimp his wares.

  20:26—An old woman requests Mariner’s “seed,” then pushes a teen girl in front of him as an old man pleads, “We can look to our own for impregnation, but too much of that sort of thing, it’s undesirable.” Pimping a relative to Kevin Costner = better than inbreeding?

  24:35—While Mariner rots in a cage, atoll dwellers go through his belongings as part of a makeshift justice system, singling out, for example, a grimy ThighMaster as “what appears to be a torturing device!” (It sure is, am I right or am I right, ladies?)

  25:31—Theoretically sexy store-proprietor/atoll dweller Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) proposes that Mariner’s dirt may have come from a mysterious utopia known as Dry Land. This earns indignant snickers. That’s about as far fetched as a man-animal learning how to read, use weapons, or operate a vehicle!

  31:38—An imprisoned Mariner tries to hit crazy Old Gregor (Michael Jeter) for asking whether his gills are vestigial or functional. In spite of his rage, Mariner is still just a pee-drinking man-fish in a cage.

  34:26—For being a threat to the atoll, Mariner is sentenced “to be recycled in the customary fashion,” that is, killed. Looks like the movie is going to end two hours and 26 minutes early. Sweet!

  37:49—Or not. A group of malevolent, cigarette enthusiasts/pirates known as the Smokers pick a narratively convenient time to attack the atoll. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss Jack Black’s star-making turn as Pilot.

  38:31—Stuff is blowing up good.

  39:20—Finally, a post-apocalyptic movie with Jet Skis and waterskiing! It’s like a cross between summer fun in Cape Cod and Al Gore’s worst nightmare.

  40:41—A dude water-skis up a ramp and crash-lands on Mariner’s cage, freeing him.

  41:04—If you’re following along at home with the Waterworld: Director’s Cut DVD, please stop. I get paid to do this. You have no excuse, and hopefully more productive uses for your time and energy. Have you considered reading to blind orphans? Deaf orphans? Orphans too lazy to read?

  45:00—Dear God, I’m only a quarter of the way through this.

  48:02—Mariner triumphantly reunites with his bonsai tree!

  49:03—Why is Smoker leader Deacon (Dennis Hopper) wearing a codpiece over his pants? Isn’t that redundant? He must really need to protect his junk. And what’s with Deacon’s medal-festooned post-apocalyptic Sgt. Pepper look?

  54:03—Hopper’s performance in a nutshell: He removes a handkerchief covering his mutilated eye and quips, “We better keep an eye out for that icky freak!” Apparently Mr. Freeze ghostwrote Hopper’s dialogue.

  56:11—I may have misjudged Mariner, as he just offered to take Helen to the fabled Dry Land. He’s less indulgent toward Enola (Tina Majorino), an orphan with a mysterious tattoo rumored to be a map to Dry Land on her back. Mariner grouses of his prepubescent charge, “The kid, we gotta pitch over the side!”

  56:37—More lovable banter from our hero: “It’s better that one of you dies now than both of you die slow.”

  57:30—Helen offers to have sex with Mariner if he agrees not to murder Enola. What a fun scene to re-create with Hasbro’s line of Waterworld action figures!

  59:00—Mariner has difficulty trusting the motives of those without gills and webbed feet. Don’t we all?

  59:12—Our intrepid mutant antihero rejects Helen with a cold, “You got nothing I need.” He seems like he’d be more into dolphins anyway.

  59:44—Mariner is awfully butch for a man-fish wearing a choker, leather vest with no shirt, and seashell earring.

  1:05:04—But he isn’t entirely heartless: When Helen asks for some of his filtered piss water for Enola, he glares at her, chugs some, waters his bonsai, then gives Enola the last few drops.

  1:06:07—Enola repays Mariner’s generosity by chirping, “Thanks for not killing us!”

  1:07:37—The uneasy peace is broken when Mariner loses his shit upon discovering Enola using his green crayon. Don’t touch his fucking crayon, little girl. He’s killed people for less. Much less.

  1:08:50—More adorable banter from Enola to Mariner: “How many people have you killed? Ten? Twenty?”

  1:09:00—Have I mentioned Mariner’s ponytail? ’Cause he’s got a fucking ponytail. Oh, and he just threw Enola overboard in a fit of anger.

  1:16:49—A key difference between the theatrical and director’s cut of Waterworld: more screen time for Jack Black as the Smoker pilot. Those letters and calls to Universal begging them to restore his role to its original majesty finally paid off.

  1:18:30—Mariner greedily devours a tomato while the sunburned, half-mad Enola and Helen look on with naked desperation.

  1:22:40—Just when you think Mariner can’t get any more lovable, he offers to trade half an hour with Helen to a clearly insane, poss
ibly violent drifter in exchange for a piece of paper but kicks him off the boat before he can seal the deal. The Age of Chivalry is not dead.

  1:42:10—I wondered, before I began this experiment, if Stockholm syndrome would kick in and I’d begin sympathizing with my cinematic tormentor. Otherwise, 177 minutes is an awful long time to spend with a movie you don’t like. Nope. It’s still fucking terrible, just longer.

  1:45:00—If this were a normal movie, it would be over by now. Hell, it’d be over 15 minutes ago.

  1:46:09—“There’s nothing human about you! They should have killed you the day you were born!” Helen screams at Mariner, acting as an audience surrogate.

  1:46:30—In a weird bit of flop meta-textual motherfuckery, in Cable Guy’s climax, the title character screams, “Dry Land is not a myth! I’ve seen it!” before saying he can’t see what all the fuss is about: He’s seen Waterworld nine times and thinks it rules. It’s worth noting that that line never appears in Waterworld. Like “Play it again, Sam,” it’s apocryphal. Mariner says Dry Land is a myth, and Helen says, “I’ve seen it,” but that’s as close as the film gets.

  1:50:21—It takes nearly two punishing hours, but there’s finally a lovely, lyrical sequence: man-fish Mariner leading Helen on a magical journey under the sea to the abandoned ruins of a long-lost civilization. It also explains where Mariner gets all that magnificent dirt; he’s a fish, so of course he can treat the ocean’s bottom like an all-you-can-scoop dirt buffet.