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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

THE TEN WORST MOVIES OF 1997

These are limited to major films by indies or major studios. But don’t look for that 3 a.m. soft porn karate on Showtime to show up. Nor should you look for Gummo, Masterminds, Mr. Magoo, T<strong>he Pest, Playing God or The Postman. I suspect that they are all candidates for this dishonor, but I didn’t see them, so they escape my wrath.
Dishonorable Mentions go to (in alphabetical order): Fire Down Below, Gone Fishin’, Incognito, Out to Sea, A Smile Like Yours and That Old Feeling.
And in the Career Enders category (in alphabetical order): Speed 2: Cruise Control (Jason Patric), Double Team (Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman), Steel (Shaq’s a hack) and Leave It to Beaver (Janine Turner).
10.Mad City, with John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman both trying to “fix” previous failures. Travolta as white trash in White Man’s Burden and Hoffman in Hero, a movie about false patriotism directed by a Brit.
9. The Devil’s Own. Brad Pitt was right when he trashed this one before it hit theaters. Great actors and a very fine director still ended up with mush when the script went soft.
8. The eruptive duo of Volcano and Dante’s Peak. Two bad movies. One took itself too seriously, the other, not seriously enough. Which do you prefer, tires that drive through lava or a character who disappears when the city is about to blow up his new multi-million dollar condo?
7. Jurassic Park: The Lost World, the first Spielberg movie without a heart. It looked good, but it was about as artful as a Fox TV special called When Dinosaurs Attack.
6. The double dip of Excess Baggage and A Life Less Ordinary. They were the same central story except one used Alicia Silverstone’s production company to move it along, the other, angels. Holly Hunter did Less Ordinary instead of As Good As It Gets. A tragedy.
5. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. When the cheesy effects opened the movie, I thought it was style. It was just cheese. The film was a better representation of the video game and no representation of a movie at all.
4. Kull the Conqueror. Universal tries to make Kevin Sorbo a movie star. Oops.
3. Fathers’ Day, the movie that even Robin Williams and Billy Crystal couldn’t save. A source at the WB says that they re-shot major parts of the film four times. It still wasn’t funny.
2. The product reel of The Bubble Factory, the production company that the Sheinbergs got for leaving the executive suites at Universal. The 1997 line-up was The Pest, A Simple Wish and McHale’s Navy.
1. The Worst Movie of 1997 is Batman and Robin. Maybe not the worst in purely clinical terms, but a true disaster on every single level. Bad acting. Bad writing. Bad effects. And expensive. Though it’s hard to imagine, this film was an even bigger disaster for Warner Bros. than the media made it out to be. Warner Bros. will deny it, but WB sources tell me that the film beat Titanic to the $200 million mark in production costs by months. My goodness, that’s bad!

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon