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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, January 12th, 2009 - Comments Off on Bad Movie! Bad, Bad Movie!
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Bad Movie! Bad, Bad Movie!

Just got in from a pre-Sundance date night with the hubs … he bought us tickets to go see Gigli! Yes, yes, it’s one of the worst movies ever made. I’m not sure which was worse: the tragic cameos by Christopher Walken and Al Pacino? The endless gratutious shots of JLo’s midriff and ass? The yoga scene? The “gobble-gobble” moment? The mockery of the disabled guy? The lesbian cat fight?
Or perhaps the whole bit about JLo, who’s supposed to be an intelligent lesbian, being magically turned onto men by Gigli, after he’s spent their entire time together showing her what a completely misogynistic moron he is? Or could it be the schizophrenic tonal changes, the ghastly lighting, the glacial pacing, the bizarre musical score that seems to have been written for a completely different film? Or should we just blame the dreadful script? If your answer is (D) All of the Above, you win.


I first saw this film several years ago, I think at my dad’s, and thankfully was tired at the time and drifted in and out of watching it. This time, I gave it my full attention, which was made somewhat easier by the fact that this was an audience-participation screening of Gigli, hosted by The Stranger‘s David Schmader, who had the brilliant idea several years ago that a movie even worse than Gigli, Showgirls, could actually be rendered enjoyable by the addition of pithy commentary. Schmader’s been touring around with his Showgirls spiel for a while now, but there are so many bad films out there, he just couldn’t resist testing his theory on a few more. Hence, this series called “From Bad to Worse,” a “six-week descent in the depths of cinematic hell” featuring Battlefield Earth, Leonard Part 6, Can’t Stop the Music (starring The Village People!), Road House, Rhinestone … and tonight, the worst of the lot, Gigli.
On the plus side, the theater serves food, and I think a lot of people left rather inebriated, because one of the rules was that you had to drink every time anyone in the film made a reference to how beautiful JLo is (if you’ve not seen Gigli, or weren’t paying attention, that happens a lot). For added fun, Schmader controlled the remote that allowed him to stop the movie periodically to add informative comments, and better yet, to rewind so we could watch certain parts over and over … like the “gobble gobble” scene, and the bit where the fish eats a chunk of stray brain matter. Yum yum.
Man, that’s a bad, bad movie. But it was infinitely more fun watching it while being able to shout at the screen to liven things up.

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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