Ben Kingsley: More Than Just Pee-Soaked Mop-Fighting

Ben Kingsley has decided to become an actor again.

Kingsley’s most recent mention in this blog is here, which sadly may not even be his most demeaning film role. At the turn of the century, the Oscar-winning British knight had critical gravitas to spare for the range he demonstrated playing serious roles in big-ticket message movies like Gandhi and Schindler’s List as well as edgy indie films like Sexy Beast. Sure, he took occasional pay-the-bills supporting roles in the odd passable comedy (1993’s Dave) or pulpy sci-fi film (1995’s Species), but these didn’t significantly alter his image as an actor capable of incredible focus on weighty parts.

But in 2005 something went horribly wrong. Kingsley appeared in A Sound of Thunder and Bloodrayne, two films that were near-locks for worst-of-the-year lists. In separate years, they might not have looked so bad on his résumé, but Thunder’s delayed release made it an ugly one-two punch. Amnesia, insanity, or replacement by an evil doppelganger are among the few plausible explanations for Kingsley’s participation in these hideously unprofitable and critically embarrassing films.

That may be changing. The Wackness (out now), reportedly features Kingsley in an energized (and apparently energizing) role as a pot-smoking therapist connecting with a teenager. Transsiberian and Elegy (both later this year) feature him in a Sundance-screened mystery-on-a-train and a cultural critic in a Philip Roth story, respectively. All have the potential to be good solid impressive chances for Kingsley to, well, act.

One still needs to probably flat-out forgive him for The Love Guru and assume that John Cusack’s regime change parody War, Inc. and narration for the animated Noah’s Ark: The New Beginning are a wash. These are nonetheless encouraging signs that an unquestionably talented actor is coming back into his own in 2008.

The Kids are Alright

As an adult, the one thing I miss most about childhood is the wide-eyed naivety. Those were the days when the only difference between boys and girls were cooties, which could be cured with a simple “circle, circle, dot, dot” simulated vaccination. When “Mike Hunt” was merely the name of some kid in class that the older kids occasionally mocked. When Disney’s The Little Mermaid, didn’t have a penis on the cover; it had King Triton’s magical underwater palace.

Recently, however, I have discovered the dissatisfying task of re-watching the children’s movies of my youth through my overly-critical adult eyes. For example, at the time of its release, I could not understand why Roger Ebert insisted that Fred Savage’s Little Monsters was unsuitable for children. I loved Howie Mandel’s portrayal of the free-spirited monster, Maurice. Sure, the scene where Maurice pees in the school bully’s juice box turned me off of apple juice for the majority of my pre-adolescent life. But it just seemed like good, wholesome fun. Until, that is, I re-watched the pervey dark comedy that is Little Monsters.

As if the premise alone isn’t enough to prompt immediate discomfort (adults sneaking into kids bedrooms at night and luring them away to a dark basement with promises of candy and endless streams of pizza), the actual interactions between Mandel and Savage raised my adult eyebrows. I understand that it was the 1980s and kids were prone to wearing neon shorty-shorts. I have all too many photo albums proving this to be true. However, when a grown man poorly emulating Beetlejuice throws a kid wearing said shorty-shorts onto his bed, then jumps on top of him and repeatedly bounces his straddling body over the boy, I feel like we’ve crossed some sort of unseen barrier of human decency. Now, I’m no Puritan, but luring kids to my underground paradise, that seems a bit too Jean Benet for my taste.

The 10 Best Bad Movies – A Field Sobriety Anniversary Tribute

It’s hard to believe that for one year, week after week every Tuesday night, me and a few friends (including pretty much the entire staff here currently) have subjected ourselves to so many painfully bad movies. As we reach the one year anniversary of Bad Movie Night, which enjoyed a brief tenure on this site in the form of the Field Sobriety Wednesday column before being retired late last year following the viewing of the worst movie ever made, I thought it might be fun to have a brief retrospective on the films that have defined the event.

Part of the reason I retired this column was that I felt it was a bit too insular, appealing only to the select few attendees of the screenings rather than a wider audience that, for one reason or another, was actively seeking out shitty movies as a way of torturing their fragile psyches. While I’m sure the same setbacks will affect this list as well, try to think of it as a survival kit to be used on those weekends where you find you have nothing better to do. Any one of these movies could brighten up a lazy afternoon or, given the current temperatures here in Chicago, a bitterly cold day during which travel outdoors is not advised , provided you have beer (lots of it) and aren’t entirely alone (there’s nothing more depressing than making sarcastic comments about a film to yourself). To be sure, every one of these films is a god-awful piece of shit, but they all possess that unique level of badness that, like a Hofstadter strange loop, somehow doubles back on itself to become genius.

In the Name of Uwe Boll: A Financial Wreck Tale

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, the $70 million fantasy epic, bombed magnificently at the box office, drawing only $3 million in its first weekend, and the circling vultures know that infamous director Uwe Boll is running out of extra lives.

This isn’t the first time Boll’s big budget future has been questioned, but news reports now seem certain that he won’t be making more mega-million movies. His recent comments to the Hollywood Reporter suggest he’s thinking the same thing.

This could signal the end of Boll as a byword for bad films. Two of the most frequently disastrous (and hilarious) aspects of Boll films are symptomatic of their budgets: special effects and casting. The former includes “clever” POV shots, unbelievably derivative bullet-time editing, and similarly exhausted post-Matrix techniques. The latter stuffs his films with slumping B-list actors who sometimes don’t even seem to conceal their disdain for the material. With these two cash-bloated albatrosses lifted from his neck, Boll will just be left with his lethally banal scripts and static direction. That would still mean bad movies, but not Uwe Boll-bad. He would still have a lot of obstacles to conquer, but he would be well on his way to making a bearable film.

Field Sobriety Wednesday: The Item

At one point or another, all things must come to an end. It’s the stark inevitability of life; good or bad, proud or disgraceful, loved or hated, death is the great equalizer. And when death reduces everything to equal footing, the only distinction is whether one greets death with a last heroic burst of brilliance — like the dying leaves of autumn that leave their majestic mark on the landscape — or withers away, only to be forgotten like a decrepit man who has lived a miserable, pointless life.

For Field Sobriety Wednesday the latter scenario appears to be its destiny, although I suppose if one were so included, they could debate the matter. I guess it depends on what you consider a fitting end for a column that dealt with the very worst in what cinema had to offer. I had toyed with the idea of retiring this column for a while now, but couldn’t find a definitive entry to go out on. Fortunately, someone else found one for me in the form of The Item, a film that will go down in history as the single worst movie ever watched at Bad Movie Night, if not the very worst film of all time. This marks the perfect coda to FSW, because, honestly, where does one go from here in terms of degradation and cinematic incompetence? Here’s a film so spectacularly bad that I couldn’t simply approach it like all the others. No, it required a three-pronged attack coming from all the participants at BMN who currently writing for this site.

Whatever harsh words we throw at it, the film deserves far worse. Its creators should be put in stocks and publicly humiliated for even conceiving of this idea. The cast should wipe their appearance in this film from their résumés and try to start over with their careers, and the BMN participant who chose the film in question — a person who shall remain nameless — should go into hiding for fear of severe retribution from all other participants. And so, with this, the final entry in the Field Sobriety canon, I say farewell to my bitter dissection of the bottom-feeding cinematic tripe as I look forward to a brighter, more promising future in terms of my movie-watching… eh, who am I kidding? I’ll still be watching shit like this for years to come.

Field Sobriety Wednesday: House of the Dead

To call Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead a more restrained effort than his other films is sort of like acknowledging that the war in Iraq is less of a quagmire than Vietnam. On the surface it proves somewhat true, but the difference is so relative that it hardly seems worth comparison. Besides, any film featuring an Asian raver wearing an American flag jumpsuit leaping through the air while blasting away zombies with a shotgun hardly earns the label “restrained.”

An issue has been raised on this very blog that perhaps Uwe Boll’s intent is to parody Hollywood blockbusters. This theory assumes that all the wildly over-the-top and ill-advised decisions Boll makes are intentional. The fact that his forthcoming film Postal appears to be aware of its own badness helps further cement this notion in truth.

However, watching House of the Dead again makes that case far too difficult to swallow. It’s certainly nowhere near the level of watchability that I’d expect from a film intended as a self-aware parody. This film doesn’t just achieve a monumental level of incompetence, but violates the fundamentals of basic filmmaking, as Boll inserts clips from the video game upon which it is based in order to mask continuity errors.

I’ve talked at length on this blog concerning Boll and his films — far more than any sane person ever should — and I can’t say I’ve gained any further insight into understanding the profound level of incompetence they exude. Boll’s producer has mentioned that it wasn’t their intent to make a film on the level of Citizen Kane. Okay, fine by me. However, it’s a moot point when you consider that House of the Dead makes Silent Hill look like Citizen Kane.

Field Sobriety Wednesday: Astro-Zombies

Astro-Zombies was the result of unrestrained hubris. Not on the part of the director — although he no doubt had a surfeit of it to think he could get away with this film — but my own. You see, the participants in my weekly bad movie night (two of which write for this very site) have a little competition going to determine who can pick the most entertaining bad movies. Lately I’ve been on something of a streak, picking such instant classics as Robot Monster, Planet of the Dinosaurs and The Wizard (although the classic status of the latter film was hotly contested by one participant, who shall remain anonymous). Frankly, it had gotten to the point that I thought I could just pick anything and have it be gold. What I ended up with, however, was Astro-Zombies, a movie so abysmally bad that I want to reconsider my recent top ten list for its possible inclusion.

It’s not that it’s grotesque or even brutal, though it does contain some scenes that would have been construed as such in a more well-produced production. Instead it’s just spectacularly dull and exceptionally pointless. I couldn’t fathom viewing a more pointless film. As near as I can tell, the film involves three story lines, none of which director Ted Mikels put much thought into. One features a gang of terrorists run by a psychotic Asian dominatrix. Another deals with two CIA agents attempting to solve a string of brutal murders. The third, and by far most excruciating, involves a mad scientist played by John Carradine who conducts experiments that involve reanimating corpses. By the way, if you haven’t already guessed it, one of these corpses, or astro-zombies, is the one responsible for the recent killing spree.

Field Sobriety Wednesday Thursday: Teenage Zombies

With the press of the “play” button and the slight hum of the DVD player, Teenage Zombies proved to be an incomprehensible mess from the moment the it lit the television screen.

The film hadn’t even begun and the menu already showed blatant incompatibility as the black-and-white 1950s bubble font declaring Teenage Zombies was inexplicably juxtaposed with an animated vision of an oversized orangutan holding a young blonde vixen on his hairy shoulders. Rest assured, though the ape did make an appearance later in the feature, the blonde bombshell was absent throughout. I’d like to say this was the only time the film portrayed obvious inaccuracy and incongruence, but then I’d be reviewing a different movie altogether.

The Teenage Zombies DVD was released by Retromedia Entertainment, who found it pertinent to add an introductory sequence livening up this low-budget, bland old “horror” movie with tastelessly inexplicable scenes of half-naked 1980s hookers dancing on car roofs in the brothel version of an all-night drive-in. Because — it stands to reason — most people willing to seek out B-quality retro media tend to pay for the feature by stuffing one dollar bills between the plastic expanse of a fake blonde’s fake tits…

Field Sobriety Wednesday: The Island of Dr. Moreau

I want to go to dog heaven.

The 1996 sci-fi flop The Island of Dr. Moreau is the third cinematic take on the H.G. Wells story, after a purportedly pretty good ‘30s version and a largely forgotten Burt Lancaster remake. The ’90s filmmakers shucked a lot of ideas from the previous drafts and decided to shoot the moon by making Apocalypse Now meets The Lion King. This 1996 version is very likely the worst of three, and although my strict puritan value system prevents me from evaluating it firsthand, I’m going to assume that renting the gay, direct-to-video The Island of Dr. Porneaux would still be more rewarding than watching Fairuza Balk pour water into a Brita filter atop Marlon Brando’s head.

A signature of bad films is the degree to which they expect audiences to fill in the blanks based on universally understood clichés and archetypes. Protagonist Edward (David Thewlis) watches Aissa (Balk) dance; she’s his love interest. Dr. Moreau (Brando) looks into a microscope; science is happening! The prefabricated clichés and tasteless, grubby action sequences are shellacked with maddening dialogue that feels fresh-spun from the mind of a writer absolutely convinced that adumbrating puns have never before been used in films and that he is the first to usher them into the cinematic medium. Half the writing credit goes to original director Richard Stanley (who wrote last year’s ambitious but rather dull The Abandoned) who was canned shortly into filming, sending this hot potato into the unlucky hands of veteran John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds). One imagines the suspects named in these split credits pointing accusatorily at each other in the presence of some parental authority.

Field Sobriety Wednesday: Masters of the Universe

I missed out on the whole He-Man craze as a child. I only had one He-Man action figure, and for some reason, it was Beastman. I did however, own every known Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure, including such obscure and irrelevant characters as Mondo Gecko. Perhaps that explains the connection I recall feeling as a child watching the TMNT movies and, consequently, the disconnect I experienced watching Masters of the Universe as an adult. I suspect that if I were to return to the Turtles movies I would feel nostalgic. With Masters of the Universe, the nostalgia wasn’t there; just the sickening feeling that I had seen this film before… when it was called Star Wars.

The music is highly derivative of John Williams, with its brassy flourishes and martial rhythm. In fact, one of the motifs running throughout the film is quite near a note-for-note ripoff of the Superman movie theme. But the John Williams score isn’t the only aspect lifted from Star Wars. Skeletor’s henchman look vaguely like Stormtroopers crossed with Nazi SS officers. He-Man’s dwarf sidekick has Yoda-like tendencies and the bounty hunters sent to destroy He-Man all resemble the various bounty hunters hunting Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back.