u/GTKPR89

He's kind of saying the opposite, but inspired by Alex Ross Perry saying Letters From Iwo Jima is the worst-looking major relase he's maybe seen (he's so wrong, but I love the take - ha!).

What is the best-made truly bad film you've ever seen?

What have you seen that's fully bad, but not for any lack of skill, or literally no element you can point to as the error (peformance, look, script)

Arthouse: I'll say Nocturnal Animals and Downsizing. Gorgeous craft, great performances, good scripts, even! But no-kidding all the way bad for me. More or less reprehensible.

Genre-wise: The Creator. It has every ingredient I like and is clearly thoughtfully made, as well as unbelievable visual / setting / worldbuilding / effects. But it's bad.

* Addendum: I do want to acknlowge this Ebert review I also think of often, which opens with a line on this very same subject. And from hearing her on How Did This Get Made: clearly a talented filmmaker. Who made a terrific looking film.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/punisher-war-zone

1: I am omitting titles covered on the pod.

2: I listened twice, but I'm sure I didn't get everything.

Intro:

The (Affleck) Way Back (they still like it!)

The Way, Way Back (great tagline!)

Happy, Texas (as ARP notes - famous for being a hugely hyped Sundance sale that made one dollar at the box office)

Wah-Wah

The Long Walk (they're overall pro if I recall, it's spoken of warmly here without much comment)

Rain Man (A la: "Guess what this is about based on the title)

The Columbi:

Pixels

Christmas Chronicles

Thursday Murder Club

ARP Brolin' hatin' (and liking)

Wake Up Dead Man

Weapons

The Sturgess Run:

Across The Universe

21 (a movie so bad we threw it on for a fun-junk quarantine watch and stopped it)

One Day

The Other Boleyn Girl

Crossing Over (?)

The Heartless (made by the apparently great Philip Ridley?)

GEOSTOOOOOOOORM (they NEGLECT to mention that it's a Sturgess / Harris joint)

The Howards:

A Beautiful Mind

In The Heart of the Sea

Eden

ARP is right about these. And I would replace his Nuremberg claim (see below) with 13 Lives was the best film of 2022 for me.

Misc:

HESHER

The television programs Shantaram and The First (Penn goes to Mars).

*Note, I remember I was living in India around when The Way Back came out and Shantaram was the big pass-around book that Everyone Cool was reading.

I'm sure it's quite the book. I do also want to mention that Charlie Hunnam was in both the eventual Apple TV Shantaram series and the Papillion remake, along with Rami Malek. He's the Adam Driver of Apple TV long-worked-on prestige projects)

Escape Films:

Papillon (David likes, ARP seems to quite like)

Runaway Train ("bonkers but great" - which is correct)

The Ridleys:

A Good Year

White Squall

Gladiator

Body of Lies (Ridley's second-best forgotten movie along with Black Rain. Good movie!)

Robin Hood

The Saorsies

Atonement

City of Ember

The Lovely Bones

The Harrises

Hidalgo (is not a Harris)

Apaloosa

A History of Violence (a perfect film - Harris should absolutely have a nom)

Radio

Pollock

Eastern Promises

The Hours

The Human Stain (classic This Had Oscar Buzz ep - track it down!)

...The Beethoven Movie (Beethoven's Second)

The stageplay of To Kill a Mockingbird (he took over for Jeff Daniels in Sorkin's recent, lauded Broadway play)

Love Lies Bleeding ("I'm your father!" "You're like....78 years old!")

The Crowes

A Good Year

Unhinged

(upcoming) Bear Country

Body of Pies (this is a good film)

Robin Food Hood

The Survivalist Pictures:

White Squall (A point is made that Weir could have made this, or Gladiator, but Scott could not have made M&C)

The Martian

The Revenant (they are thumbs down)

Gerry

All is Lost (Griffin: "not my favourite movie)

The Day After Tomorrow

127 Hours (referenced, not by title - as per Franco might have been another Sturgess for Weir)

WWII ARP -

Fury (i guess ARP likes?)

Defiance (the best movie ever apparently)

Shoah

Nuremberg

the Music Box (Which I know of as Oscar trivia, Jessica Lange's most forgotten of her Oscar run, though arguably no more forgotten than her win in 1994 for Blue Sky, which is not a WWII movie but does involve, ahem, military / nuclear mystery/conspiracy elements. Also lots of boating)

Number 24 (Ben rec)

"Will" - I think?

All Quiet on the Western Front

Blood and Gold

The Photographer of Mauthausen

Irena's Vow ("A Really, really good movie")

Good Evening Mr. Wallenberg (I worked in Sweden, they call him the "Swedish Schindler" and there are statues of him, etc - a person worth reading up on)

Midway (the hilarious: "Yeah - so excited I waited to watch it two years later on memorial day")

Devotion (I started this one once. It wasn't particularly good)

Enemy at The Gates (ARP loves. This was a BIG deal movie for a teenaged me, but I later revisited and found it fairly corny? maybe it still rules? Sound off)

The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society, which I'm sure is nice

Beasts of War (bookmarking this one - Aussie war film w/t sharks. Triple bill it with Dangerous Animals and that Nic Cage USS Indianapolis movie that myolder neighbor has vociferously recommended to me?)

Miracle at St. Anna

Da Five Bloods (what a picture. Just. Strong stuff.)

Flags of our Fathers (ARP: yes!)

Letters From Iwo Jima (ARP: NO!)

and, in the most Blank Check / ARP move ever, the last title in this discussion is....The Greatest Beer Run Ever

"How have you not seen this, Ben?"

Operation Dumbo Drop

Bushwhacked (NOT the Dave Bautista / Brittany Snow post-Purge action joint Bushwick)

The Phantom

Small Soldiers

"Wait, what's that Cate Blanchett Movie called?"

Charlotte Grey

Veronica Guerin

From the Box Office Game:

No Strings Attached (guess what? good movie. Kevin Kline plays an aging former tv star whose catchphrase is "Great Scott!". From the popular tv show Great Scott)

The Green Hornet (Christoph Waltz in his Ben Mendelsohn era of 'need a villain?')

The We and the I

Mood Indigo

The Dilemma (what if there was...)

The King's Speech

Black Swan

Little Fockers

The Fighter (my fave Russell, personally)

Tron: Legacy (which they famously like. I do not recall it being especially good?)

The Company Men (Griffin: "Booooooo!")

Disclosure Day

Finding Nemo

Wall E

John Carter

Finding Dory

In The Blink of an Eye

Toy Story 5

Pavements

Video Heaven

What a brilliant guest. What a great peak-behind-the-curtain guest, and also just plain decent guy guest. But most of all? His intelligence.

As a teacher, I don't know if I've had more of a laugh/surprise as the Darkman ep when, during a very fun discussion beginning with David ("How does Darkman eat? His mouth is...messed. Up.") Chris casually comments:

"And yet, he can form plosives and fricatives. Which is surprising."

And, a moment later, when Griffin says a top person considered for the lead role was Gary Oldman,

Weitz (laughing): "Holy mackerel!"

Strong film.

So many phone calls, and truly, as with most movies, every single time, people just hang up without saying goodbye. It's the strangest, silliest thing.

There are one thousand phone calls in this film and no goodbyes.

Plenty of them are less interesting, but still, I find, cute - such as "The Voice of Math" on the Beautiful Mind score. What's that swirly music when the maths all swirl and make him crazy, but also beautiful? Why, "The Voice of Math" or course.

A question: Is it the composer, writer, or director who names these it? I suppose I've always assumed composer.

Anyhow: here are some recentish BC ones. Not that these became well known, just here are some ones I like.

"Dreaming of Fiji" and "Aquaphobia" - from The Truman Show

*"A Tree for My Bed" - Jurassic Park

*"Hammer and Tape" - You Were Never Really Here

*"I Love You Birdy Abundas!" - The Man Who Wasn't (really) There

*"Promenade (Tourists on The Menu)" - Jaws

Oh - and, as I learned painfully - don't look at the dvd scene titles or sountrack titles before you've seen the movie! You'll never be able to unsee spoilers like "Ricardo Says Goodbye to His Legs" or "Lovers Finally Reunite". (those are made up)

1997 - "Going All The Way" - looks like a fairly sincere thing, Korean war vets return and...I dunno. Look for love? Jeremy Davies, Ben Affleck, Rose McGowan, Rachel Weisz. Very much a post River Runs Through It thing that probably played every day at 10:00 a.m. on HBO from 1998 until whenever Entourage started.

1999 - "Arlington Road" - a really interesting, good movie that one of these years is gonna get the 'now I'm hearing how this is a classic on every podcast' treatment. Jeff Bridges is a professor who begins to suspect his neighbors (Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack) might be involved in or planning violent anti-establishment acts.

2002 - "The GODDAMNED Mothman Prophecies" - Move over, John Denver - West Virginia has a new reputation.

the video for "Everybody's Changing" by Keane, from Hopes and Dreams, a near-perfect pop rock album but a band that should be obnoxious but instead are more or less brilliant.

2008 - "Henry Poole is Here" - One for....the Christians? People like it, it seems nice. Get Chris Ryan on for this Luke Wilson joint.

2011 - "I Melt With You" - a film I remember being so godawful and indulgent, very much so a later 2000s / early 2010s type deal. And also I could imagine someone defending it - it's, uh...vivid. Tom Jane, Jeremy Piven, Rob Lowe, and Christian McKay, (Me and Orson Welles himself, who apparently had an absoltely miserable time making this movie). 40-something guys do drugs and get deep into their feelings and it's visually pretty nuts.

2018 - "The Last Word" - Amanda Seyfriend is...hired (?) to write Shirley MacLaine's obituary, because - you see - ms. MacLaine has live a big ole' eccentric life! But will Seyfriend discover a world of other things? Perhaps things MacLaine has hidden, despite her big success in the ____(unclear) industry? This is the kind of movie a friend of mine and me call a "Tumbledown". See: Kodachrome, The Hollars, Wish I Were Here, etc

2018 - "Nostalgia" - via IMDB, it's "A mosaic of stories about love and loss, exploring our relationship to the objects, artifacts, and memories that shape our lives."

I personally have to know: artefacts? as in...ancient? (though I strongly fear it's "as in: emotional", so...just more objects, really)

Stars the Big Four: Hamm, Burstyn, Keener, (bruce) Dern! also John Ortiz! James Le Gros! Nick Offerman! Amber Tamblyn! (the legendary) Beth Grant, and....Mikey Madison! Only one oscar winner here, folks.

2022 - "Survive" - Corey Hawkins and Sophie Turner stuck out in the snow. Maybe eat each other? hard to say.

Prior to this miniseries, Fearless came onto my radar thanks to David mentioning it being great.

Presently, I've finally gotten to Blow-Out. Good god, what a superb piece of direction. I also caught up to John Frankenheimer's Seconds and of course, Kelly Reichart's Night Moves, similarly. Great stuff.

Feel free to include Blankie Award nominees/winners! That's how I watched Resurrection (the Rebecca Hall flick - fantastically unsettling, all-timer Tim Roth)

Wondering what movies you've heard discussed, rather than directly covered, that have been gems for y'all?

Truly just a thought, but as the Two Friends discussed and contextualized Depardieu's appeal, standing, fame, and crossover - such as it was - I kept thinking of Javier Bardem.

He's also a rare foreign male star to come over. He has, of course, had arguably much more success in Hollywood. He's also a real block of a man, with some of the same "here's a different, more rugged masculinity" going for him.

Yes, he's super hot, but he does not look like any American male sex symbol leading man, or at least none that I can think of since, say, Robert Mitchum. And he had early roles as a wild card / sex object - I first had a "oh!" moment in the ep when they discussed Depardieu in "Going Places" whose French title is slang for "balls", remembering that Bardem had an early Spanish breakout in "Golden Balls" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107165/

Anyhow. May Bardem continue to be the seemingly good-hearted, sane, personally admirable version of a hot lunk of talented European masculinity.

That's all!