In my defence (and that's the British spelling, for any American readers out there), there have been people who have written much less than once every year and have got (British for "gotten", for the Americans) away with it pretty well, sometimes even with a Nobel prize. I have seen no throng of enraged fans screaming at me, demanding that I come back to the realm of the Blog. And all along, I have been quietly getting owned in the background, by extremely hard Princeton classes, so I have a valid case.
Anyway, I am alive, and well, and just about kicking. And I want to share with you some of the worst movies I have ever seen. This is a tribute to the very worst of the worst.
First of all, Sawaariya. This was a Bollywood movie that redefined "bad" for me. I don't know what it was going for, but it was full of hilarious attempts at recreating some sort of magic realistic world inspired partly by Venice and partly by Gotham City. There were boats everywhere in a city of canals, and a few royal-looking buildings, all very well, but then this slightly dense-looking dude started dancing in a towel all over the place, and this strange shy girl decided to appear every thirty seconds, look from behind a veil, laugh hideously and disappear. Then there was a scene in the clock tower (it might have been a zoo; I don't know, I was sleeping through this part of the movie, nothing terribly interesting happened) where this girl let out a terrible secret, and then the guy took a boat and sailed away below a bridge to ... an enormous candlelit bust of the Buddha. I am going to move on to the next one now, because I think I have said all I wanted to say about Sawaariya.
The next movie was recommended to me by Juan, which makes sense, because I guess you can't get anything better than this in Mexico. This movie is called The Thing, and I have three words of advice to give anyone who is getting ideas: don't watch it. Just the name of the movie should tell you that there was definitely something missing somewhere; the authors ran out of ideas, and gave the protagonist of the story the somewhat unimaginative name of "the Thing." But in all fairness to them, that's the best, clearest possible description of this protagonist. The Thing is about a monstrous ... thing ... in Antarctica, that eats people alive and then replicates them. So obviously, the usual group of researchers end up in Antarctica where they meet ... voila! The Thing. And our friend Thing starts eating them up one by one (not even sparing their pet dogs, bless their souls) and then behaving exactly like them, so it's impossible to figure out if you are addressing your friend Kurt Russell or the Thing. Oh also, the Thing looks something like a spider that Dali would draw if you gave him enough marijuana, and then replicated in 3-D by James Cameron, with the addition of about a couple of hundred extra fangs, the odd tentacle here and there, and gallons of gooey liquid dripping down its anatomy. That's only when the thing is not replicating someone, obviously. Whatever fault Kurt Russell has, it's still hard not to distinguish him from an enormous repulsive spider. Anyway, The Thing was, for a long time, the worst movie I had ever seen. But of course, records are meant to be broken.
In the meantime, Hamza told us about a film called Idiocracy that he had watched, that was apparently one of the worst movies on his list. This movie portrayed a world of idiots, where movie theaters screen the motionless picture of gluteal muscles. Then a change comes over them, so that they are no longer idiots. Now, they have the same screenings, only they try to make sense of what they see. I decided not to watch it.
In the meantime, Kynan came up with a wonderfully bad movie called Shoot 'em Up. It stars Clive Owen in a Rajnikanth-like role, where he takes on thousands of enemies singlehandedly with a deadpan face, using his ultimate weapon: a carrot. In its defence, the movie was actually very funny, even if it was unintentional for the most part. Every once in a while, you would see about thirty assassins with either ninja reflexes or cutting-edge technology planning for months about how to kill Clive Owen. The scene would cut to a close-up of Clive Owen's lips biting off the end of a carrot (with an appropriate cinematic crunch), and you would just know what's coming. The next scene would be a whirlwind of smoke and gunpowder and fire and blurred movements of Clive Owen and his carrot against the very latest in technology, and at the end of it all, you would see Clive Owen standing with his carrot over the dead bodies of all those assassins. At the end of the movie, he has his fingers all broken with sickening crunches. With those bandaged fingers, he kills a hundred terrorists in the last scene. How? By flicking a revolver in the air, catching it with his bandaged fingers on one hand, and then using the other bandaged hand to hold a carrot like a finger on the trigger, and then just pull a Chuck Norris. In another memorable scene, Clive Owen has sex with Monica Bellucci while killing twenty assassins. The girl is clearly unaware of what's going on, errr, behind her back. Clive Owen rhythmically moves with her and with each thrust kills an assassin as well. He redefines multitasking in the thirty seconds it takes for Bellucci to get an orgasm. This is by far the most ridiculous scene ever shown in a movie.
This is a MUST-WATCH.
But the two worst of the worst -- the worst and second worst movies I have ever seen -- are going to be described in the next post. I will put up two stills from the movie here, as a teaser trailer of what they are. Thought I have just barely managed to watch thirty minutes of one and twenty three of another, in those fifty-three minutes they have made me a different person. But I will talk about them another time. Enjoy!
