#49(b) Town and Country (2001) (Colin)

Cast: Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Garry Shandling, Nastassja Kinski, Josh Hartnet, Andie MacDowell, Charlton Heston.

Director: Peter Chelsom

Genre: Comedy, Romance

The next movie on our list is Town and Country (2001), a comedy about 2 married couples whose relationship is tested to breaking point on discovery that both husbands are having affairs, (not with each other I must add). It contains an all-star cast led by Warren Beatty and reads like a who’s who in modern cinema history. With such calibre, surely this film does not belong in our top 100 bad movies list?

Beatty plays Porter Stoddard, a wealthy architect married for 25 years to Ellie, (Keaton), an interior designer. They lead a typical middle class existence with 2 children, the family dog and a nice big house with big cars to match. It’s all very civilized and stable on the outside, but unbeknownst to Ellie, Porter is having an affair with young Cellist Alex, (Kinski).

The other couple is Griffin Morris, (Shandling) and his wife Mona, (Hawn). Married for a similar period as Porter and Ellie, Griffin and Mona also lead a nice middle class lifestyle with the added bonus of no children. However, their relationship hits the rocks when Mona discovers Griffin is having an affair with a mysterious red haired lady. The only thing Mona does not know is that the lady is in actual fact a man and that Griffin likes to bowl from the Pavilion end.

With divorce proceedings underway, Mona moves down to her house in Mississippi, which is in need of renovation. Ellie asks Porter to help Mona as she is worried about Mona’s state of mind. Porter agrees and quickly realises the house will need a lot of work. Old, run down and smelling of damp, Beatty is best known for playing the lead role in the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde.

Porter’s infidelity continues as after a drunken night on the town, he sleeps with Mona. In the meantime an anonymous phone call to Ellie alerts her to the fact that Porter is having an affair with the Cellist. She goes round to Mona’s to have a heart to heart not knowing that at that moment Porter is doing some horizontal jogging with Mona.

Fortunately for Porter, Ellie does not discover the fact he is there and realising he needs to get out of town for a while, he and Griffin decide to retreat to Griffin’s home in Sun Valley. Porter can’t keep it in his pants for long, however, and starts yet another affair with Eugenie Claybourne, (MacDowell), a rich spoilt lady, financed by daddy, (Heston).

Will Ellie realise the full extent of Porter’s womanising and if she does, can she forgive him? Can Mona and Griffin repair their relationship? Will there ever be a point in this movie where I give a crap about any of these characters? The answer to the last question is a resounding, no.

Town and Country tries to be a British farce, but it fails spectacularly, which is surprising given it has a British director, Peter Chelsom. Sure it has trousers falling down, lovers hidden in cupboards and lots of people walking into lots of rooms looking very flustered, however, the jokes are subtle and normally fall flat. It feels as if the cast have an in-joke which we are not privy to and they probably do; the size of the pay checks they received for this drivel.

The soundtrack is dated and does nothing to lift the movie. Sounding like a 1920’s big band throughout, it makes the movie feel old-fashioned and I half expect the cast to break out into a Charleston. However, instead of the roaring twenties we are left with the whimpering noughties.

But the reason why this movie is so bad is simply due to Beatty and co and the awful characters they are portraying.

Beatty plays Beatty, a womanising shit of a man who has a higher opinion of himself than everyone else. Keaton plays a cold statuesque woman and could easily have been replaced with a lump of rock. Hawn plays every character she’s played since Private Benjamin, Shandling is still learning his lines and has only turned up for the free coffee and MacDowell plays the only character she has ever played throughout her career.

Even Charlton Heston can’t save this movie as he decided to play Charlton Heston, a right wing idiot with an unhealthy gun obsession.

With a cast of such talent and acting experience, their lacklustre performances are very disappointing and their characters become so obnoxious and unlikeable that you really do not care what happens to them. It is very hard to invest 100 mins of your life into this shallow bunch and for that reason the movie drags and feels longer than it actually is.

So with such calibre of actors, does this film belong in our top 100 bad movies list?

Absolutely yes!

I’ve listed this movie’s genre as comedy and romance and that is true but with 2 exceptions. There is not really any romance, unless you count a 70 year old man trying to hump anything with a pulse as romance. And there is no comedy, unless you count a 70 year old man trying to hump anything with a pulse as comedy.

Don’t let the all-star cast sway you into thinking this is going to be a good movie, it isn’t and like Beatty’s view on monogamy, it should be avoided at all costs.

#49(a) Showgirls (Wes)

Showgirls

So, what’s got two thumbs and really sucks at finding Turkish comedy movies? This guy right here! (You’ll have to believe I’m pointing my two thumbs at myself right now, as this really is more of a visual gag that I just didn’t think through when I started writing this…). Yes, once again we failed at finding another movie on the list, this time it was Emret Komutanim: Sah Mat (Yes Sir) starring Mehmet Ali Erbil. The last time we watched a film featuring Erbil was when we sat through Keloglan and the Black Prince (see here), so maybe having to sit through two movies from our back up list wouldn’t actually be a terrible punishment this time. However first up for us was Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, a movie that had such bad reviews on release that it led to quite a few of the people involved having their careers soon go tits up for a while (sorry)….

Written by Joe Eszterhas (in his second appearance on our list. He also wrote An Alan Smithee Movie – See here), Showgirls is the story of a drifting dancer, Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) who hitches to Las Vegas in the hopes of becoming a showgirl. She soon finds work at Cheetahs Topless Club, where she gives Zack Carey (Kyle MacLachlan) a private dance after her girlfriend, Cristal Conners (Gina Gershon), the diva head dancer of the Stardust casino dance show Goddess pays for it in a bid to humiliate her. Cristal soon arranges for Nomi to audition to be in the Goddess chorus line, but even though she gets the job, Cristal continues to try and humiliate her by getting her to make an appearance at a boat show, where she is expected to sleep with rich businessmen. In revenge Nomi seduces Zack and convinces him to give her an audition to be Cristal’s understudy. When Cristal objects to Nomi’s new role, Nomi pushes Cristal down some stairs and takes her place as the shows lead. On her opening night Nomi’s friend Molly (Gina Ravera) meets musician Andrew Carver (William Shockley) who brutally rapes her. Nomi soon learns that Carver’s fame and power will protect him, so she sets out to punish his crimes herself. But how will all of this affect Nomi's career in Vegas (and will Berkley's career in Hollywood be Saved by the Bell, or is that too late)?

  

Paul Verhoeven is a brilliant director. He managed to make big budget action movies with a brilliantly satirical edge to them. Robocop, Starship Troopers and Total Recall are superb movies, each with multiple levels on which you can enjoy them. Whilst they are all visually beautiful, they also target the soulless greed and social irresponsibility of big corporations, rampant militarism and the propaganda machine used to support this, or just the dangers of not wiping Arnie’s memory properly. This can be seen even more clearly just by watching the remakes of these movies (well not Starship Troopers, the remake of which is thankfully stuck in development hell), which miss out on all the cleverness, and merely focus on the visual spectacle instead. So what went wrong with Showgirls?

 Well the satire is still there, this time on the vacuity of celebrity and the dark and seedy world this often entails, but unlike some of his past films, this critique of the corruption of the American Dream seems like shooting fish at Billingsgate Market using a mini-gun, and yet still it manages often to be the film equivalent of a perfectly healthy cod. That’s not to say there aren’t some subversive moments of genius that are hard to spot. For example when Nomi is first seen dancing it’s to the Prince song “319”, then later when she visits Cristal in hospital after she’s no longer the top dancer in Vegas, Cristal is in room 319, showing how easy it is to fall back to the bottom whilst you’re riding on top (I admit I never spotted this myself, it was only through research that I found this out).

Also it’s a beautifully shot movie. Verhoeven has always made visually brilliant movies and this is no exception. The cinematography, editing, sets, costumes (what little of them there are) and choreography are all great. But then again this just highlights what the intended satire fails to deliver. Then again, perhaps this is exactly what Verhoeven wants you to see in that Vegas/Hollywood/celebrity world. Everything is such a spectacle, then peel beneath it and there’s really not that much there (again the costumes really wouldn’t take that much peeling back. I said it when I was younger and I’ll say it again now, but this movie could have seriously just have been called Show-boobs, as on the surface that’s all this movie really does).

Even the acting isn’t that bad. Sure it has some of the most laughable sex scenes in movie history, and Elizabeth Berkley often over dramatises everything, but at least she can dance, unlike in the last movie we watched which featured stripping, I Know Who Killed Me (see here). Gina Gershon is suitably divaish as Cristal, and Kyle MacLachlan is always great. I even liked Lin Tucci as Mama Bazoom (her acting may not have been the greatest, but her boobs seem to come with a car horn noise every time they pop from her bustier, which made up for a lot).

What really lets down Showgirls is the script. The film itself has such dark undertones, that lines that are supposed to be funny just appear as tragic as everything else in this movie, whereas what isn’t supposed to be funny is often laughable. It’s a very chauvinistic movie, where even though the stars of the show are women, the men behind the scenes treat them as little more than commodities. Not only that, but the nice people, the ones you would like to see succeed all fail, male or female. Whereas the nasty ones (including Nomi), those who screw people over to get what they want all do well until someone turns on them. Whilst this was clearly the point, the pure cynicism makes it a hard movie to enjoy watching and for me made the movie a tiresome experience that I was happy when it finally over.

Honestly Showgirls isn’t THAT bad a movie. I’m glad it was only in the reserve list as it doesn’t deserve to be nestled alongside some of the movies we’ve watched, but it’s not a movie that I’ll be revisiting in a hurry. It doesn’t deserve as much criticism as it receives, but nor does it deserve the praise that also seems to be heaped upon it in the past few years (including a book titled It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls). It’s merely a below average movie that would have been mostly forgotten quickly if people didn’t make such a fuss of it at the time, but then again even the critics in this world make occasional boobs.