The worst movie ever made

The Guardian's Joe Queenan goes looking for the worst movie ever made and comes up with Heaven's Gate, which is unanimously considered to be the biggest bomb of all time, even though the French love it it has its share of defenders.

Queenan makes a compelling case for crowning Heaven's Gate as the all-time champion of bad:

This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.

I would argue that any movie that can generate the preceding paragraph cannot possibly be the worst ever made. If anything, that description makes me want to watch the film again. But while Queenan makes Heaven's Gate sound as amusing as Showgirls or Gigli in terms of its camp value and sheer folly, he underplays the one element that makes me agree with his anointment as the Worst Of All Time: Heaven's Gate is stupefyingly boring.

There are a million reasons why Heaven's Gate doesn't work, from the casting of Kris Kristofferson in the starring role (he had the task of carrying a three-and-a-half hour movie, something beyond the reach of almost any actor) to Vilmos Zsigmond's hazy, brown-and-tan cinematography, which makes big chunks of the movie look like they were shot through a dirty lens, to writer-director Michael Cimino's slow, ridiculous script, which stretches out 90 minutes' worth of plot into more than twice that duration.

  But if Heaven's Gate is impossible to sit through, it is endlessly fascinating as a subject of discussion. For example, the film generated the second-best book I have ever read about the Hollywood studio system, Steven Bach's Final Cut, which addresses the seemingly unanswerable question of how so much time and money could be spent on a movie that no one would ever want to watch.

Bach's book was adapted into an excellent documentary of the same name that was shown at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival. A newly restored print of Heaven's Gate premiered there that same year. I went to the screening to find out if the movie was more tolerable on the big screen made than on DVD, the only way I had ever seen it.

But although the meticulous cinematography was far more nourishing when seen in a large theater, the whole of Heaven's Gate remained just as plodding as it ever was. I made it as far as the roller-skating rink sequence - a beautiful setpiece that stands apart from the rest of the film as a piece of pure craftsmanship - then bailed, wishing the festival had done a retrospective of Cimino's Year of the Dragon instead. That movie may be just as wretched and overblown as Gate, but there isn't a boring frame in it.

Lots to see at the multiplex - and more on the way

It may not be a banner weekend for Hollywood studio releases, but the Miami Film Festival opening-night charmer La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon) is out in regular theaters today. Also still playing are Caramel, Funny Games and the brilliant 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which is easily my favorite movie of the year thus far and deserves to be seen in a theater, not just on DVD.

Coming up soon are several films I'm eagerly anticipating. Opening next Friday is Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, his third in a loose and unplanned trilogy of movies (after Gerry and Elephant) about young people, murder and really long takes.

Arriving April 4 is Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese's concert documentary on the Rolling Stones. And due on April 18th is Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights, his first film set in America and spoken in English. The movie got a lukewarm reception at last year's Cannes Film Festival, but I don't care. Even bad Wong Kar Wai is still Wong Kar Wai.

Attack of the film festivals

The 25th Miami International Film Festival may be over, but the local film festival season is just getting started.

First up is the third annual Women's International Film and Arts Festival, which runs March 28-April 6. Boasting 100 feature-length and short films "by women, about women and for all who love women," the event opens with the red pink carpet world premiere of Steam, starring Ally Sheedy and recent Oscar-nominee Ruby Dee, both of whom will attend.

The black-tie screening will be held at the Gusman, followed by an opening-night bash at the Havana Club featuring a performance by Xiomara Laugart, star of the off-Broadway hit Celia: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz, which I can personally attest is a whopping good time. Unfortunately, the party carries a big "BY INVITATION ONLY" label on the program, which is usually code for "We don't want you here." Alabao!

Anyway. Other WIFF events include An Evening With Ruby Dee at the Lyric Theater on March 31, a slew of workshops and panels and, of course, movies. You can download a copy of the festival program here.

  Next up is the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary April 25-May 4. The festival launches with a screening of Breakfast with Scot and closes with Were the World Mine, both at the Gusman.

Other noteworthy events include the festival's centerpiece selection, The Secrets starring Fanny Ardant, and a tribute to iconoclastic film producer Christine Vachon (I Shot Andy Warhol, Go Fish, Far From Heaven) along with a screening of her latest film Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore.

New this year is the addition of a parallel mini-fest, the Fort Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which will run May 1-May 4 with its own set of films. The festival's complete lineup will be unveiled this Sunday. 

A few weeks later, the 12th edition of the Brazilian Film Festival of Miami arrives. Running May 30-June 7, the event kicks off with a free outdoor screening of last year's People's Choice Award winners Urban Snapshots (Polaroides Urbanes) and Chicken Blood Stew (Galinha ao Molho Pardo) at the North Beach Bandshell on Collins Avenue.

Nine days of screenings, workshops and parties will follow at the Colony and Lincoln Theaters and Miami Beach Cinematheque. This year's lineup will be announced on April 18th.

David Lynch pays students $1,000,000 to chill out

Filmmaker David Lynch is donating a million dollars through his eponymous foundation to provide scholarships for students to learn Transcendental Meditation techniques and attend Iowa's Maharishi University of Management, where meditation is part of the daily curriculum for students and faculty.

Established in 2007, the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace funds "quiet time" programs in schools and research studies that examine the effects of daily meditation on academic performance, learning disorders and brain functions.

Judging by the importance of dream imagery and logic in Lynch's films, the director obviously practices what he preaches. He even published a best-selling book last year, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, about how meditation has influenced his own work. The book is an illuminating (and inspiring) read for anyone who's ever wondered, say, what Lynch was smoking when he came up with Mulholland Drive.

Here's a video clip of Wednesday's news conference announcing the $1 million scholarship program. I think I will try this meditation stuff next time I'm five minutes away from deadline and see if it has any effect on my writing.

 

Paying tribute to Anthony Minghella

The U.K. newspaper The Guardian has posted a brief but touching video tribute to the work of the late Anthony Minghella. Check it out here.

Let's try that again: Another "Dune" movie in the works

Variety reports actor-turned-filmmaker Peter Berg has been signed by Paramount Pictures to direct a second feature-film adaptation of Frank Herbert's landmark novel Dune. Berg, who has shown a flair for well-executed action pictures (he directed The Kingdom, The Rundown and this summer's upcoming Will Smith vehicle Hancock) hasn't settled on a screenwriter yet, so the new Dune probably won't hit theaters until at least 2010.

The first attempt to film Herbert's novel resulted in David Lynch's disastrous 1984 curiosity, which has attained a devoted cult following over the years, like practically every science-fiction film does with time. But to most people - especially Herbert fans - Lynch's Dune remains largely unwatchable.

Lynch himself has disowned the film, even declining to participate in the special edition DVD released by Universal two years ago (when I interviewed him in 2001 for Mulholland Drive, I brought up Dune and got back a strained, don't-go-there smile). Lynch, who was coming off a Best Director Oscar nomination for The Elephant Man, famously turned down George Lucas' offer to direct Return of the Jedi in order to make Dune. But although producer Dino De Laurentiis spared no expense in financing the film, trouble arose when the filmmakers tried to compress Herbert's sprawling novel into a lucid two-hour film.

I remember going to see Dune on opening weekend and being handed a glossary by the ticket-taker, explaining the various factions and planets in the movie I was about to see. It's never a good sign when you have to give audiences a homework assignment before the lights go down. Sure enough, 10 minutes into the movie, I was completely lost and confused, never to regain my bearings.

The impenetrability of Lynch's Dune is often attributed to De Laurentiis' insistence that the director turn in a 137-minute cut (the exact length, coincidentally, of Aliens, The Abyss and Spielberg's final cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind; is that Hollywood's de facto running time for sci-fi films?) While a Lynch-approved "director's cut" has never surfaced, the longer version shown on TV is certainly easier to follow, proving that the enforced cuts hurt the coherence of Lynch's film.

I tried watching Dune again last year when it was released on HD DVD, and although I still don't understand it find the film clunky and uninvolving on a narrative level, the dreamlike power of its imagery and sound design cannot be denied. I now think of the film as a Lynchian meditation on a densely plotted story - more of a Herbert pipe dream than a Herbert adaptation. Its impenetrability has started to grow on me.

It's a safe bet Berg's version, if it actually gets made, will figure out a way to compress Herbert's novel into a comprehensible film. The movie is also expected to stress the environmental/ecological subtexts of the book. Maybe I should take the persistent advice of friends who cherish Dune and just read it before the movie comes out. I don't think I've ever actually finished any science-fiction novels I've started, though. Except this one. But that probably doesn't count.

Best Buy cares about HD DVD owners, too

It's not just Circuit City helping HD DVD owners make the leap to Blu-ray land. Electronics chain Best Buy has set aside a whopping $10 million in order to mail a $50 gift card to every customer who bought an HD DVD player in one of their stores before Feb. 23. The chain is also allowing customers to trade in their HD DVD players via BestBuyTradeIn.com.

Curiously, now that the format war is over, Blu-ray players aren't dropping in price as quickly as they were before. In fact, they're actually getting MORE expensive. Imagine that!

Even more movie critics get axed

The Salt Lake Tribune's Sean P. Means reports that San Jose Mercury News movie critic Bruce Newman has been deployed to the general-assignment features beat, while the Contra Costa Times' Mary F. Pols has accepted a buyout offer at her paper.

Forget Agatha Christie. It now feels like a Friday the 13th bloodbath here in movie-critic land.

R.I.P. Anthony Minghella

Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, died at age 54 this morning from complications after undergoing surgery at a London hospital to treat tonsil cancer.

Minghella, who directed seven films in his too-short career, specialized in bringing literary novels to the screen. Only two of his movies were based on original screenplays: His 1991 debut, the fantasy romance Truly Madly Deeply, and the 2006 Jude Law-Juliette Binoche drama Breaking and Entering, which used the story of a crumbling marriage to examine life in contemporary, multicultural London.

But it was Minghella's adaptations of novels - some of them seemingly unfilmable - that earned him the most success. The English Patient, which won nine Oscars in 1997 (including Best Picture and Best Director), was a sweeping war-time romance reminiscent of old-school epics such as Doctor Zhivago, that preserved the structural complexity of Michael Ondaatje's novel to tell the story of a burned plane crash survivor (Ralph Fiennes) and the nurse (Binoche) caring for him.

1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley furthered Minghella's reputation as a maker of commercial, accessible films rooted in literature. Based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, the elegant film (which earned five Oscar nominations) also demonstrated Minghella's knack for casting, permanently elevating then-Good Will Hunting darling Matt Damon to leading-man status. The movie also propelled the careers of the all-star supporting cast, easing the way for Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Cate Blanchett to become stars in their own right.

Minghella continued to concentrate on filming novels with 1993's Cold Mountain, his adaptation of Charles Frasier's hugely popular Civil War romance that starred Law and Nicole Kidman. Although it did not share the same critical and popular success as his previous two films, Cold Mountain did earn seven Oscar nominations, winning one for Best Supporting Actress Renee Zellweger.

Like golden-era Hollywood directors John Ford and John Huston, Minghella had no discernible visual style or stamp. Instead, his films were handsomely photographed, elegant productions that emphasized characterizations and performances as strongly as plot.

You may not remember the entire storylines of Mr. Ripley or The English Patient, but you probably remember specific moments - Hoffman's memorable quip, "How's the peeping, Tom?" or Fiennes carrying Kristin Scott Thomas out of a cave - because Minghella paid as much attention to the inner lives of his protagonists as he did to matters of cinematography and editing. It is their characters, above everything else, that give movies the power to endure. 

One of five children, Minghella grew up above an ice cream parlor owned and operated by his parents on the Isle of Wight. In a 2003 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Minghella spoke about his attraction to adapting renowned novels.

"I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies. That's the advertised idea of Hollywood. Why would something like that be true? I think what is behind this is the disavowal of narrative in 20th-century literature - that most modern literature is an argument with fiction. The novel in its heyday, in the 19th century, was all about story and entertaining an audience with a tale, then using the structure of a tale to convey thematic notions and political notions, or theoretical notions. I love that idea. Film tends to work best when it's in the safe hands of a storyteller."

Minghella recently completed shooting on what will be his last completed film, which brought him back to the world of literature. The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, based on the best-selling novels by Alexander McCall Smith, is the two-hour pilot for an intended series co-produced by HBO and the BBC about a detective agency in Botswana.

Movie critics? Who needs 'em?

New York Newsday's Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour (who I met during a film critics' panel at the 2007 Miami Film Festival) are the latest veteran newspaper film scribes to be deemed unnecessary by their home publications.

Stuart and Seymour join Jack Mathews (of the New York Daily News), Terry Lawson (Detroit Free-Press) and David Elliot (San Diego Star-Tribune) as respected movie reviewers who were either downsized or not replaced after leaving their respective newspapers.

Throw in the list of critics I wrote about here last May, add the swirling rumors that (gulp!) more papers are preparing to show their reviewers the door and ... is it just me, or is it starting to feel like an Agatha Christie novel around here?

Say it ain't so: "The Ruins" is going to suck

I read devoured Scott Smith's The Ruins the week it was published in 2006 and immediately started pondering how I would adapt it into a film if I won the lottery and could afford to buy the screen rights.

But Ben Stiller, who is rich and has his own production company, swooped in and snatched the book, hired Scott Smith to write the screenplay himself and gave the directorial reins to first-timer Carter Smith, whose resoundingly creepy, award-winning short film Bugcrush played at least year's Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

The involvement of the two Mr. Smiths raised my hopes even higher for the movie. The book, about a group of young adults on vacation in Cancun who wander onto a patch of jungle where really bad things happen, has all the elements for a great popcorn thriller: A finite cast of just-rounded-enough characters, an atmospheric setting, an endless supply of horrific tableaux and an original, you've-never-seen-this-before monster.

Alas, it appears my hopes are about to be weedwhacked, since Paramount Pictures is not screening The Ruins until 10 p.m. April 3, the night before it opens in theaters. Which means no opening-day reviews. Which means The Ruins will be on par with this. And this. And this. And this. And... well, you get the picture.

Spoilers ahead: Scott Smith told USA Today he made a couple of changes from book to script, including removing the monster's ability to mimic voices, in order to avoid unintentional laughter from the audience. But that means one of the best passages from the novel isn't going to be in the film. Aaarrrggh.

The same thing happened with the movie based on Smith's first book, A Simple Plan, which had an ending so dramatically different from the novel that it effectively changed the entire story from something truly sinister and chilling to a boilerplate noir-thing.

What annoyed me the most about the alterations made to A Simple Plan is that there was absolutely no need to change the ending of the book, other than worrying about what audiences were going to think and trying to preempt negative reactions.

It sounds like the new movie may be a victim of the same kinds of premature alterations. But I'm still going to hold out hope they haven't completely ruined The Ruins. If you haven't read the book, do yourself a favor and pick it up before the movie comes out, so you won't have the experience spoiled for you.

The biggest flop of 2008 (thus far)

I was poking around boxofficemojo.com and noticed that Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth has grossed an anemic $244,397 in the U.S. Ouch! Did anyone but movie critics see this movie?

The film did fare better overseas, with a $1.9 million gross, proving my long-held theory that Europeans are much more likely to sit through boring, pretentious art films than Americans.