Reel history: Titanic

In the first of a new series, Alex von Tunzelmann watches classics of big screen history and prises fact from fiction.

One April night in 1912, the biggest, newest and most famous passenger ship in the world collided with an iceberg. In less time than it takes to watch James Cameron's film, the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic provided one of history's clearest examples of pride coming before a fall.

The film, meanwhile, is an example of pride coming before an obscenely enormous success. Cameron's production reportedly went $65m over budget. Before its release, the sinking of Titanic was widely predicted. Instead, it went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time, and won 11 Oscars



Location: Costumes and sets have been meticulously researched, and some shots were filmed on the real wreck. Admittedly, if you look at the imdb.com goofs page, you will find pedants complaining about the colour of the wicker furniture, and some inaccurately positioned door handles. If you're the sort of person whose day is ruined when you spot that "The button on the left side of Jack's borrowed jacket is a Kingsdrew button, first made in 1922", it's never too late to seek professional help. If you're not, the ship is entirely convincing.

People: Less convincing. Several are based on real people, though the leads, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet), are fictional. Rose is realistic enough: a well-bred but destitute young lady, about to be married off to a suave cad with cash pouring out of his trousers. Jack is less believable as a Wisconsin urchin who has somehow ended up as a jobbing fine artist ("Monet!" he gasps, waving his hands at Rose's art collection. "Look at his use of colour here! Isn't he great?").

Sex: Jack tells Rose he trained by sketching women in the brothels of Paris. Amazingly, she accepts this excuse for being in the brothels of Paris, and even proceeds to have sex with him on the cargo deck. Luckily for her, the first antibiotic treatment for syphilis was marketed in 1910. Perhaps Jack was inspired by the painting hanging in Rose's cabin: Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon, a portrait of five prostitutes. (For anyone upset by anachronistic jacket buttons: that painting was definitely not on the Titanic. It can still be seen in New York.)

Society: Credibility is stretched even further by the depiction of life in first class as boring and miserable, while the happy proletarians down in third are having a knees-up. In reality, throughout most of history, it has been much nicer being rich than being poor. Moreover, White Star segregated single male and female passengers in most third class areas, limiting the scope for onboard jollies.

Mortality: There is some debate over whether the third class passengers were really locked in their quarters to facilitate the escape of the aristos up top. But the survival rates of passengers by class are striking: while over 60% of first and 40% of second got off the ship, only 25% of third did.

Technology: "I did the sum in my head," says Rose, long before any icebergs heave into view, "and with the number of lifeboats times the capacity ... it seems there are not enough for everyone aboard." Meanwhile, crew members comment on the inadequacy of the rudder to provide a proper turning circle. They might have added that buying cheap rivets turned out to be a bit of a false economy.

Verdict: Despite the film's heavy veneer of schmaltz, Cameron does a pretty decent job at recreating the historical story of the Titanic: enough to earn him a respectable B- grade and rescue him from steerage class. King of the world, though? Not quite.

Source: The Guardian

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10 Most Historically Inaccurate Movies

The 10 movies that make high school history teachers everywhere cry.

10,000 B.C.
Director Roland Emmerich is usually a stickler for realism (see: sending a computer virus via Macintosh to aliens in Independence Day). So we hate to inform him that woolly mammoths were not, in fact, used to build pyramids. Heck, woolly mammoths weren't even found in the desert. They wouldn't need to be woolly if that were the case. And there weren't any pyramids in Egypt until 2,500 B.C or so.

Gladiator
Emperor Commodus was not the sniveling sister-obsessed creep portrayed in the movie. A violent alcoholic, sure, but not so whiny. He ruled ably for over a decade rather than ineptly for a couple months. He also didn't kill his father, Marcus Aurelius, who actually died of chickenpox. And instead of being killed in the gladiatorial arena, he was murdered in his bathtub.

300
Though this paean to ancient moral codes and modern physical training is based on the real Battle of Thermopylae, the film takes many stylistic liberties. The most obvious one being Persian king Xerxes was not an 8-foot-tall Cirque du Soleil reject. The Spartan council was made up of men over the age of 60, with no one as young as Theron (played by 37-year-old Dominic West). And the warriors of Sparta went into battle wearing bronze armor, not just leather Speedos.
The Last Samurai
The Japanese in the late 19th century did hire foreign advisers to modernize their army, but they were mostly French, not American. Ken Watanabe's character was based on the real Saigo Takamori who committed ritual suicide, or "seppuku," in defeat rather than in a volley of Gatling gun fire. Also, it's doubtful that a 40-something alcoholic Civil War vet, even one with great hair, would master the chopsticks much less the samurai sword.

Apocalypto
This one movie has given entire Anthropology departments migraines. Sure the Maya did have the odd human sacrifice but not to Kulkulkan, the Sun God, and only high-ranking captives taken in battle were killed. The conquistadors arriving at the end of the film made for unlikely saviors: an estimated 90% of indigenous American population was killed by smallpox from the infected Spanish pigs.
Memoirs of a Geisha
The geisha coming-of-age, called "mizuage," was really more of a makeover, where she changed her hairstyle and clothes. It didn't involve her getting... intimate with a client. In the climactic scene where Sayuri wows Gion patrons with her dancing prowess, her routine - which involves some platform shoes, fake snow, and a strobe light - seems more like a Studio 54 drag show than anything in pre-war Kyoto.

Braveheart
Let's forget the fact that kilts weren't worn in Scotland until about 300 years after William Wallace's day and just do some simple math. According to the movie, Wallace's blue-eyed charm at the Battle of Falkirk was so overpowering, he seduced King Edward II's wife, Isabella of France, and the result of their affair was Edward III. But according to the history books, Isabella was three years old at the time of Falkirk, and Edward III was born seven years after Wallace died.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age
In 1585, when the movie takes place, Queen Elizabeth was 52 years old - Cate Blanchett was 36 when she shot the film - and was not being courted by suitors like Ivan the Terrible (who was dead by then). And though the movie has her rallying the troops at Tilbury astride a white steed in full armor with a sword, in fact she rode side saddle, carrying a baton. She was more of a regal majorette than Joan of Arc.

The Patriot
Revolutionary War figure Francis "The Swamp Fox" Marion was the basis for Mel Gibson's character, but he wasn't the forward-thinking family man they show in the flick. He was a slave owner who didn't get married (to his cousin) until after the war was over. Historians also say that he actively persecuted and murdered native Cherokees. Plus, the thrilling Battle of Guilford Court House where he vanquishes his British nemesis? In reality, the Americans lost that one.
2001: A Space Odyssey
According to this film, in year 2001 we would have had manned voyages to Jupiter, a battle of wits with a sentient computer, and a quantum leap in human evolution. Instead we got the Mir Space Station falling from the sky, Windows XP, and Freddy Got Fingered. Apparently the lesson here is that sometimes it's better when the movies get the facts all wrong.

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In memoriam, Ingmar

In response to the recent death of Ingmar Bergman, the Chicago Cinema Forum has organized a Bergman marathon (Chicagoist termed it a "crash course in Bergman") to be held at the Chopin Theatre this coming weekend. Included will be the local premiere (two screenings) of a recent three-part, three-hour documentary about Bergman made for Swedish TV and screenings of five major Bergman features: 16-millimeter prints of Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and Persona (1966), and a DVD projection of the 188-minute version of Fanny and Alexander (1982), a Bergman miniseries that was the last thing he ever shot on film.

All five of the features will be introduced and discussed by local critics. I'll be trying my hand at Sawdust and Tinsel, and the founder of Chicago Cinema Forum (and organizer of this event), Gabe Klinger, will do Fanny and Alexander; WBEZ producer Alison Cuddy will introduce The Seventh Seal, Time Out Chicago's Ben Kenigsberg will introduce Wild Strawberries, and National Louis University prof Robert Keser will introduce Persona. The social aspect of the Chicago Cinema Forum has been a central part of Klinger's project from the beginning, and two hour-long receptions on Saturday and Sunday, offering a further chance to discuss Bergman, are also scheduled.

As it happens, I had already made plans to show Bergman's The Magician (1958) as part of a lecture course I'll be teaching this fall at the Gene Siskel Film Center well before his death. And after I agreed to introduce Sawdust and Tinsel at Klinger's event, I was invited about a week ago to write an op-ed piece about Bergman for the New York Times (registration required) that's less reverential than these other activities might suggest.

Having more recently seen the second part of the Bergman documentary being shown, devoted exclusively to Bergman's prodigious career as a theater director--which I would argue (and Bergman himself maintained) is more important than his career as a filmmaker--I can strongly recommend it as an eye-opener. And if I had to recommend only one film to see by Bergman, I'd probably pick Persona--though I hasten to add, with some embarrassment, that I still haven't seen Fanny and Alexander, which many regard as Bergman's masterpiece, and which I'm planning to catch up with this weekend.

::Read more about film critics personally at blog.Chicagoreader.com

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Saying Goodbye to Two Giants of Cinema

Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni
by J. Hoberman

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

Ingmar Bergman directed over 50 features, but he was a significant figure in 20th-century culture in part because he was so obviously significant. Last week's inch-above-the-fold front-page New York Times obituary cites Woody Allen's pledge of allegiance: The Swedish director was nothing less than "the greatest film artist . . . since the invention of the motion picture camera."

More than Fellini, Kurosawa, Resnais, or Wajda, Bergman personified the art-house cinema of the 1950s and '60s. He was a skillful filmmaker and an extraordinary director of actors, but mainly he was a sensibility whose quintessential image was Max Von Sydow's gaunt knight playing chess with the cowled figure of Death in The Seventh Seal (1957). Bergman's high middlebrow symbolism, evident metaphysical anguish, and absence of challenging formal innovation made his movies safe for college English departments. Cinephiles were often less enthusiastic. Bergman's work was memorably satirized in The Dove, the faux Swedish short that opened the 1968 New York Film Festival; the same year, Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris joked that the obscure ending of 2001 qualified as "instant Ingmar."

The son of a Lutheran minister, Bergman was born in rural Sweden and made his first movie in 1945. Still fresh and immediate, his early films—many of them lyrical invocations of the brief Nordic summer—were indifferently received at home but championed by the new French journal, Cahiers du Cinema. Wider recognition began when Bergman won a prize at Cannes with his 16th film, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955); this was followed by The Seventh Seal, which won the Palm d'Or two years later and, along with the elegiac Wild Strawberries (1957), established his international reputation.

An allegory set during the period of the Black Death, The Seventh Seal was blatantly existentialist entertainment, a costume version of Camus's The Plague; Bergman waxed even more philosophical in an early-'60s trilogy that addressed God's indifference and his own spiritual crisis: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962), and The Silence (1963). Gorgeously shot and unflinchingly downbeat, the latter was Bergman's most sexually explicit movie. A trimmed version opened in New York at a theater that specialized in cheap horror and "nudie-cutie" films and set a house record.

The Silence signaled the filmmaker's wary involvement in the social and aesthetic currents of the 1960s; it led directly to his enigmatic masterpiece Persona (1966) and Shame (1968), an impressive meditation on the fate of civilians during wartime. In the early '70s, Bergman returned to melodrama and had a second period of critical success with "relationship films" like Cries and Whispers (1972) and Scenes From of a Marriage (1973). He announced the end of his movie career in 1981 with the sumptuous Fanny and Alexander (although making several more television films), while remaining active in the theater. A series of productions—mainly Strindberg and Ibsen—imported by the Brooklyn Academy of Music demonstrated his brilliance as a stage director.

I never reviewed Bergman, although I did write a brief essay on his "secret film" This Can't Happen Here (1950), an exemplary anti-Communist thriller which he would later disown. I enjoyed describing Samuel Fuller as Bergman's American analogue; precipitated a brief flurry (in Helsinki) by calling Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki Bergman's postmodern successor; and have several times taught The Silence in the context of post–World War II poetic horror and pop existentialism (including Fuller's Shock Corridor).

The Silence is morbid and despairing, but such consummate filmmaking cannot be depressing. Bergman himself saw The Silence as almost hopeful, telling one reporter that it suggests "Life only has as much meaning and importance as one attributes to it oneself." Meaning and importance are things Bergman's films never lacked and his oeuvre has in abundance.

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)

Michelangelo Antonioni was not just a great movie director, but a major European artist—one of the very few filmmakers ever recognized as such. A more polarizing figure than Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni has also remained more current, as demonstrated by the popular success of last year's complete retrospective at the BAMcinématek.

Antonioni was the maestro of impeccable angst and elegant alienation, the poet of sterile architecture and bad breakups. His noncommunicative characters did not have personalities so much as drives; his most substantive movies feature, as the embodiment of spiritual anguish, the stunning '60s girl Monica Vitti. It was Antonioni who put the mod, as well as the modishness, in modernism. Alienation has never been more gorgeously indulged than in L'Avventura—a mystery that casually abandons its ostensible premise midway through and the stormy triumph of the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, which bestowed its Palm d'Or on Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Seven years later, Antonioni achieved an even greater renown: Thanks to his English-language art-house blockbuster Blowup, he was Beckett in bell-bottoms.

Can a serious director also be an unabashed fashionista? During the decade between L'Avventura (1960) and his gloriously foolish American debacle Zabriskie Point (1970), Antonioni's name was the equivalent of a chic designer label or a certain soigné state of mind—what Andrew Sarris liked to call "Antoniennui." Antonioni made industrial pollution ravishingly beautiful in Red Desert (1964) and did as much as anyone to elevate the fashion photographer to artist with Blowup. Il Grido (1957) was the first Antonioni film to use a specific location as the stylized stage set for a stripped-down existential drama. But it was the spectacular widescreen L'Avventura which—lavishing neorealist attention on the rich and the bored—brought his style to maturity. L'Avventura was a landscape film that was also a landmark, changing forever the face of cinema. This use of film as a form of temporal sculpture would be among the most influential of '60s movies (anticipating, in some respects, the more radical use of "real time" in Andy Warhol and structural film).

Less monumental in its purity and more subtle in its radicalism, Antonioni's 1962 masterpiece L'Eclisse showcases Vitti as his moodiest, most evasive heroine, drifting out of one affair and into another with Alain Delon's mercurial stockbroker, both of these beautiful creatures over- shadowed by the blandly futuristic architecture of the film's setting. As L'Eclisse anticipates Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville in its use of a "found" Flash Gordon landscape, Antonioni's first color film, Red Desert, is almost pure science fiction. Everything exudes a chemical glow; nature has been supplanted.

The overrated Blowup and underrated Zabriskie Point form, with The Passenger (1975)—which stars Jack Nicholson as an international man of mystery—a loose trilogy, less enduring but more personal than the Vitti vehicles. In each of these laconic, ostentatiously with-it thrillers, an alienated male protagonist stumbles into some sort of social commitment, attempting the passage from witness to participant. All three were made in English at a time when Antonioni was the world's most cosmopolitan filmmaker—an example of what German author Hans-Magnus Enzensberger unkindly termed a "tourist of the revolution." Antonioni's 1972 China documentary Chung Kuo Cina, made the year before Enzensberger's essay was published, might be considered a pendant on the "radical tourist" trilogy. Antonioni was a Now-ist.

"In this period, they had what was called 'the art film,'" Nicholson explains in the commentary that augments The Passenger's DVD release, locating it in some irretrievable past. Fair enough. Antonioni's trendiness was a factor of his desire to engage the history of his times. It's suggestive that those contemporary directors who have made the most use of Antonioni's example—Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, the late Edward Yang—are from nations once considered "third world."

: Link source: http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0732,hoberman,77443,20.html

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Cinema Paradiso (1988)

Directed by : Giuseppe Tornatore
Produced by : Franco Cristaldi, Giovanna Romagnoli
Written by : Giuseppe Tornatore
Starring : Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi, Philippe Noiret, Jacques Perrin
Music by : Ennio Morricone
Release date(s) : 1988
Running time : 155 Min Italy, 121 Min Cut USA, 174 Min
Language : Italian

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988) is an Italian film written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. It was internationally released as Cinema Paradiso in France, Spain, the UK and the US.

It was originally released in Italy at 155 minutes but poor box office performance in its native country led to it being shortened to 123 minutes for international release. It was an instant success. This international version won the Special Jury Prize at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and the 1989 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. In 2002, the director's cut 173-minute version was released (known in the U.S. as Cinema Paradiso: The New Version).

It stars Jacques Perrin, Philippe Noiret, Leopoldo Trieste, Marco Leonardi, Agnese Nano and Salvatore Cascio. It was produced by Franco Cristaldi and Giovanna Romagnoli, and the music was by Ennio Morricone along with his son Andrea Morricone.

Told in flashback, it tells the story of the return to his native Sicilian village of a successful film director "Salvatore" for the funeral of his old friend "Alfredo", who was the projectionist at the local "Cinema Paradiso". Ultimately, Alfredo serves as a wise father figure to his young friend who only wishes the best to see him succeed, even if it means breaking his heart in the process.

The film intertwines sentimentality with comedy, and nostalgia with pragmaticism. It explores issues of youth, coming of age, and reflections (in adulthood) about the past. The imagery in each scene can be said to reflect Salvatore's idealised memories about his childhood. Cinema Paradiso is also a celebration of films; as a projectionist, young Toto develops the passion for films that shapes his life path in adulthood.

A famous film director returns home to a Sicilian village for the first time after almost 30 years. He reminisces about his childhood at the Cinema Paradiso where Alfredo, the projectionist, first facilitated his love of films. He is also reminded of his lost teenage love, Elena, who was forced to leave Salvatore (Toto) because of her father. In the 123-minute release she remains only a lasting memory, but in the 154-minute version she and Toto meet again. Old and grayed they see the life that has passed before them. As their conversation unfolds, Salvatore discovers that Elena married an old friend, but even more importantly, discovers that Alfredo was the reason why their relationship ended, when Alfredo reluctantly manipulated her into leaving him, if only to see Salvatore follow his dreams. They see each other and make love in a car. Toto seems to want to relight their relationship, but Elena tells him that this is impossible.

The film ends with Salvatore inheriting a film reel that Alfredo left for him, made up out of film clips cut from the reels by the projectionist (to appease the censor, the local priest). The clips are romantic scenes from every film Alfredo has projected in the theater, causing tears to come to Salvatore's eyes.

Cinema Paradiso was a critical and box-office success and is regarded by some as a classic. It is particularly renowned for the famous 'kissing scenes' montage near the end of the film.

Cast

* Antonella Attili - Maria (Young)
* Enzo Cannavale - Spaccafico
* Isa Danieli - Anna
* Leo Gullotta - Usher
* Marco Leonardi - Salvatore (Adolescent)
* Pupella Maggio - Maria (Old)
* Agnese Nano - Elena (Adolescent)
* Leopoldo Trieste - Father Adelfio
* Salvatore Cascio - Salvatore (Child)
* Tano Cimarosa - Blacksmith
* Nicola Di Pinto - Village Idiot
* Roberta Lena - Lia
* Nino Terzo - Peppino's Father
* Jacques Perrin - Salvatore (Adult)
* Philippe Noiret - Alfredo

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The 10 Most Miserable Performances in Film History

In Annie Hall, Woody Allen famously distinguished between the "horrible" and the "miserable," but in the case of this top ten countdown, forget about the "horrible" as we concentrate on the "miserable" defined as "wretchedly unhappy or uncomfortable; habitually morose; and contemptible." Throughout film history, miserable performances have abounded, film actors making sure that their checks were secure in their pockets before acting their frustrations and neuroses before the unblinking camera eye, conveying complete contempt for the film's audience, the film's creators, and themselves.

Behold, the worst, most miserable performances ever:

10. Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction
Tarantino manages to tarnish his own breakthrough film with such dreary line readings that, if Pulp Fiction had turned out to be a flop, Tarantino would have been sent packing back to the counter at Video Archives. The bulk of the cast members of Pulp Fiction are the gourmet, expensive stuff that you can taste. Tarantino, however, is like Bonnie's shit coffee.

9. Elizabeth Taylor in Boom!
Joseph Losey's twisted adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore features a bloated and over-ripe Elizabeth Taylor as rich dowager Sissy Goforth, awaiting death on her palatial estate on a Mediterranean Island, spending her remaining time staggering around in flowing black or white gowns (depending on her mood) and raging and bellowing at the hired help. Richard Burton shows up as a roustabout poet known affectionately as The Angel of Death, but in the case of Taylor's performance, rigor mortis has already set in.

8. John Wayne in The Conqueror
Where can an actor go after playing the greatest role of his career, as Ethan Edwards in John Ford's The Searchers? Where else but Mongolia to channel Genghis Khan. Talk about a bad career move. Wayne is so dead wrong as Genghis Khan that a viewer new to The Conqueror Experience will discover his jaw dropping to the floor like a character out of a Tex Avery cartoon. Wayne doesn't even attempt any verisimilitude as the Mongolian tyrant, swapping japes with co-star Susan Hayward along the lines of "You're beautiful in your wrath" like an outtake from McClintock! More shocking than Wayne's walking death performance was producer Howard Hughes' insistence that the film be shot in Utah's Escalante Desert, an area that had recently been used as an above-ground atomic test site resulting in cast members Wayne, Hayward, Pedro Armendariz, Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell all ending their lives in the cancer ward. What a waste of lives for such a clunky production.

7. Adam Sandler in 50 First Dates
Adam Sandler as a lothario Hawaiian veterinarian who seduces cute women tourists? Here we have Joseph Goebbels' The Big Lie in action. Sandler as male chick bait is about as desirable as a colonoscopy. Yet this is the premise we are asked to swallow during the first half hour of 50 First Dates. Sandler doesn't even try to become Brad Pitt Jr. He whines and kvetches and still the gals fall for him like nuts in May. When Drew Barrymore arrives on the scene falling head over heels in love with Sandler's Henry Roth character, Barrymore's Lucy comes across like the dim-bulb idiot to Henry Roth's monotone psychotic. I don't know how Sandler himself would classify his performance as Henry Roth but as for me, I'd call it sleep.

6. Dennis Hopper in Super Mario Bros.
Hopper bounds around in a lizard skullcap in this video game scrapheap of a movie with a desperately glum look on his face that screams, "I gave up all the booze and drugs for this?" Hopper's King Koopa, in the polar opposite of a good film performance, compels the viewer not to keep his eyes on him. It all looks like a sad way to earn a living, even when Hopper belts out, "Bring in the Goombas!"

5. Ryan O'Neal in Tough Guys Don't Dance
It's hard to believe that Norman Mailer, the director of the film version of his overheated potboiler noir novel, cast Ryan O'Neal as Tim Madden, an ex-con who may or may not be killing off all of his friends and acquaintances, "deep-sixing" the severed heads into the drink off Provincetown (after all, Mailer was notoriously famous for duking it out with Rip Torn on the set of another of his directorial efforts, Maidstone). It's even harder to fathom O'Neal in the part when film noir icon Lawrence Tierney plays his father (perhaps O'Neal was adopted). Still, when O'Neal opens up a basketful of skulls on the Provincetown beach and Mailer twirls his camera in a circle jerk around O'Neal's own head and O'Neal barely emotes "Oh man, oh God, oh man, oh God" it almost makes O'Neal's pathetic performance worthwhile.

4. Jerry Lewis in Slapstick (Of Another Kind)
In this thoroughly debased version of Kurt Vonnegut's satirical sci-fi opus, Jerry Lewis plays two characters, each one more unwatchable than the other. Lewis is Caleb Swain, a billionaire, whose wife, Madeline Kahn, gives birth monstrous twins -- also played by Lewis and Kahn -- that turn out to be alien geniuses. And it would take at least one alien genius to sit through this filmic mutilation. Lewis oozes oily distaste as Caleb, but as Madeline Kahn's twin, Lewis overplays his spastic mannerisms -- so much so that the key scene in the film features Lewis as Caleb, getting an eyeful of little Lewis and then throwing up. Besides, how good can a film be when the finest performance in the picture is offered by Samuel Fuller?

3. Mike Myers in The Cat In the Hat
Dr. Seuss' The Cat In the Hat is a beloved children's book about a cat that befriends two lonely homebound kids, becoming their best pal and teaching them the value of joy and imagination. In this bloated film version, Mike Meyers plays The Cat as an overactive, crackpot bore. This is a cat you do not want to take to your heart but to capture and drown in a lake.

2. Frank Sinatra in Cannonball Run II
What do you do when you want Frank Sinatra in your film but Sinatra doesn't want to act with anyone in it? Well, you hire a film crew for 20 minutes, shoot some reaction shots of The Chairman of the Board and then insert it into mismatched footage of an emaciated Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Burt Reynolds later on down the road and then construct a scene. This thoroughly cynical sequel to the debauched original film treats the audience like fat-headed numbskulls. The genius of Sinatra's presence (his final film appearance) is that he takes this level of cynicism a step further by also treating the filmmakers and actors as even more fat-headed than the dolts in the audience.

1. Stephen Boyd, Milton Berle, Joseph Cotton, and Tony Bennett in The Oscar
Here is the mother lode of miserable performances, a veritable gold mine of self-loathing actors eager to displease. Boyd, Berle, Cotton, and Bennett have never been worse, the film cutting a wide swath, ruining film careers left and right and taking no prisoners. Never before have film performances in a single movie been so revealingly sour, bitter, and sad; you know things are ready to explode when the opening credits read, "...And introducing Tony Bennett as Hymie Kelly." The Oscar is like a Robert Altman ensemble piece in reverse, actors intent on not creating any chemistry with each other. Boyd plays Frankie Fane, an actor up for an Oscar, who walks, crawls, and stabs in the back anybody who gets in his way in pursuit of a Best Actor nomination. Given our #2 selection above, it is only fitting that at the end of the film, the Oscar for Best Actor is awarded to Frankie... Sinatra!

Honorable Mentions: Richard Burton in Candy; Liberace in Sincerely Yours; Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity; Timothy Carey in Head; Dean Martin in the Matt Helm films; George Segal in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Lifetime Achievement awards go to Sandra Bullock and Tim Allen.

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